DESCRIPTION
The Director Plan of the Integral Urban Regeneration of the Historic Artistic Complex of Alcalá del Júcar (CHA) promoted by its city council has as its main objective the recovery and revitalization of the CHA, laying the foundations for a series of actions framed in the context of a strategy territorial and urban, consistent with the new Municipal Planning Plan (POM) and the Special Plan for the Protection of the Historic Artistic Complex (PEPCH), which the city council is preparing in parallel.
A strategy that bets, from the social and environmental sustainability, to rehabilitate and regenerate the CHA and its environment, very degraded from the patrimonial and social point of view by the inherent threats to the specific problem of the Castilian-La Mancha rural municipalities and that in This case is aggravated by the orography of the territory on which it is located, which induces deficiencies and limitations of various kinds to the existing houses, causing the social fracture of its residents.
On the contrary, the singularity of its location has enabled the tourist development of the municipality, making it a benchmark for inland tourism at the national level.
These imbalances, together with the absence of guidelines and efficient planning instruments, have contributed to its environmental and urban degradation, favoring the accelerated deterioration of the heritage built by the abandonment of buildings and poor maintenance. In parallel, the appearance of new out-of-scale buildings, alien to vernacular architecture and impossible to integrate, has occurred around the fertile plain of the Río Júcar, but also at points with a strong visual impact.
If we add to this scenario significant deficits in urban infrastructure and services, a delicate scenario is completed, which, if not reversed in the short term, threatens to reach a point of no return.
The Director Plan required for its elaboration the holistic vision of a multidisciplinary team led by AUG-ARQUITECTOS, SLP, a company that was developing the new planning. From this multisectoral perspective, the Director Plan structures the change to create the best possible future for the CHA of Alcalá del Júcar and its environment, shaping a global vision that goes beyond solving current problems and transcends the geographical scope strictly delimited by the CHA. The challenges were tackled in an integrated and coordinated way with the rest of the actions, so that the proposals did not constitute a simple aggregation of actions, but rather formed a unique and integrated strategy, with a desire to remain in time.
The actions were prioritized where progressive and silent situations of social vulnerability were detected, caused by the aging of the resident population, the age and housing deficiencies of the real estate park, the high percentage of empty homes, the difficult accessibility to them by itself configuration of its urban fabric, the natural risks that threaten its integrity or the progressive abandonment of local commerce.
We are not facing a CHA where the preservation of buildings with the highest heritage value is threatened; In this case, efforts focused on energizing and enhancing CHA as a whole and, above all, counteracting the structural and socioeconomic degradation that threatens its continuity and gives meaning to its existence.
The aim was to reverse the current paradoxical situation, of a municipality that is consolidating its status as a reference tourist rural municipality, without this dynamism reverting to the CHA, which is what gives it meaning and personality. For this, an Implementation Plan is contemplated, which lists the Axes and Strategic Objectives to develop around the proposed programs and projects, articulated in a schedule, a budget, degree of priority and intervening agents, to coordinate and ensure its effective implementation.
The Government of Castilla-La Mancha awarded this work the First Prize at the regional level, among the various applications submitted to the call for the year 2017. Thanks to this and the actions carried out, with the presentation of the ARRUR Report that AUG-ARQUITECTOS, SLP was prepared for the municipality of Alcalá del Júcar, which benefited from aid of 1.3 million euros, granted by the supra-local administration to promote the various urban regeneration and rehabilitation actions.
DETAILS OF THE PROJECT
Location: Alcalá del Júcar (Albacete, Spain); Promoter: City Council of Alcalá del Júcar
