A rehabilitated river in the Colombian city of Medellín. Mauricio Carvajal (Courtesy)
EL PAÍS offers the América Futura section for its daily and global informative contribution to sustainable development. If you would like to support our journalism, subscribe here.
“If you take the flow away from me, you take away an essential part of my life. And you’re taking it from my town, too.” It’s sunset on a Saturday in Cuenca, Ecuador, and Adriana Carrasco is sipping coffee from her balcony while watching the calm flow of the Tomebamba River and contemplating the relationship she has in the 16 years that she lives to him has built up his banks. “It changes your life. It’s the feeling of being in constant contact with nature in the historical center of the city. It’s a distinctive element of Cuenca and almost all of us enjoy it,” says Adriana, who takes her dog Nuna for a walk along the riverbank every morning.
Thirty years ago it was different and Adriana’s story would have been considered a fantasy. At the time, the Tomebamba River was a sewage dump and the city insisted on hiding its banks like one hides dust under a rug. Boris Albornoz, technical director of the El Barranco special plan that rehabilitated the Tomebamba River, explains that before the intervention, this body of water was considered a negative space linked to crime and where hospitals and slaughterhouses were located.
“When the interventions on the river began, first cleaning the water with treatment plants and then rehabilitating public spaces, bridges and parks, the perception of the people of Cuenca towards the river changed completely. It became the leading element of the city, the one who structured the city and established order. “Today you can see that people are building with a view of the river, whereas before they had their backs turned to it,” says Albornoz.
But Cuenca’s history is not endemic to Latin America. Many other cities, some major regional capitals, have embraced the idea of regenerating their rivers and turning them into large green public spaces that give their cities a breather. América Futura spoke to urban planners involved in these transformations in Santiago de Chile, Mexico City, Medellín and Córdoba to understand the urban impact and quality of life improvements of these major projects.
Dozens of people walk and ride bicycles along a rehabilitated river in Santiago, Chile. Roberto Moris (Courtesy)
living banks
Rivers have always been at the heart of the founding of Latin American cities. However, their valorization has long been considered by politicians and authorities as a one-off or even decorative urban intervention, unaware of their ability to articulate the urban fabric and mobility.
For Roberto Moris, former national director for urban projects in Chile, the importance of urban river interventions lies not only in their structuring nature of cities, but also in the enormous impact these large projects can have on the population. “An intervention in a river must be able to be a project with a triple impact. That it meets a mitigation condition, that it addresses problems of urban decay, but is also able to create value. Economic value that can even fund the project,” explains Moris.
A good example of this project approach, according to the Chilean architect, is the intervention on the Mapocho River in Santiago, which over the past 50 years has been progressively valorized by the creation of large parks, bridges, footpaths, bike paths and recreational spaces.
“When you flip the urban discourse and demonstrate the political viability, the social viability of the project, it becomes something that can be epic and poetic.” When people spend more hours in recreational areas, they live longer, are healthier, and benefit from social profitability. Because there is less pollution, more sustainable mobility in the parks, and fewer hours of attention in the public health system,” says Moris, who believes the Mapocho River has become one of the most iconic and beloved urban elements for Chileans.
For his part, Guillermo Iros, current general coordinator of the Institute for Planning of the Metropolitan Area of Córdoba, Argentina and one of those responsible for the transformation of the Suquía River and its banks, believes that the structuring power of rivers over cities must not only be used longitudinally, but also through the cross connections that can be found, ie in the transitions that are realized in the form of bridges. However, Iros understands that these interventions must first have a systemic approach and not just urban planning.
“In the case of the Suquía River, the sanitation and decontamination measures had a strong impact on the conservation of the aquatic fauna and flora, and this made the riverbank sanitation project viable and garnered popular support,” says Iros.
Aerial view of a rehabilitated river in Cordoba (Argentina). Ministry of Public Services of Cordoba (Courtesy)
Mexico City and Medellín are other examples of how rivers can articulate urban dynamics on their banks. Elias Cattan, founding architect of Taller 13, a studio responsible for the redevelopment of Mexico City’s La Piedad River, explains that before the project began, a diagnosis of the city was made and it was assumed that the redevelopment of the La Piedad River would be completed Piedad required The river was one of the best things to happen to Mexico City.
“The La Piedad River crosses the city center and therefore has enormous potential to transform the lives of almost everyone in the city. Not only because of the issue of green space and public space, but by rehabilitating the river, you are transforming the city and improving the quality of the air and the river. And this is where it’s important to understand that in Mexico, more people die from air quality-related problems than from drug trafficking,” says Cattan, who developed the La Piedad River Regeneration Project as a river-based reconsideration of the city’s mobility and across the city describes creation of wetlands and creation of an integrated mobility network.
“The La Piedad River ecopipe is a tool to capture rainwater, treat our drainage and channel it through multiple green infrastructure or nature-based solutions. It’s Latin America’s first piped river and also the first built wetland,” he explains.
For his part, Juan David Hoyos, founder of the Latitude studio and responsible for the Parques del Río Medellín project, is convinced that before an intervention of the scale that an urban river requires, there must first be a process of awareness, dissemination and participation .Citizens , which begins to generate a different discourse about the city.
“There has been talk of building a park on the Medellín River for 80 years. It’s not a sudden process, so one could assume that it was a city necessity that was already built into people’s imagination. However, there were voices repeating: “Medellín is not Europe”, “You can’t build a park like that in Medellín” or those who claimed that the money to be invested in the river would provide 80 schools, public housing, Motorways and a thousand other things could be built,” says Hoyos.
For the Colombian architect, the project aimed to turn Medellín into a city with smaller routes and small central areas, “almost like the city of 15 minutes, which is like starting to become a more compact city and needing for that we life scenarios.” of meetings that until recently could only be found in shopping malls. In this context, the banks of the river become places of civic integration, transforming the urban fabric, giving it life and a commercial, economic and social dynamism that did not exist before,” says one of the designers of the Parques del Río Medellín project.
The five experts interviewed agree that the regeneration processes of the rivers have one factor in common. In almost all cases, the first step in these interventions is water treatment, which in most cases has been neglected for decades. Another coincidence arising from this seeming neglect by the rivers is that for decades the urban structures around the rivers represented unsafe, filthy places far removed from the modernity of their cities.
Finally, the impact of these interventions in their cities has not only led to an improvement in the urban ecosystem and access to more and better public spaces, but they have also served as a neuralgic element to rethink mobility and social, economic and commercial dynamics in these cities. Clear examples of how nature can be seen as a powerful tool for urban transformation and renewal in a region lacking urban elements that encourage encounters between citizens.