The present project – CAMBIUM – offers the city of Madrid the opportunity of a forest, a forest in all its complexity in which the city is at its service. Through this proposal, the city changes its DNA.

CAMBIUM offers a strategy that can be extrapolated to any other site with similar characteristics and generates an agenda of deep urban transformation.

Madrid, like the rest of the planet, is in a situation of accelerated change due to the different crises we face.

The risks of drought and floods, rising temperatures and loss of biodiversity are depleting its soil. The effort to recover it is great, but we can mitigate these problems as nature does by recovering, maintaining and caring following these 4 points:

01 Generate forest logistics: transform mono-functional infrastructures – highways or roundabouts are some examples – into corridors that are able to generate clean water, produce living soils and grow connected roots. Everything is at the service of the forest.

02 Make more accessible the places where ecological succession dynamics have already begun. This will allow actions able to reverse degradation and encourage care: remove fences, make paths accessible, and clean the litter allowing the forest to grow. This is all part of a coordinated agenda of large-scale urban civic ecology. Existing actions of this type in Madrid’s network of open spaces are promoted and protected.

03 Trees enable people to weave links with the forest. We plant adult trees that offer shade and shelter accompanied by a constellation of environmental facilities, intensifying a process of ecological succession. In this way, nuclei appear that we call proto-forests, of varying sizes, which support the incipient development of pioneer species. The proto-forests, linked to the paths and corridors of spontaneous vegetation, are the necessary push to accelerate the process of evolution of this ecosystem towards a resilient forest.

04 From here, a lasting and self-sustaining affective bond is built between infrastructure, city, people and trees. The forest is the virtuous collaboration of all. Species are associated and the urban is transformed. Forest and city become allies.

CAMBIUM appears as a proposal that obtained the second position in AREA 02 of the International Competition for the Metropolitan Forest of Madrid, but at the same time, it is offered as a forceful strategy to be developed in this and other cities. See video of the project.

CAMBIUM – is a collaboration of PSAAP as landscape designers within a multidisciplinary team.