Sustainable urbanism: building a city by recovering, rather than expanding urban voids

Madrid Nuevo Norte follows the prevailing trend in urban planning: leverage the opportunity afforded by brownfields in large cities.

Madrid Nuevo Norte, Europe’s largest urban regeneration project, will build a new, 200-hectare city: streets, parks, houses, public facilities. When talking about urban planning in the past, what springs to mind are urban developments on the outskirts of the city designed on a drawing board or computer screen. These urban development projects continuously required new land, sometimes, to the point that there was simply no more land to build on. They expanded the boundaries of the cities, increasingly encroaching into the countryside, agricultural land or natural areas.

This trend has been challenged in recent years by a new generation of international urban projects that leverage the opportunities afforded by obsolete industrial lands or large railway, port or road infrastructures located within the cities. These urban voids, known as “brownfields”, are large extensions of vacant and abandoned land that almost always represent a barrier within the urban centres.

There are numerous examples of this trend. Indeed, there are dozens of urban developments that have helped cities grow, be better connected and more liveable, without further urban sprawl nor expansion of the city’s boundaries. Projects such as King’s Cross in London, New York’s Hudson Yards or Porta Nuova in Milan, were built on former railway land. Meanwhile, London’s Canary Wharf, Hafencity in Hamburg or Barangaroo in Sydney, were developed on obsolete port areas, to name a few.