The dream of a metropolitan forest that improves the environmental conditions of the city is the great challenge launched by the Office of Strategic Planning of the Madrid City Council. To materialize it, it will be necessary to overcome the limiting conditions of the degraded areas and the adoption of strategies that achieve the territorial connection (biological and social) between all the parts.

For the area of ​​lot 4, the Southern River Parks, the adoption of a triple strategy is proposed that will articulate three complementary actions:

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- A Territorial Connection: Based on an environmental and urban recovery that converges the flows in the arms of the crosshead that makes up the hydrological network that models the urban structure through the reactivation of the natural territorial networks (rivers and streams), semi-natural (canals and irrigation ditches) and sustainable mobility (livestock trails, trails and roads), which had been incomplete or interrupted by urban developments

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- A Social reconquest: The territorial reconnection and the new uses implanted in the area will propitiate an authentic “reconquest” of the territory long demanded by the neighbors. The Manzanares axis is reactivated in the south of the city, giving continuity to the backbone of Madrid Río and bringing together new activities and possibilities with a marked social accent on the fertile plain. The “Senda del Sur” is configured on the layout of old pedestrian paths and connects the heart of the city with the Manzanares and Jarama natural spaces.

- A Reconversion of processes: We propose to implement a “Forest Factory” at the service of the metropolitan area, thus making the utopia of solving with available resources on the site the ex novo generation of a large protective forest mass viable. This “factory” will be the Green Infrastructure in charge of efficiently transforming a problem area, the city's sinkhole, into another provider of ecosystem services destined to produce fertile soil and trees, the two essential components of the forest. It will function based on the Circular Economy and will be organized around two production lines: the forest nursery and the soil nursery.

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