Water: Strategies for a New Paradigm.

The project proposes a paradigm shift to respond to the current major global and emergency climate crises, biodiversity and the depletion of a finite territory.\r\nA regenerative system structured by water arteries and activated by 5 metabolic strategies will become the basis of the new PlainHortaCity paradigm.

The project is contextualised in the awareness of the need for a change of environmental, social, economic and cultural paradigm based on overcoming the dichotomy between the countryside and the city in order to respond to the major current and global crises of climate emergency, biodiversity and the depletion of a finite territory.\r\nThe Lleida's plain becomes the largest area of rural and agricultural production in Catalonia (200.000 Ha) and one of the least inhabited. A territory formed by an agricultural tiles, natural spaces and habitability in a constellation that orbits around the compact city of Lleida.\r\nThe area of contact between the plain and the city forms the area of \"Horta de Lleida\". 15,000 Ha of territory between Horta and the city become the working scale of the project.\r\nThe transformation of the initial uses of Horta, the explosion of the city and its urbanization dynamics are consolidating the limits between the orchard and the city, until reaching a model of discontinuities between natural, rural and urban ecosystems that does not respond to the current and global requirements: A change of paradigm is necessary.\r\nThe paradigm shift is proposed based on the recognition of the identity and structuring elements of the place as structuring and regenerative elements: Water as a backbone of a system necessary for the reconfiguration of damaged ecosystemic relationships.\r\nA regenerative system that blurs the limits imposed by human activity by drawing up 5 metabolic and continuity strategies and which is based on overcoming the dichotomy between countryside and city: A slow mobility of recovery of the flows between orchard and city, the rehabilitation of the historical districts of the city and the plain, the restructuring potential of the linked collective spaces as a cohesive element of the system, a new local, social and responsible food system and the enhancement of identity through the activation of natural and cultural heritage, become the strategic bases of the new PlainHortaCity paradigm.