Archipelago of Santiago - Parque de la Ciudanía

Santiago de Chile
Competition Entry 2012

The redesign of the Parque de la Ciudadanía offers enormous potential to create urgently needed green public infrastructure and a vibrant social space for Santiago de Chile. At the core of the scheme the isolated existing and the proposed sports and leisure facilities are transformed into a series of programmatic islands floating in a cohesive sea of planting. The islands provide a powerful identity, while allowing flexibility for the future. The trees and canopy that define the islands guide circulation, create shading and the means for tying the scheme into the surrounding urban grid. With its heavy winter rains and hot, dry summers Santiago shifts between water stress overload and severe water scarcity. The project proposes an environmental scheme for the necessary irrigation of the sports-fields throughout the long hot and dry summer months. A landscaping system of bio-retention basins is distributed throughout the park where run-off storm-water is collected and filtered in the winter-months thus avoiding further stress on the city´s storm-water systems. The bio-retention basins themselves and the cistern for storing the run-off water constitute an integral landscape element of the park design.