Europan 12

The environment of Vila Viçosa is full of olive and cork trees that shape the spatial and mental landscape of the locals. We want to continue this beautiful natural environment in the intervention area, with a new plantation of olive and cork trees that will act as a tree nursery.

Our proposal avoids the reproduction of a typical urban fabric, providing a new natural landscape created by man. It will generate order, scale, shade and sustenance to the new neighborhood. It will be a new ecosystem that is half urban, half nature, following a slow process of development as a result of an intervention related to the growth of the tree plantation. It is a system of regeneration of an area that has been damaged by different human activities.

In a first phase, the new trees will cover all of the free area. The areas of urban growth will appear in a second phase, generating new free spaces through woodland transplant to another damaged area, which will reproduce the same process.
The benefits obtained from this process will be used to develop the area where trees have been removed, just as happens in the simple functioning of a tree nursery.

We do not want our proposal to be seen as a complete architectural design. What we want is that our project will help to initiate a process, allowing all actors involved in the development of the area to be able to judge and decide.

We propose the creation of an office for citizen participation and civic center in one of the existing abandoned industrial buildings in the project site.
This office will ensure and coordinate the participation of the inhabitants of Vila Viçosa in the development of the area. They will be key players in shaping the space. The restored building will be the meeting point between the future inhabitants, builders, biologists, sociologists, neighbors, engineers and architects who will join in a cooperative. We propose to delete from the process the developers and the banks.

We also propose to reform another existing building into a space dedicated to the participation in the process of growing trees. It will be a place where you can store all the necessary tools for planting and caring for the trees, but will also be a place where people can attend workshops for those interested in tree planting, nursery management and tree maintenance.

The present time of crisis forces us to consider the construction of new structures in a more responsible way and been aware of the real needs, especially focusing on reducing the consumption of non-renewable resources.

When it will be necessary to add new buildings within the project area, we propose the construction of light and simple infrastructures, easy and quick to build-change-reuse-dismount.

These new structures can be adapted to different programmatic scenarios. They will provide the site with versatile new public spaces.