GUADALMEDINA RIVER COMPETITION 2012

In 2012, Malaga City Council, together with the Junta de Andalucía and the Confederación Hidrográfica del Gobierno Central, launched an International Ideas Competition to provide urban and architectural solutions to one of Malaga’s most important problems: the integration of the urban section of the Guadalmedina River with the city. This ‘unfinished business’ has become the subject of ongoing debate since the 1960s with the construction of the Limonero Dam at the head of this urban watercourse.

The winning project presented by our technical team, in collaboration with a wide range of specialised engineering firms, proposed a decisive urban and landscape integration of the river with its city, recognising the identity of both historical structures and the future need to consolidate, qualify and enhance this necessary and unavoidable urban ‘coexistence’. It is no coincidence that our slogan for the competition was: ‘More River, More City’, thus identifying this important objective. The problem of the management of the River Guadalmedina could no longer be centred exclusively on the simplicity of two extreme options in which neither the simple ‘landscaping’ of the riverbed, nor the commitment to ‘embankment’ operations could provide coherent solutions to conserve its nature and the river’s urban relationship with the city.

In the case of the Guadalmedina, these actions were subject to a new way of managing the Limonero reservoir, which was never conceived as a ‘dam’ but, on the contrary, as a ‘regulating reservoir’. Controlling the regulation of the reservoir is therefore the principle of the civility required for the river’s course. To try to conceive of the reservoir as a dam would be to maintain a constant danger to the city, or to try to use it as a headwater for water transfer operations would be a serious mistake, as it was not designed for such a function, but rather to recover its main objective of never causing any risk to the city. Managing the reservoir as ‘regulation’ and not as “accumulation” is the solution to achieve a greater city-river relationship, greater identification by discovering the riverbanks, and a greater capacity to ‘make a city’.