Agora Machine

We claim the contemporary city to solve simultaneously two matters, on one hand, we request the city to provide us with ways to move easily and carry out our daily tasks; on the other, we need the city to be a symbolic place that could cover our social and emotional needs. Agora Maquina is a city proposal for a near future, that embraces this contradiction.

Agora Maquina is a hyper dense city model that enables major movement and better connections, not only to the urban centers, but to the whole territory. It is set in the border that separates the city of Madrid from its suburbs, in a 500.000 square meters void caused by the railway infrastructure. The proposal covers this void with a megastructure that reconnects both sides of the neighborhood. The formal result is an urban section where the agora, the most inhabited part of the proposal, is placed in the streets, with direct access to the train platforms and surrounded by mixed use buildings. The project turns more into a maquina, meaning it loses social character as it gains an infrastructural one, by moving away from the agora, towards the lower levels, with the railway infrastructure, and to the upper ones with office space, air delivery logistic space and air mobility boarding areas. This new urban section integrates in the same place uses that until now were relegated to different locations in the map of cities, reducing in this way, the differences between the center of the cities and their peripheries. Agora Maquina explores how the city of social interaction not only can coexist with the city of logistic in a same place but can actually be enriched through this bound. The intense flow of passengers, directly connected through the canals, to the streets, ensures an activation and a constant use of the public space. The city should always be a symbolic place for human relations, but it should also allow us to move and carry out our daily tasks easily. The city as an agora and as a maquina.