Contested Waters: The Tajo River in Spain
GSD 1401, Fall 2007
Instructor: Christian Werthmann
Consultant: Carl Steinitz, Arancha Munoz
Teaching Fellow: Stephanie Hurley, Carlos Vargas-Moreno

Assistant Professor Christian Werthmann proposes a study leading to design proposals for the upper Rio Tajo, the second largest river in Spain, within a 120km stretch between Aranjuez and Talavera de la Reina, where the river forms the southern border of the rapidly growing Greater Madrid Region. The studio is a follow-up studio to GSD 1403 “The Landscapes of Castilla-La Mancha” and is sponsored by the Fundacio Civitas Nova and has the full cooperation of both the provincial and local authorities in Castilla-LaMancha and Madrid.

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Situation
Spain is experiencing massive change. Its overall road system and high-speed rail network are rapidly expanding and new relationships between its own cities and other countries are forming. The increased build-out of renewable energy production (wind farms and solar fields) largely alters historic landscapes. Spain’s water scarcity has reached a point where fundamental change in water use and distribution is vital in order to mitigate water shortages and desertification. In-migration, immigration and real estate speculation create extreme growth spurts at the perimeter of the country, along the Spanish coasts, and in the heart of the country in Madrid. The population of the Greater Madrid Region (GMR) will soon grow from six to ten million inhabitants, already creating enormous demands for new infrastructure, developable land and clean water.

The Tajo River forms the southern boundary of this growth region. The Tajo is the second largest river on the Iberian Peninsula (the largest is the Duro). Its length exceeds 1,000 km, stretching from the Albarracín mountains to the Atlantic Ocean at Lisbon with a total watershed area of over 80,000 km². The continued increases in water-intensive agriculture, urbanization and severe droughts make its waters a highly contested resource.

Various regions and communities fiercely compete for the Tajo’s flows with mixed success. More than half of its clean headwaters are currently sent to the Mediterranean coast for agricultural use, yet are simultaneously sought for the expanding population of Madrid. Large irrigation projects west of Toledo siphon off significant volumes of water from the Tajo and at times reduce its flow to a trickle. Further downstream the water volumes promised to Portugal can no longer be guaranteed.

The fight for the Tajo waters will grow even more pronounced since the Tajo no longer carry the water volumes it once did and increases in flow in the future are unlikely. With the reality of a warming planet, prolonged droughts like the current one, will be the rule and not the exception in Spain, resulting in a watershed that yields less water and dessicated reservoirs.

The appearance of the segment of the upper Tajo to be studied is a reflection of the aforementioned conflicts. Shortly after leaving the Albarracín mountains its natural flow is severely decreased after half of its water is diverted to the Mediterranean coast. Further downstream to the west the Tajo regains some of its flow through tributaries like the Jarama and Guadarama River coming from the north. However, those rivers carry the wastewaters from Madrid and essentially turn the Tajo into an open sewer along the 120km stretch from Aranjuez through Toledo to Talavera de la Reina. These three towns forming the southern conurbation ring around Madrid are experiencing tremendous urban growth. Each city has great historical importance and each once held a rich and close connection to the Tajo; today the river is a source of pity. Given the potential role the river could play in the future urbanization of these towns, present land use planning for the Tajo’s watershed and riverbanks is lacking. The River fails to be an attractive feature for a landscape that gets more populated by the day. Soon the river will cease to run through sparse stretches of agricultural landscape, but will have tens of thousands of people dwelling nearby.

Studio
Accordingly, the Harvard studio focuses on the most critical stretch of the Tajo River between Aranjuez and Talavera and deliberate on the central question:
How can an open sewer be transformed into a regional asset?

Thereby the students create an overall development scenario(s) for the river. Overall issues like water distribution, treatment and consumption in the GMR are discussed, followed by closer examinations of opportunities for the treatment of wastewater. Urbanization patterns and transportation build-out around the Tajo are studied. Regarding all these aspects constructive proposals are made.

The potential of the Tajo River and its tributaries is explored within the framework of forming a linear park system as the green (blue) backbone for future and current developments of the GMR. The students study this potential to give shape and identity to the otherwise amorphous and featureless conglomerations of highways, housing developments and shopping malls that threaten to diminish the south of Madrid into a giant suburb.

Besides the creation of an overall development scenario(s), the students generate detailed designs at specific locations along the river corridor. For example:

• Specific points along the Jarama starting from Santa Monica up to the confluence with the Tajo at Aranjuez could be the topic for post-gravel extraction scenarios.
   
• The urban development of smaller, but rapidly growing communities along the river like San Martin de la Vega could be exemplified.
   
• Specific water cleansing parks could be developed, for example in the historic parklands of Aranjuez.
   
• Inside the city of Aranjuez the relationship of the city to the river could be further intensified.
   
• Downstream of Aranjuez the Tajo and its connection to the future distribution and industrial center at the AVE intersection Villaseca de la Sagra would be a fruitful topic of investigation, especially in its close proximity to Toledo. (The role of the river in Toledo was already explored in a previous Harvard studio that is integrated into this study.)

Another rich source for detailed exploration could be the growing town of Talavera de la Reina: the development of a new waterfront and river park, including the critical study of proposed new highways and bridges especially south of the Tajo.

Ultimately, the end products of the studio are composed of an overall Tajo river development scenario along with detailed explorations at exemplary programmatic locations along the river. The idea is to provide indications about the potential of the Tajo river to guide current and future urban development patterns and infrastructure expansions in the Greater Madrid Region.

The Landscapes of Castilla-La Mancha
GSD 1403, Fall 2006
Instructors: Carl Steinitz, Christian Werthmann
Teaching Fellow: Carlos Vargas-Moreno
Students: Kevin Bunker, Chih-Wei Chang, Dharshini Joseph, Kris Lucius, Scott Melbourne, Anchalee Phaosawasdi, Adalie Pierce-McManamon, John Ridenour, Ruth Silver, Jose Juan Terrasa-Soler, Anne Vaterlaus, Julia Watson

Professor Carl Steinitz and Assistant Professor Christian Werthmann, propose a study leading to design proposals for the protection and development of the landscapes of Don Quixote in the Province of Castilla-La Mancha. The studio was sponsored by the Fundacio Civitas Nova and has the full cooperation of both the provincial and local authorities in Castilla-LaMancha.

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Situation
Spain as a country is undergoing massive changes. In the effort to create a balanced transportation network over the whole country, Spain’s highway system and high-speed rail network is rapidly expanding, and reconfiguring the relations among its urban centers in Spain and to Europe. The accelerated growth of Madrid into a multimillion person metropolis with enormous demands for developable land deeply affects its surrounding regions including its southern neighbour, Castilla-La Mancha. The landscapes of Castilla-La Mancha are dominated by agriculture and interspersed with small to mid-sized towns, and  were for hundreds of years left fairly untouched by the not so distant metropolis. For centuries, the sparse and dry lands of the elevated plain shaped the cities, the culture and society of this region. With the pressure and sprawl of recent urbanization and the immense infrastructure build-out, Castilla-La Mancha is on the verge of a vast shift in the historic relationships between its built structure and its landscapes which will radically transform the identity of the region into a new, yet to be defined entity.

Studio
The specific studies and projects undertaken were identified during initial investigations and discussions with provincial and local authorities. After that the studio team selected a 200km by 70km study corridor that offers a wide range of urbanization phenomena currently occurring in the region. Beginning at the outskirts of Madrid, the corridor extends past the historic capitol city of Spain, Toledo, to its southern boundary at Ciudad Real, in total an area of about 14,000 square kilometers. The study that operates in a twenty year horizon includes a vision for an alternative future for the region as a whole to policy and design proposals that offer site specific solutions for locally significant situations.

Process update
The Castilla-La Mancha studio began with a site visit in August 2006, prior to the start of the school. The visit had two major goals: first, to gain a first hand understanding of the 40 km wide and 130 km long corridor between Madrid and Ciudad Real, its larger context and its major issues and second, to begin to identify sites for possible projects.

The class was divided into four management teams to take turns managing studio work for 3-4 weeks each. The role of Management Team #1 was to organize the site visit and elements of an analysis of the region. Part of this organization took place during the site visit and the rest took place back in Cambridge. The two primary components of this phase of the project were a list of project and policy ideas and a coordinated database.

During the week long stay in Spain significant knowledge of the 5,000 square kilometer corridor and its complexities was gained. Using Toledo as a base, the first three days were spent with driving large parts of the corridor with an overnight stay in Almagro at the corridor’s most southern end. Those trips were guided by a local specialist with a deep understanding of the whole region and its problems. One day was set aside for lectures from local authorities about relevant topics like water, development, transportation, history and tourism.

Then possible projects inside the corridor were discussed and students went in groups to revisit specific sites to gain a more detailed understanding. This entailed riding and documenting several highways, embarking on various train trips inside the Spanish high speed rail network and simply covering key sites by foot.

Back in Cambridge, students began a brain storming exercise and over 200 projects and policies for the region were proposed; they ranged from the small, e.g., redesigning the Toledo train station, to the large, e.g., develop a visual management plan for all major roads. A geo-referenced diagram was made for each. Some projects would be further developed, some be excluded, some modified or combined with others. Then the best 20 proposals were chosen. After this warm-up students split into groups and researched specific topics related to those proposals.

Management Team #2 organized a strategy to define alternative scenarios for the corridor. They considered alternatives that the municipality might encounter in shaping its physical, economical, environmental and cultural development. This was inspired by the experiences on the site visit, conversations with official and academic authorities, and research on development trends in other municipalities. Once the scenarios were defined, each was developed into a plan by a group of students who selected the 20 most appropriate diagrams for the list of 200 projects. The first iteration, presented on October 18 started with 5 scenarios: a natural disaster, unplanned market forces, an ecologically driven plan with federal funding, and an industrial development plan. The final iteration encompassed two final scenarios: a market-driven and a municipal plan.

The role of Management Team #3 was to establish the 20 projects that emerged as most critical in the previous exercise, and assign individuals or teams to develop them further. Every individual in the class was assigned to at least two projects: one that would significantly impact the municipal plan and another of their preference. These were developed to be integrated into the proposed municipal plan, part of which was presented on November 3.

Management Team #4 organized and guided the development of the final presentation. This responsibility involved formulating representation standards to bring individual work into a synthesized form, outlining and delegating the necessary tasks required to design a visual and verbal representation of our ideas (i.e. writing, editing, layout, drawing, and graphic design), and deciding on the most compelling order of presentation to describe all of the projects as a coherent whole.

Throughout the semester, UAM and Harvard students frequently collaborated using videoconferencing, e-mail, and a common web-based file sharing system. In more ways than one, this studio and the work of this exhibition is a group project at its core. Although everyone eventually focused on one topic or another, the final project is one cohesive proposal. This is the product of efficient management, extensive discussion, and an exceptional level of cooperation among a diverse group of students.

The studio results were shown in a traveling exhibition in Toledo and in Ciudad Real accompanied by a lecture of the students. A 100 page book with 2,000 copies was created by the students and published by Fundacio Civitas Nova.