VOLUME 3 ISSUE 4

Spaces and Flows:

An International
Journal of Urban and
ExtraUrban Studies
__________________________________________________________________________

Creative City in Suburban Areas

Geographical and Agricultural Matrix as the Basis for the
New Nodal Space

JUAN LUÍS RIVAS NAVARRO AND BELÉN BRAVO RODRÍGUEZ

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 Creative City in Suburban Areas: Geographical
and Agricultural Matrix as the Basis for the New
Nodal Space
Juan Luís Rivas Navarro, University of Granada, Spain
Belén Bravo Rodríguez, University of Granada, Spain

Abstract: The new urban configurations contain an interesting mixture of land that is more or less active. Flows between
the different settlements draw open pieces on a map where the natural geography and agricultural spaces are trapped.
They are forms belonging to a time when the relationship of field-city were clearer, and coexistence between urban and
agricultural functions were easier. These suburban areas become necessary fields of possibilities for the implementation
of new functions in this contemporary geography of our cities from the perspective of the city and also in relation to the
new territorial dynamics, as well as in response to new social demands, cultural and economic. Creative cities, slow
cities, areas of innovation, technology, cultural parks . . . these are some possible directions that allow these intermediate
places to assume a new role in the map of centralities. The key to success in all of these projective approaches is the
sensitivity to attend to the natural geography and their traditional agricultural subdivisions to reach out to become a real
matrix of support: an "interesting space" to allow the temporary co-existence, the balance between past, present and
future of these territories. It is ultimately the search for urban geographies where overlapping functions, rhythms, and
human actions that have hosted these areas over time. Thus, it is important to observe geographic features, its main
roads, and logical division of plots, valuation of its architectural heritage, its key organizational and landscape or spatial
parameters. In addition, the "creative city" must conduct a programmatic search and a typological adjustment that
means more competitive demands to incorporate innovative facilities and new collective architectures. So we can make
compatible two fundamental tensions of the project: the responsibility for the history and inherited geography, and the
sense for the occasion and the invention of a landscape deeply related.

Keywords: Urbanism, Suburban Area, Creative City, Landscape, Time, Multiscale

Introduction

T
he dynamics in planning contemporary urban territory—ranges of government, the
systematization of management, rationalization of resources, extrapolation of solutions—
frequently affect particular urban areas that have been annulled or homogenized. A more
responsible urban planning should better engage local identities, be conscious of global
dimensions, and reveal the specific conditions of the areas, thereby attributing a value to the
differences between given urban facts, and using urban matter as a source of knowledge and
development, i.e. an urban planning that is profound and dense, but also precise and practical.
The present text localizes one of those "unique places" and tries to explain its qualities and
possibilities within the urban project and its planning: the border space. The objective is to
establish a certain category that permits us to learn, to observe, and to discover other similar
territories and demonstrates better ways of intervening in them. 1
The first section will focus on the characteristics and possibilities of suburban areas as
particular areas of the contemporary territory that need to be studied and defined. This will be
done from both a theoretical perspective, beginning with some fundamental concepts that explain
the nature of the space that we inhabit, and from a practical dimension, through a series of
projects, both contemporary and from the last third of the 20th century. It also incorporates some
1
This text reflects a series of successive and interlinked research that we have produced in recent years in the Laboratory
of Urbanism and Regional Planning at the University of Granada: national and international competitions, research in the
area of Andalusia, thesis, etc., all related to our teaching in the subjects of urban project of School of Architecture.

Spaces and Flows: An International Journal of Urban and ExtraUrban Studies

Volume 3, 2013, www.spacesandflows.com, ISSN 2154-8676
© Common Ground, Juan Luís Rivas Navarro, Belén Bravo Rodríguez, All Rights Reserved
Permissions: [email protected]
SPACES AND FLOWS: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND EXTRAURBAN STUDIES

research of our own, through which we can develop an understanding of this kind of space and
how to intervene in it.
Certain qualities are of common base to these urban architecture and town planning projects:
the need to intensify the functions of peripheral areas, the improvement of relationships between
the edge of the city and the urban environment with the areas outside, and the formal and
functional challenges that must be addressed when facing fringe spaces.
We will then present a case, which at the moment is the focus of our investigations called
"Creative city on the Western edge of Granada." We will then formulate a working hypothesis
and present the results, which can currently be obtained from the methodology that is used.
The final objective is to reach some conclusions about the possibility of establishing new
nodal spaces on the agricultural matrix, and to establish new means of methodological support to
help us understand and intervene in these "border spaces." For many Mediterranean cities and
other regions, in conurbation or metropolitan contexts, this is the habitual form of contact
between the city and the countryside.

Characteristics and Possibilities of the Suburban Space

Urban border spaces reveal themselves as a narrative thread of the city. They narrate the cities
evolution and explain relationships with the territory while constructing their own urban form
and governing their function. There are many other urban facts within a city, but it may be in
these spaces where the combination and interaction between local urban qualities and structural
function can be best observed. As can be observed in the border of Granada, the new
infrastructures of communication which surround the cities over and again cannot compete with
the local fabric of the border space in terms of urbanity (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Southwest Edge of the city of Granada. Seen here is a place of growth on the southern edge of Granada, in a
specific moment of its development where we can observe the contact of a compact urban fabric and the surrounding
agricultural system that the city is encroaching upon. On this border, residential plots move into agricultural plots and
fragments of rural parcels are frozen in the consolidated network, producing a system belonging to both typologies.
Another element acts on the space in a less conciliatory manner: the freeway system makes this border space
indeterminate, in constant adjustment, an ambivalent urban position of inside and out, superimposed on distinct systems.
Source: www.bing.com, 2013.

This is why the system that is organized aground the "border space" or "suburban space"
presents itself as the most advanced with the parameters that qualify the urban forms, just before
transcending the city and stepping into territorial urban forms in which other factors emerge.
At the same time, this space exhibits an intense relationship with the major scales of the
territory. In some cases it has its origins in territorial itineraries that traversed the city, usually in
relation to its foundation; in other cases it has consolidated an intraurban territorial movement,
which in its extremities projects a potent influence towards the adjacent countryside or the
villages.

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 RIVAS NAVARRO & BRAVO RODRÍGUEZ: CREATIVE CITY IN SUBURBAN AREAS

On this borderline, different relations are imposed on one another, referring to minor and
major scales: the shapes of the road, the neighborhood, the territory of the city, etc. These
multiscale elements have to be represented by drawings, adequate information and history,
images of the contribution of the space to the globality of the city, wrapped up in a decisive
manner in its spatial and temporal story, in relation, both to what it ascertains and to where it
goes wrong. In this manner, we can intervene in these spaces in a more balanced and just way,
correcting deficiencies in projects and plans that are currently being applied on border spaces,
often times, the result of ignorance on the part of urban agents about the delicateness of these
action.

Qualities of the Contemporary Urban Territories

In order to explain the qualities of the suburban space, we should first reflect on the nature and
the behavior of the contemporary territory or space itself. Thus we can indicate synthetically that
the present territory in which we develop our activities as citizens, inhabitants and urban users,
can be explained by means of four fundamental concepts (Rivas, 2006).
The first concept, and the one in which the others originate, is rupture: the current territory is
seen as a fragmented territory, and this is the result not of a division of a previously unified urban
entity into unconnected parts, but of incorporating distinct preexisting entities into an area of
action that they all share. As a consequence of this, secondary poles emerge in the territory,
which produce constant destabilization as well as the need for balance. This translates into
incapacity to name and describe situations, because traditionally this discourse was established
within a perspective in which these objects and territorial system were separated: urban system,
rural or agrarian system, natural system, hydrological system, geographical system,
communication system, etc.
Fundamentally, the rupture in contemporary space increases the boundaries or edges
enormously. It marginalizes and constantly creates peripheries, which includes the marginality of
the old as opposed to the new: historical centers are emptied, more or less recent peripheries
become obsolete, etc. As we can observe in the situations like the border between Mexico and
the United States (Figure 2) administrative limits also generate rupture and difference in a
territory:

Figure 2: Border between U.S. and Mexico, 2007.

Source: www.pbase.com, 2013.

Another important concept is the relative position of the elements. The existence of concrete
distances, “an interesting distance” (Solá-Morales, 1995), produces changes in the dynamics and

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SPACES AND FLOWS: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND EXTRAURBAN STUDIES

evolution of the urban territory. A set of possibilities create associations like pairs, trios, and
urban groups, which at the same time marginalize other positions where the mechanisms of union
and separation between the urban objects are as important as the objects themselves.
A third concept, that of superimposition, is highlighted. The elements are diversified and
fragmented, and they are separated or combined on the map, but they also overlap, superimposed
in the same space and the same time. This blending of territorial fragments can be as much a
handicap as it is an advantage for the contemporary territory.
We should remind ourselves that more than eighty years ago the American visionary
architect Frank Lloyd Wright conceptualized his living city, Broadacre (Figure 3), in which the
acre per family grid promotes the coexistence of the residential and urban space, with higher
density dotational spaces. Here everything is in dialog with the geography that enshrines it. This
proposal understands that territory and man are capable of constructing a balanced ecosystem,
where blurred borders are places for diversity and not exclusion. A concept of “fusion“ of land
and city, the project of a purely urban while intensely mixed territory, in which nature,
infrastructure, housing, industry and agriculture could be found in a harmonious fusion.

Figure 3: Broadacre City, The Model. F.LL. Wright, 1934.

Source: Weidemann S. (Wright 1917-1942), 2010.

Finally, and as a result of the previous characteristics, the importance of the urban void, the
value of the intermediate space and the space for relation is exponentially increased. In many
urban territories the space between things, the intermodal space, is a guarantee for the future, a
measure of its capacity for evolution or change.
Rupture, relative position, superimposition and the importance of the urban void behave like
a harmonious set of arguments that indicate the guiding rules of the territory in which we move
on a daily basis. These concepts are in tune with other authors that have produced other
fundamental explications. It would be interesting to take a look at them to help us understand the
described formula:
• The territory as a triad of process by André Corboz (1983) is a process in which the
territory is spontaneously modified as a result of natural dynamics, and by human

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 RIVAS NAVARRO & BRAVO RODRÍGUEZ: CREATIVE CITY IN SUBURBAN AREAS

interventions; resulting in the actual ordering and planning; and the territory as a
project of the society that inhabits it, a desired image and improved by it to better
adequate its functions to its space.
• The idea of crossover of urban territoriality by Giuseppe Dematteis, which
understands urban space as a convergence between the different territorial systems,
social-infrastructural-geographical-political-cultural, etc. Here, cities are considered
local territorial systems but express different forms according to the relationship
that its inhabitants and their associations have with the territory.
These reflections on territory, as does the previously described formulation, coincide in
explaining the effects and spatial and functional situations from the moment in which we live: the
increase of mobility, the emergence of the "intermediate space," the coexistence of natural and
artificial systems and also, of course, the incessant production of internal boundaries and border
spaces.

Figure 4: Patchwork Metropolis, by W.J. Neutelings.

Source: Neutelings (Architectural Design nº64), 1994.

One final reference that gives an especially illustrative complementary view of the
contemporary territory is that of the architect Willem Jan Neutelings (1994), who describes the
Patchwork Metropolis as flourishing in its fragmented condition, but also as an integration of
these fragments in a coherent and hopeful whole (Figure 4). His urban “patches” work in groups
in order to create a territorial “carpet,” which is the result of recycling all the strands of urban
fabric, with a sense of contemporaneity, which offers a fantastic field of possibilities, or in his
words, “a minimal space creates a maximum of large-scale events.” In this light, the territory
becomes a sum of more or less complete continuations and narrations, thresholds between urban
elements. It is a series of spaces that are urban in themselves, resting areas, crossing points, a
territory-home made of vestibules, hallways, living rooms, kitchens, terraces, bedrooms,
recesses, and spaces for conversation and encounter.

Projects in the Border Space

Making use of the proposals expressed by Solá-Morales (1995) for the construction of a
“splendid periphery,” in which the values of an environment often misunderstood are

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highlighted, where it is possible to find a huge field of possibilities for experimentation and for
hosting contemporary urban forms and new ways to involve civil society, the projects described
here are located in suburban areas. They redefine its role in the urban complex and strengthen the
“self-esteem” of those border spaces which today’s cities create permanently, and they can serve
to discover some positive guidelines for our work.3 In all of them, the previous space was
agricultural or pseudo-agricultural that has become decontextualized, interstices of the
metropolis, or on the edge of the built city itself. This results in an increment in the consideration
and value that these border spaces with respect to other central positions and a discovery of new
positive working guidelines.
In all the projects referred to in the following paragraphs, the space was agricultural or
“pseudo-agricultural“ that had become decontextualized, situated in urban between space, or in
the border of the constructed city.
The Álvaro Siza project in Évora, Quinta da Malagueira (Figure 5), recovers a marginal area,
a side-product of the urban groups around it. On this occasion, the fragmentation of the program
made it possible to incorporate natural space by means of small gestures of urbanization: for
instance the installation of a small lake as a community space, the appearance of paths and
bridges, trees, urban furniture, etc. The combination of a strong collective use and the
topographical sensitivity are responsible for the fact that the project is incorporated in the
peripheral space with its distinctive personality, and that gives centrality and cohesion to the
intermediate space.

Figure 5: Quinta da Malagueira planification, Évora, Alvaro Siza, 1977-1979.

Source: Siza, A. and Castanheira, C. (Las ciudades de Álvaro Siza), 2001.

The following Italian projects are related to “the planification of Milan“ (Nicolin, 1995),
which returned centrality to a series of obsolete peripheral packages of a city that looked
optimistically to the exterior when it was furnished with collective equipment and services on the
pre-existent periphery.
First, there is Roberto Collová’s intervention in Palermo (Figure 6), in which the foundations
for a better understanding between land and city are laid by means of simple gestures of building:
activation of urban land either close to or far from pre-existing others, recovery of the traces of
lost country paths, gate architecture in the open space and also of the consolidate periphery. A
paradigmatic project that acts “almost without touching,” with a subtle intervention, building
bridges between the proposed and the future networks, and reserving much space for posterior
processes.
Secondly, from a more structural perspective, the work coordinated by Alessandro Armando
on the Western edge of Turin (2002) (Figure 7), is very interesting. Here, a new urban system is

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 RIVAS NAVARRO & BRAVO RODRÍGUEZ: CREATIVE CITY IN SUBURBAN AREAS

opened in a border space. Here, the streets are the elements intuited behind the spaces that stitch
together the fragmented condition, which Neutelings spoke of. An organism based on the
continuity of unoccupied spaces is created that is susceptible to being filled or emptied in
moments, in a profound study of its form and of its role as a channel of all the loose or isolated
urban energies in the periphery of Turin. This organic structure, filled with the criteria of order of
the traffic, and of naturalization of transport mechanisms, make the surge of a new Turin
possible. Thus, the space that was previously considered as backward, belonging exclusively to
the communication infrastructures, now acquires great power based precisely on its peripheral
origin, a singularity difficult to equal by more classical central areas.

Figure 6: "Una calle hecha de esquinas", Palermo, Roberto Collová, 1987.

Source: Collová, (UR nº 5, El proyecto urbano I), 1987.

Figure 7: Workshop Progettare linee complesse. Torino, 15-22 february 2002.

Source: Armando (Paesaggi a molte velocità), 2002.

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SPACES AND FLOWS: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND EXTRAURBAN STUDIES

“Creative City” on the Western Edge of the City of Granada

It is quite common, as we have seen before that these border territories are spaces that were
inherited from a time of greater agricultural productivity with an ethnological and landscape
heritage of unquestionable value. Its opportunities are based precisely on this quality of open
space, mixed up with the urban centralities and occupations, a transmitter of the processes of
occupation and transformation of this territory in past epochs.
At the same time, this space shows important urban characteristics that make it attractive for
development: accessibility, closeness to the urban centrality, [functional as well as historical and
touristic], the capacity for formal organization of the metropolitan areas, especially apt to house
new urban functions, etc.
It is the dual aspect of opportunities and heritage, of a lack of current functionality and great
spatial and relational possibilities that allow us to imagine that beyond the compact city and its
infrastructures of mobility edge, on this agricultural intermediate space, we might consider a new
city of architectures, flows and functions to harmonize overlapping territorial times.
To understand the case of the border space in the city of Granada it is necessary to quickly
point out what was learned in the investigation of the winning proposal of the International
Architecture Competition of Gran Canaria, Spain, “Flowpolis, the form of the nodal space.” This
project was conceived to develop a new city in the metropolitan context of Las Palmas in Gran
Canaria, in a territory which used to be considered as peripheral, despite being crossed by a great
quantity of flows of communication: airport, motorway, coastal highway, access to smaller sized
villages, etc. (Rivas, 2008)
The proposal called Slow08 (Figure 8), represented the possibility of working with
superimposed networks, all of which also include the aspect of landscape, in which the choice of
the built architecture, or the positioning and character of the empty space, was connected to a
project that disconnected large infrastructures from small ones, in order to respond to a territory
with various layers of recognizable time.
This is a territorial intervention developed on the basis of knowing, respecting, and
enhancing the values of the natural, urban and infrastructural environments, searching for
balance between them. The creative outline of the territorial map, of what exists as given, its
possibilities and its utopias is the basic tool that Slow08 uses in order to investigate and at the
same time to propose a new city. It is the representation of a new landscape of central functions
within the scope of preexisting forms and logics, as overlapping periods of the territory.
In this sense we may speak of the "creative city," using the urban regeneration undertaken in
cities such as Barcelona, Amsterdam, or Singapore as a model, by means of the reformulation of
urban parameters in areas that have lost the original functionality. The search for new territories
of competitiveness, which would allow the implantation of urban programs based on the creation
of knowledge, has in many cities turned into an objective so as to become better points of
departure in order to be "successful" in the 21st century (Musterd, 2007; Hall, 2004).
Without the intense social implications expressed and developed by Richard Florida with
respect to the "creative class," we would also be speaking of the search for innovative urban
functions and functional specialization of space in the lines of “new production economies” that
he studied (Florida, 2002). We should keep in mind that we are speaking of less central territories
from a geopolitical perspective and still less in terms of active economics (as is the case in
Southern Spain), but where these kind of strategies could also be valid for the generation of areas
of comfort for society and businesses. This ambivalent condition, between a really tough present
and the different possibilities of the future, allows us to think about them like an interesting
opportunity to develop urban projects in the border space, and even more so, if we add the
component of recovering its landscape heritage, such as we are proposing here.

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 RIVAS NAVARRO & BRAVO RODRÍGUEZ: CREATIVE CITY IN SUBURBAN AREAS

Figure 8: Proposal Slow08. Gran Canarias (Spain).

Source: Rivas, Gómez (Flowpolis. International Competition of Arquitecture), 2008.

Analysis and Proposal of “Creative City” in Granada´s Vega

The space relative to this practical investigation is on the western border of Granada. To
understand the circumstances that mark the growth of the city and the space in question, it must
be made clear that Granada is an inland city in Eastern Andalucía (Southern Spain), situated at
the foot of the Sierra Nevada, at the edge of an area of fluvial deposit defined by the valley of the
Genil River.
During many centuries, Granada remained concentrated in this position, until at the
beginning of the 20th century the city was forced to develop. This fertile agricultural land known
as “Vega,” an area much larger than the actual border with the city, was considered both an
economic engine and an unquestioned landscape value in the 19th century. This was the reason
why the urban planning always tried to develop the city towards the north and the south, but not
towards the west (Figure 9), which would seem more logical from the point of view of
continuing the pre-existing city, just like it occurred in many Spanish cities with the mechanism
that is known as ‘Los Ensanches.” 2

2
The Camino de Ronda neighborhood is located in contact with non-built borders of the city of Granada, beyond the ring
road: a major north-south traverse within the city and which is currently under construction to incorporate the first
underground light rail line to cross the city's Metropolitan Area from the towns of Armilla (south) to Maracena and
Albolote (north) through the city of Granada.

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SPACES AND FLOWS: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND EXTRAURBAN STUDIES

Figure 9: General Map of Granada representing the building height. Note the high density on the Camino de Ronda road–
the most longitudinal and perpendicular to the rivers represented by the white space on the map. This high residential
density puts tension on the relationship between the limit of the urban territory and the agricultural land on the border.
Source: Rivas (Chapter Granada, Doctoral Thesis, University of Granada), 2012.

Figure 10: (right) Orthophotography of Granada in the area of study. The limits are marked by the presence of two
important roadways: Carretera de la Circunvalación–curved, which radically separates the urban space form the Vega,
and the Camino de Ronda–straight interior. Source: Rivas (Chapter Granada, Doctoral Thesis, University of Granada),
2012.

The work, still in progress, studies the urban possibilities of this space that belongs to the
Vega, demonstrating that in functional, spatial, and symbolical terms, but also from the social
and economic point of view, it has many more possibilities of intervention than the fact of being
considered a pseudo-agricultural space that needs to be protected against urban growth.
Here again, the area we observe is a field of investigation in which many phenomena have
occurred over time in a definite manner (Figure 10). Thus the discovery of the rules of internal
functioning, of the occupation of plots, the architectural typologies, the ways of life, becomes a
key element in order to measure the intervention in a territory that is so susceptible to change.
For a project to be sensitive to all these considerations, knowledge and creativity are
parameters that must be administered equally. On one hand, it is essential to separate the fabric
from the physical reality, deepening the knowledge of the systems (spatial, architectural, and

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 RIVAS NAVARRO & BRAVO RODRÍGUEZ: CREATIVE CITY IN SUBURBAN AREAS

process) that are part of the study. On the other hand, associate a programmatic repertoire
adequate for the border space that links it to the central city, projecting the area towards a
hopeful future in terms of competitiveness and knowledge generation, and, last but not least,
discover and revere the landscape and ethnological value of the place.
Among the large repertoire of studies that have been undertaken for analyzing and
understanding these, we are mentioning here the following:
1. Multiscale analysis: relations between the contemporary urban elements and their
constituting forms or systems from a triple perspective, the metropolitan, the urban,
and the local.
2. Temporal analysis: discovering the form and character of the area over time, its
oldest formal and functional values, and its evolution, mainly in the 20th century.
3. Formal analysis: organizing the different directions which cross the space of the
agricultural matrix from the territory and from the city of Granada.
4. Thematic analysis: supposing relations with respect to a dominant urban function,
in this case the university, which are introduced in the agricultural space as an
element of generating order.
5. Complementariness of roads: collecting information on the different scales and
particularly on the most local scale, intending a reconsideration of agricultural
roads in the measure in which they can here and there complement the urban
functions and their mobility.

Figure 11. Three meshes of space: the Vega's accessibility behaves through a very hierarchical distribution of different
network. Here we can see the mesh devoted to private vehicles of the first level, the local public mesh, and the more
private and inaccessible mesh. 3
Source: Cuevas Arrabal, Thesis of the School of Architecture of Granada, 2012.

3
The followings images belong to one of projects that are the result of Creative City workshop coordinated by Juan L.
Rivas. María del Mar Cuevas Arrabal and Juan L. Rivas Navarro, "Ciudad creativa en la Vega de Granada," Thesis of the
School of Architecture of Granada (Granada, 2011); In addition, research forms part of PLANPAIS, INTEGRATION OF
LANDSCAPE PLANNING PROCESSES: APPLICATION TO THE ANDALUZ CASE, Project of Excellence granted
in 2009 and coordinated by Dr. Alberto Matarán Ruiz, professor at the University of Granada (2009-2013).

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Figure 12: Granada, Temporal evolution. 1956-1977 and 2000.

Source: Cuevas Arrabal, Thesis of the School of Architecture of Granada, 2012.

Figure 13: Granada, formal analysis: Inside-Outside and From north to the south.
Source: Cuevas Arrabal, Thesis of the School of Architecture of Granada, 2012.

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 RIVAS NAVARRO & BRAVO RODRÍGUEZ: CREATIVE CITY IN SUBURBAN AREAS

Figure 14: Granada, Complementariness of roads and beginning of the project. New urbanization–Vega quarter–Urban
functional connection–Key points of a new nodal space.
Source: Cuevas Arrabal, Thesis of the School of Architecture of Granada, 2012.

As we have previously indicated, the project opens a series of programmatic possibilities

among which it finds its best option for the future:
A. Occasional interventions which enable certain functions and mobilize the space
according to the time it needs to reactivate its agricultural landscape.
B. Mediation of the area of intervention, to establish intermediate structures and new
forms of occupation.
C. Configuration of “new aspects of the creative city” with a greater or lesser degree
of transformation, which make use of the positional potential of the space that is so
close to the consolidated and central city, and also of its singular qualities in order
to obtain unique landscapes and functions that would be impossible to reproduce in
the traditional compact city.

Figures 15: Urban and architectonics consequences of an example of implanting of the “Creative University City” in part
of the study area.
Source: Cuevas Arrabal, Thesis of the School of Architecture of Granada, 2012.

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Conclusions: New Nodal Spaces on the Agricultural Matrix

The new urban configurations contain an interesting mixture of more or less active land. Flows
between the different settlements draw open pieces on a map where the natural geography and
agricultural spaces are trapped. They are forms belonging to a time when relationship field-city
was clearer, and coexistence between urban and agricultural functions was simpler.
These suburban areas become necessary fields of possibilities for the implementation of new
functions in this contemporary geography of our cities from the perspective of the city and also
in relation to the new territorial dynamics, in response to new social, cultural, and economic
demands.
Thus it is important to observe geographic features (main roads and logical division of
plots), valuation of its architectural heritage, its key organizational and landscape or spatial
parameters. In addition, the "creative city" must conduct both a programmatic search as a
typological adjustment. This means to know more competitive demands, to incorporate
innovative facilities and high quality trade fabric, and locate new collective architectures. So we
can make compatible, two fundamental tensions of the project: responsibility for the history and
inherited geography, and the sense for the occasion and the invention of a landscape deeply
related.
Finally, we could simply think of these suburban spaces as intermediate places, something
“situated between the urban things,” which allows it to assume a new protagonism on the map of
territorial centralities of the city: creative cities, slow cities, areas of innovation, technology,
cultural parks, etc.
In this sense, we would locate the key to success in all these projective approaches in the
sensitivity to attend to the natural geography and to their traditional agricultural subdivisions so
as to become a real supporting matrix, but also so that they can become an ”interesting space”
which allows the temporal coexistence, the overlapping of functions and rhythms that are also
urban.

Acknowledgments
We would like to sincerely thank our families for their support to carry out this publication, and
especially our colleagues Heraldo Ferreira and Alberto Matarán, our friend landscaper Clif
Bucher, and architects María del Mar Cuevas and Ana Alfaro, for collaboration and support to
develop research presented and the article. Also thank Common Ground team and Spaces and
Flows Journal team for your attention and support, as well as students Final Project of the School
of Architecture of Granada involved in the Workshop on Creative City in the Vega of Granada.

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 RIVAS NAVARRO & BRAVO RODRÍGUEZ: CREATIVE CITY IN SUBURBAN AREAS

REFERENCES
Armando, A. 2004. “Lo svincolo di Beinasco/Drosso: verso la sacala territoriale.” In Paesaggi a
molte velocità, edited by Gustavo Ambrosini and Mauro Berta, 142-147. Roma:
Meltemi.
Brooks, B., Goesel, P. 2010. Wright 1917-1942: The Complete Works. Bonn: Taschen.
Cecchi, R., Lima, V., Nicolin, P. and Traversi, P. 1995. “Nove Parchi per Milano.”, Casabella no.
626: 32-37.
Collovà, R. 1987. "Una calle hecha de esquinas". UR no.5 (El proyecto urbano I): 28-31.
Corboz, A. 1983. “Le territoire comme palimpseste.” Diogène no. 121: 14-35.
Dematteis, G. 1999. “Sul crocevia della territorialità urbana.” In I futuri della città. Tesi a
confronto, edited by Giuseppe Dematteis and others. Milano: Frano Angeli.
Guiheux, A., Dethier, J. 1994. Visions urbanes: Europa 1870-1993: la ciutat de l'artista, la
ciutat de l'arquitecte. Madrid: Electa.
Florida, R. 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class, and How It Has Transformed Work, Leisure,
Community, and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books.
Hall, P. 1996. Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the
20th Century. Barcelona: Ediciones Serbal.
Neutelings, W.J. 1994. “Explorations into Wonderland: Riding the Periphery of the Low
Countries” Architectural Design no. 108: 59-62.
Maas, W., Van Rijs, J., De Vries, N. (Architects MVRDV). 1997. “Vivre au bord de
l’autoroute.” Quaderns no. 218: 54-61.
Musterd, S., Bontje, M., Chapain, C., Kocavs, Z., Murie, A. 2007. “Accommodating creative
knowledge: a literature review from a European perspective.” ACRE Report no 1.
Amsterdam: AMIDSt, University of Amsterdam.
Rivas, J.L. 2004. "Infrastructure and contemporary space," in Un Curso de Urbanismo 2001-
2002 (Granada: Universidad de Granada - Diputación de Granada): 26-33.
Rivas, J.L., Gómez, J.L. 2008. “1º prize. Slow08.” Especiales de Urbanismo no. 4 (Flowpolis. La
forma del Espacio Nodal. Competition + International Meeting of Architecture): 206-
209.
Rivas, J.L. 2012. La travesía más transparente: la visión de Córdoba, Málaga y Granada desde
su calle ciudad / Dissertation by Juan Luis Rivas Navarro; tutor: José Luis Gómez
Ordoñez. Granada: Universidad de Granada.
Siza, A. 2001. Las ciudades de Álvaro Siza. Edited by Carlos Castanheira and Chiara Porcu,
Madrid: Talis, 40-45.
Solá-Morales i Rubio, M. 2008. “Territorios sin Modelo (1995)” in De cosas urbanas, ed. Eelco
van Welie (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili): 166-173.
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Internet Figures Sources

Figure1: http://www.bing.com/maps/#Y3A9cTV2YnhwZ3EwYnc4Jmx2b D0xOC42MSZkaXI9
MzU5LjcxJnN0eT11

Figure 2: http://www.pbase.com/bmcmorrow/image/74771072/original

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SPACES AND FLOWS: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND EXTRAURBAN STUDIES

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Juan Luís Rivas Navarro: Born in Sevilla in 1975, he was a graduate of Architecture from the
University of Granada in 2000. He has been a researcher in the Laboratory of Urban Planning at
this university since 2001. He received the First Prize in the International Competition of
Architecture in Gran Canarias (Spain), in the 2006, “Flowpolis. The form of the nodal space.”
His dissertation was read in November, 2009, with the title, "The traverse more transparent. The
vision of the cities Cordoba, Malaga, and Granada from the street-city point of view." He has
been a lecturer of the Postgraduate Program of Urbanism at the University of Granada since
2010.

Belén Bravo Rodríguez: Born in Jaén in 1981, she was a graduate of Architecture from the
University of Granada in 2007. She has been a researcher in the Laboratory of Urban Planning at
this university since 2005 and a collaborator in the First Prize-proposal in the International
Competition of Architecture in Gran Canarias (Spain), in the 2006, “Flowpolis. The form of the
nodal space.” She has been an associate professor of the E.T.S. of Architecture in Granada since
2010 and belongs to the Postgraduate Program of Urbanism of the University of Granada where
she works on writing her dissertation on the southern district of Granada and its spaces of
sociability.

16
Spaces and Flows: An International Journal of application, and the practices of knowledge making and
Urban and ExtraUrban Studies addresses some those of knowledge dissemination.
of the most pressing social, cultural, economic and
environmental questions of our time, focusing on In addition to traditional scholarly papers, this journal
spaces and flows as crucibles and vectors of ongoing invites case studies that take the form of presentations
transformation. of practice—including documentation of spatial
practices and exegeses analyzing the effects of those
The journal discusses several central questions: practices.
What are the new and emerging spaces of production,
consumption, and human living as communities, Spaces and Flows: An International Journal of Urban
regions, and societies organize and re-organize in and ExtraUrban Studies is a peer-reviewed scholarly
contemporary times? And what are the new flows journal.
of people, goods, services, information, and ideas?
How are they being constructed and how are they
functioning?

The issues addressed in the journal oscillate

between the local and the global, the empirical and
the theoretical, the utopian and the pragmatic, the
disciplinary and the transdisciplinary, research and its

ISSN 2154-8676

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