“Tablada marisma”: EDDEA’s proposal to return the old pastureland to the Guadalquivir

In September 2009 Diario de Sevilla ran on its front page an alternative proposal for the Tablada land devised by EDDEA, “one of the best architecture studios in Seville”, in the newspaper’s own words.

A marshland at the city’s gates

The central idea was to transform much of the former pastureland into a vast river marshland: to give back to the city part of the old Guadalquivir and create “a kind of theoretical Doñana at the very gates of Seville”. The proposal reserved the most urban edge, closest to the route of the SE-30 and the old military quarter, for a new urban frontage built facing the water.

A team broader than architecture

The work, entitled Proyecto de ordenación de Sevilla, el río Guadalquivir y Tablada (Planning project for Seville, the Guadalquivir and Tablada), was developed with professionals from academia, engineering, economics, sociology, law, business and various fields of science and technology. It was presented publicly on 25 September 2009 at the Hotel NH Plaza de Armas by the economist Rafael Salgueiro, the organic farming expert Francisco Casero, the lawyer Francisco Mesonero and the architect José María de Cárdenas.

That thesis, that Tablada belongs to the river and must be thought of from the river, as an open space that is “not green, but blue”, remains the studio’s position more than a decade later.