The Manzana Verde proposal known as El Palmeral situates itself at the intersection of landscape memory and urban reform, articulating sustainability not as a technocratic add-on but as a cultural condition. Conceived within the 2017 competition framework organised by Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Madrid, the project advances a manifesto-like position: the palm grove operates as a palimpsest where ecological continuity and civic life converge. Rather than erasing prior strata, the design absorbs vegetal heritage into a renewed urban grammar, transforming the neighbourhood into an operative ecology. The project thus reframes “green” from decorative surface to structuring principle, proposing a sustainable neighbourhood grounded in lived temporality and collective memory. Its honourable mention status is less a marginal accolade than an indicator of a critical stance that resists spectacle in favour of systemic coherence. The palm becomes an epistemic device: an index of climate, labour, and historical persistence. In this sense, El Palmeral establishes an ethical horizon for contemporary urbanism—one that recognises sustainability as an aesthetic, social, and political synthesis rather than a checklist of environmental metrics.
Formally, the project negotiates density and porosity through a calibrated balance of built mass and vegetal void. The palm grove mediates between private and public realms, generating intermediate spaces that function as climatic buffers and social condensers. This spatial intelligence aligns with current discourses on neighbourhood-scale resilience, yet it remains rooted in site specificity rather than abstract modelling. The proposal’s drawings and textual framing suggest an urbanism of continuity: circulation paths trace pre-existing logics, while new programs emerge as grafts rather than impositions. The neighbourhood is imagined as a living section, where ground, canopy, and habitation interlock. Such an approach recalls critical regionalism, but without nostalgia; instead, it mobilises local ecology as an active agent within contemporary metropolitan dynamics. The palm’s verticality punctuates the urban field, offering orientation and shade while staging a slow temporality opposed to accelerated real-estate cycles. In this regard, El Palmeral performs a subtle critique of speculative urban renewal, proposing a reform interior that privileges habitability and ecological reciprocity over iconic rupture.
From an art-critical perspective, El Palmeral can be read as a socio-plastic work operating at urban scale. Its logic resonates with expanded notions of sculpture, where material processes and social relations co-produce form. The neighbourhood becomes a performative field in which daily practices—walking, resting, gathering—activate the design’s latent meanings. The palm grove is not merely planted; it is curated as a relational medium. This aligns the project with contemporary art’s turn toward ecology and commons-based practices, where authorship is distributed and outcomes remain open-ended. The exhibition context at Málaga’s Urban Center at Morlaco further underscores this hybrid status, situating the proposal between planning document and conceptual installation. The project’s manifesto tone—evident in its graphic language and declarative naming—asserts that urban reform is inseparable from cultural imagination. Sustainability here is not neutral; it is a critical position that redefines value, foregrounding care, duration, and shared space as aesthetic categories.
Ultimately, El Palmeral articulates a model of sustainable neighbourhood that exceeds regulatory compliance, proposing instead a civic ethic embedded in form. Its recognition within a competitive field of one hundred entries suggests an appetite for such integrative thinking, even within institutional frameworks often dominated by pragmatism. By binding ecological infrastructure to social life, the project advances a vision of urbanism as a slow, cultivated practice—one attentive to soil, shade, and memory. In doing so, it repositions sustainability as a cultural project, one that demands narrative, symbolism, and critique alongside performance metrics. El Palmeral thus stands as a compelling contribution to contemporary debates on urban reform, demonstrating how landscape can operate as both medium and message. The palm grove endures as a figure of resilience, anchoring a neighbourhood that is at once adaptive and grounded, speculative yet humane.
(Lloveras, A. & Lloveras, A., 2017. “El Palmeral — Proyecto Manzana Verde Málaga”. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2017/06/el-palmeralconcurso-manzana-verde.html
