The Post-automobile City From Deterritorialization to the Proximity City: The Case of Madrid

Abstract

There is a broad consensus in the scientific community to understand that the impact of private car-based urban mobility models is unsustainable in terms of urban environmental quality, energy economy, and health. The case study presented in this text, the Madrid Centro Project, approaches this situation through the simplest but richest element of the system of urban public spaces: the street. As the conclusions show, there is a need to reorient the character of urban planning toward greater flexibility and technological innovation ensuring sustainability in its environmental, land use, and mobility components. The interrelation between buildings and streets opens rich reconfiguration options, as does the growing number of motorized and non-motorized modes of transport. The Central Madrid Project has provided an opportunity to experiment with a new concept through which the pre-existing urban tissue is reconfigured in “new urban cells”. These constitute a land use- mobility organization in which the streets that enclose the urban cells receive through traffic and those inside provide a more domestic local core, to which only residents can get by car. This allows a much larger allocation of public space to pedestrians and urban vegetation.