María Arquero de Alarcón
Preface by authors:
It is generally accepted that there is a strong association of macroeconomic and political decisions with large-scale infrastructures. It is equally true that the territorial and urbanistic conditions in which new urban phenomena develop call for a greater rationality that draws together different scales to produce more efficient, integrative action.
This is the case of adequate assessment of the impact of large infrastructures on the landscape and particularly their effect on activities and the existing geography. We also have to understand, however, that in some situations networks and systems may produce a different definition to infrastructures, which are often excessively organized according to their hierarchical structure or internal logic, more typical of a top-down decision-making system.
We can therefore create paradigm models for the use and organization of a landscape whose backbone is formed by infrastructure which, in their capacity to enhance the territory, prove the advisability in social terms of implementing these infrastructures.
Belief in a series of urbanistic projects that integrate infrastructure and landscape, existing activity and new programmatic demands, prompted the proposal of the Studio as a kind of “research by design,” making it both a propositional and an evaluative mechanism. These were, at least, the initial intentions and the results are still open….