The Third Manuel de Solà-Morales European Prize 2021 www.dur.upc.edu
10-2021
Design Principles for Integrated Urban River Corridors (Chapter 7)
15. Diagram of the Interconnectedness principle on the scales of a generic URC (top) and corridor segment (bottom).
Distilled from practical experience and refined by theory, principles are essential for guiding thought or action and for facilitating the transfer of knowledge across disciplines. Urban design is a normative activity that often makes use of transdisciplinary principles to transfer knowledge of a given urban phenomenon to the design process. To that end, the thesis translated the four properties of URCs introduced, namely connectivity, open space amenity, integration, and multiscalarity, into corresponding design principles: Interconnectedness, Absorptive Capacity, SocialEcological Integration, and Interscalarity. As shown in Figure 14, the first two principles were used to define the elements of URCs—networks and spaces—as well as their configuration and composition. The latter two were defined as relational principles, as they guide design by revealing spatial linkages across the systems and scales of the URC. Design for socialecologically integrated URCs requires an overall understanding of the potentials uncovered by each of these principles. Advanced as a comprehensive set, the four principles were defined as follows:
14. The four design principles proposed in the thesis (right), as derived from the four key
properties of URCs (left). Interconnectedness and Absorptive Capacity refer to the spatial elements of URCs, while Social-Ecological Integration and Interscalarity describe the spatial-temporal and systemic relations between those elements.
Interconnectedness guides the design of the spatial elements of the water network, the traffic network, and the ecological network in the URC. According to this principle, these networks should have a non-conflicting and interconnected spatial configuration in order to accommodate hydrological, social and ecological connectivity on all three—i.e. longitudinal, lateral and vertical—dimensions. 57