SOCIÓPOLIS: AN OPPORTUNITY FOR URBAN INNOVATION
Vicente Guallart


Every generation builds its own city in terms of the social, economic, technological and cultural conditions of its time.
From this point of view, the Sociópolis project, promoted by the Generalitat Valenciana with the active support of Valencia City Council, is an opportunity to put forward a new model of urban development that responds to the new conditions of habitability for the start of the 21st century. The fact is that we no longer live in a compact metropolis, but in a discontinuous metapolis, an extensive territory criss-crossed by road and rail transport routes and occupied by kernels of population, logistics centres, industry parks and shopping and leisure centres around which people (local, national and foreign) move according to their needs.
In this situation it is as necessary to propose strategies for the renewal and compaction of the urban centres as for the integration and protection of the elements that constitute the natural and geographical landscape of our environment.
The challenge of constructing a new neighbourhood on the boundary between the city of Valencia and the huerta has enabled us to explore this open and dynamic new hybrid condition of the territory and to propose a new model for the construction of the urban fringes.

Because in addition to the challenge of constructing almost three thousand rent-controlled housing units that would be affordable to young people, the elderly and low-income families, we have addressed the challenge of integrating the landscape that surrounds us, the landscape we have inherited from our ancestors.
To do this it has been necessary to reformulate the very concepts of urbanism with which traditionally is operated in the city, on the basis of the exceptional opportunity offered by a project promoted by a body with responsibility for housing, planning -urbanism- and the environment. The word 'urbanism' was coined by Ildefons Cerdà to designate the science of urban growth, a process based on the implanting of a rational grid, superposed on an agricultural layout, in which the owners of a plot of agricultural land had transferred to them the ownership of a plot of urban land eligible for development. It is this principle that has informed and overseen the urban expansions of the 19th century and the modern city of the 20th, the typically North American low-density city and the historical revivalism of the end of the last century.

But the challenge facing us now is to manage to make the city grow, integrating into our developments the anthropological and cultural elements of the landscape that surrounds us - constructing and conserving are accomplished in the same act. As against the old city-country dichotomy we now propose to bring about an intelligent transition between these two formerly antagonistic modes of dwelling, an integration that lets us recognize the social and cultural value of -in this case- the landscape of the huerta of Valencia and incorporate it into the urban fabric by means of appropriate management strategies.

Faced with an increasingly uniform global society, we need to recognize the specific cultural and landscape values of each territory as fundamental to the quality of life of the people who live there and to asserting a distinct identity that can bestow a competitive advantage.

Because of this, in contrast to the town planning of the 20th century, conceived on the basis of the speed of the car, Sociópolis proposes a new model of 'techno-agricultural' development that guarantees the creation of a high-quality local environment, to be used at low speed by its residents, with global connectivity by means of the information networks and collaborative systems of an advanced digital neighbourhood, making it possible to act in any place in the world in real time.

Sociópolis is simultaneously local and global.

With this and other projects Valencia confirms its status as a paradigm of this new city of the 21st century, a city that enjoys a high level of readily accessible environmental quality and is capable of projecting and making itself accessible to the world.

Sociópolis thus goes beyond the purely quantitative issue of creating a high number of protected housing units to transform it into a qualitative issue. More than building housing, we should be creating inhabitable environments that effectively resolve the different factors that give people the assurance habitability at different scales: the neighbourhood, the building and the home. As the integrated actuation it is, Sociópolis serves to propose a new model of 'disdense' (discontinuous and dense) urban development in which the city and the park are constructed as a single whole, in which the buildings solve new functional, technological, and environmental problems and put forward specific housing typologies that respond to the needs of the types of family unit of our time.