Green infrastructure for a sustainable connection between the city and the orchard

First day of Future in Spanish

The strategy would make the green areas of the municipality of Murcia and the rest of the urban elements interrelated

In the structure of the cities of the present and the future there is a term that marks the direction to follow: sustainability. Far from being just a challenge, it represents a new paradigm that goes beyond the reduction of emissions or the creation of green lungs in cities to advance to an integrated model in which all the elements are interconnected in favor of the citizen and the environment. .

Sustainable cities were the central axis of the first presentation of the V Conference on the Future in Spanish that took place this Wednesday at the Artillery Barracks, organized by the newspaper LA VERDAD and CAF-Development Bank of Latin America, with the sponsorship of the City Council of Murcia, Aguas de Murcia, the Central Union of Irrigators of the Tajo-Segura Aqueduct (SCRATS), Cajamar, Esamur and the Autonomous Community of the Region of Murcia, and the collaboration of the National Technological Center for Preserving and Food and AgritechMurcia. In it, different experts put on the table ideas and projects that offer solutions to the challenges that cities face.

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Among these solutions is the green infrastructure that Murcia City Council is committed to with a strategy that, starting June 1 and lasting one year, has as its goal the interrelation of green spaces and the city, being “one of the most important projects for the immediate future of this metropolitan city”, as indicated during the event by Jesús López, municipal architect and technical deputy director of Urbanism and Ecological Transition of the Murcia City Council. The strategy aims to make a physical approach to the center, the orchard, the green spaces and natural areas and interrelate them with mobility, making the more than 4,100,000 square meters of green areas in the municipality stop being seen as isolated and begin to act and interact with each other. “In this municipality where we are lucky enough to have green spaces in the garden, there are a series of itineraries that will insert mobility with the districts, natural spaces and symbolic spaces with respect to the identity of the city and large parks,” he explained. the. It is a project “to make a better city”, which has the involvement of citizens.

In this green infrastructure, the preservation and maintenance of the orchard is of great importance, as well as actions to recover scattered heritage, such as the mills; or the recovery of trails, such as ancient paths. Actions, indicated the expert, “that are against this contemporary mobility but that we have to solve.”
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In this concept of sustainable cities, “water has a lot to say”, as stated by Inmaculada Serrano, general director of Aguas de Murcia, being an element that accompanies the path towards sustainability in the municipality, accompanying it in the spaces and paths green. “Our objective is to continue transforming the integral water cycle by supporting ourselves in this green transition and digitalisation.”

The challenge of geographical dispersion

In order to connect all the elements of the city and interrelate them, mobility plays a key role, especially considering that the municipality of Murcia has geographical dispersion as a peculiarity, with more than 880 square meters of territory and 55 districts. For López, this dispersion of the population “goes against the sustainability of a city”, because “the need to be able to access these facilities and spaces entails a series of displacements”. In this sense, there are numerous actions that are being carried out in the Murcia City Council, such as the incorporation of 100 new kilometers of bike lanes that will connect the city center with the districts for the first time; the digitization of public transport to “put them in the 21st century”; the construction of intermodal public transport nodes, the reduction of times between journeys, the connection of districts with each other to reach all population centers and the creation of dissuasive car parks to reduce the use of private vehicles, as detailed by Carmen Fructuoso, councilor Sustainable Mobility and Street Cleaning of the Murcia City Council. “These projects are going to allow us to go from some 600,000 private vehicle movements to 400,000,” she clarified, recalling that “mobility, urban planning and the orchard are priority axes to improve the locality of life of the neighbors.”

tactical urbanism

Luz de la Villa, member of the College of Architects, advocated tactical urbanism and its differentiation from strategic planning, promoting “one-off, temporary and reversible” actions, as opposed to long-term actions, bearing in mind that “a city lasts for centuries and you have to change it.” It is an urbanism that transcends that of norms and regulations to implement “immediate and easy” actions, said Jesús López, making it more beneficial to health, with cities where there is “less pollution, more stress-relieving spaces and better and larger facilities” .