El Andador, developed by Lloveras + Lloveras for the Civic Endowment Plaza of Gran San Blas in Madrid, situates itself within a critical lineage of contemporary urbanism that conceives public space not as residual void but as active relational infrastructure. The project operates as a civic device aimed at reconstituting centrality within Madrid’s peripheral fabric, embedding itself in the polycentric network of Greater Madrid. Its formal and programmatic logic displaces the monumentalist imagination in favour of an ethics of shared ground, where walking, training, learning and dwelling are interwoven into a quotidian choreography. El Andador is not an iconic object but an operative field: a spatial continuum articulating parks, productive endowments and a large civic plaza capable of hosting up to one thousand inhabitants in citizen-driven activities. This emphasis on proximity and human scale redefines centrality as relational density rather than symbolic concentration.
In this sense, the project enters into dialogue with critical European urban traditions—from the garden city to Team X—while rewriting them through an ecosophical and socially situated sensibility. The programmatic structure of the site—50,000 m² of urban area, 33,000 m² of productive endowment, 18,600 m² of parks and a 6,000 m² civic plaza—reveals a deliberate equilibrium between hard infrastructure and the soft support systems of communal life. This proportional logic encodes a spatial politics privileging slow time, intergenerational encounter and the corporeal reappropriation of public space. El Andador functions as a restorative green corridor, a topographical ribbon suturing previous fragmentations of the urban tissue and reconnecting inhabitants with natural cycles obscured by functionalist planning. The integration of next-generation systems for energy management and the minimisation of environmental footprint situates the project within an economy of means that rejects both technosolutionism and superficial green aesthetics. Sustainability here is operational and pedagogical: construction processes are rendered legible, forming part of the urban narrative and exposing the infrastructural metabolism that sustains everyday life.
One of El Andador’s most conceptually significant contributions is its redefinition of civic endowment as a platform for emergent forms of sociality. The “material square metres” generated by the special plan are conceived not as closed containers but as flexible matrices for evolving practices: informal sport, situated learning, neighbourhood micro-economies and spontaneous cultural assemblages. This programmatic indeterminacy counters the functional obsolescence afflicting many civic facilities, allowing the space to mutate with shifting communal needs. The civic plaza operates as a post-Fordist agora in which citizens are not spectators but co-producers of meaning. In Foucauldian terms, El Andador may be read as an ordinary heterotopia: a counter-site embedded in the everyday, capable of temporarily suspending habitual hierarchies of use and circulation. The centrality it proposes is neither hierarchical nor spectacular but distributed and processual, grounded in the rhythms of lived experience. Ultimately, El Andador articulates a political poetics of the commons that displaces smart-city rhetoric in favour of situated, embodied and relational intelligence. Against the commodification of public space as touristic décor or consumer interface, the project reinstates use value as the primary criterion of urban design. Its invocation of “new modes of inhabiting the twenty-first century” does not materialise as futuristic typologies but as an ethical reprogramming of the ground itself: walking as civic act, training as communal ritual, and interaction with nature as everyday pedagogy.
This conceptual sobriety constitutes its radicality. El Andador does not promise utopia but proposes a verifiable, incremental improvement of urban life. In this restrained gesture resides its critical potency: it advances a low-epic, high-affective-density urbanism in which the city ceases to be a stage and becomes an interface of care, learning and sustainable cohabitation.
Lloveras + Lloveras, 2020. El Andador: Plaza Cívica Dotacional Gran San Blas. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2017/10/el-andadorplaza-civica-san-blas.html
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