Plan n´UNDO Don Benito

Europan12 Competition : First Prize

Location: Don Benito, Badajoz  (Spain)

Year: 2013

Framework:  Europan12 Competition

#PublicSpace #Identity

n´UNDO proposes for Don Benito the improvement of its municipality from No Construction, Minimization, Reuse, and Dismantling, with a global long-haul project, which avoid any immediacy. Acting from a network of small sequenced interventions against large localized scale, and giving priority to investment in the typical values and pre-existences of the municipality, recovering and promoting the grid of voids, public spaces and patios.

Urban grid: public space and private courtyards, a large network to enhance:
Investment in the values and memory of Don Benito. Field work in the urban grid is proposed: firstly, improving the network of public spaces, communicating them and reviewing them from a global strategy, promoting and connecting existing spaces and creating new ones, working on a new interpretation of the city and its walks, with the consequent impact on the social net. Secondly, working in the network of private patios, characteristic of the history and memory of the place; considering its recovery as a socio-economic approach project: «Week of the Patios of Don Benito».

Urban Centre: the need for review of the existing.
No construction of new buildings nor the parking in the centre of the town, replaced by deterrent parking areas situated on strategically located empty lots; Minimization of barriers to accessibility, road traffic in the centre of the village and not relevant signage and street furniture; Reuse of existing buildings for public use, revision of voids, empty plots and urban remnants,setting them up for public use; management of demolition material to use it in the construction of pavements and new interventions; and Dismantling of buildings in poor condition or other elements involving a visual or physical barrier between public spaces.

Square: organized from its memory, a project with socio-economic dimension.
The trace of the pre-existences will serve as a generator of public space. Intervention is also complemented by a socio-economic proposal in the field of management of construction waste, in relation to the actions in the square and its surroundings.

It is wisdom, which has the merit of selecting, among the countless problems that arise, those whose solution is important to mankind. E Kant

Team: Indalecio Batlles, Alejandro del Castillo, Julia Font, Verónica Sánchez y Beatríz Sendín.