Chiva, 30 kilometres west of Valencia, was one of the towns hardest hit by the torrential rains of 29 October 2024. How to live with the ever-increasing risk of flooding? In 2023, architects Catalina Salvà (Salvà Ortín Architects), Jaume Gil and Santiago Alberca (Bou Gandia) won the Europan 17 competition for the Chiva ravine site. A year before the disaster, their project ‘Breathing Back’ brought together the different scales of land use, urban planning and architecture, and saw the Chiva ravine as an opportunity to restore the landscape and connect the city with the countryside.

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Ethel Halimi

‘A’A’: Could you present your winning Europan 17 project from 2023?

Catalina Salvà: The site proposed by Europan 17 aimed to rethink the environment of the Rambla del Poyo, which crosses the urban center of Chiva in the Valencian Community. The competition was launched on March 2023, delivered on July 2023 and ruled on December 2023. Since the first site visits, we noticed that the ravine was in an abandoned state and the growth of the town had swallowed it and turned it in the back of the city. The ravine became an area used exclusively for infrastructural purposes, with polluted water and rubbish often flowing through it. Our proposal ‘Breathing Back’ designed a global intervention for the ravine to reverse this situation: facilitating the access from the close urban public spaces, introducing social uses in the ravine and recovering the water cycle and natural ecosystems to restore its high natural value.

How do you think your project could have mitigated, or even prevented, the damage caused by the torrential rains in autumn 2024?

Right from the start of our design process, we noted that water was an essential element for Chiva and its territory. The village’s position on an alluvial flood plain with recurring karst emanations and a high phreatic level defined geo-morphological and hydrological conditions particular to the place. We recognised that there was a risk of flooding.

For this reason, three of our six strategies related to improving the gully space to co-exist with flooding, avoiding as much damage as possible, both economic and social. We called them ‘Water Topographies’, ‘Water Infrastructure’ and ‘Creating New Habitats’. The ‘Water Topographies’ strategy is based on the premise that it is possible to live with floods by designing a park that gives them space (by increasing the floodable section of the gully where possible) and slows the speed of the water (by reintroducing riparian woodland), thereby reducing run-off and ensuring better infiltration into the ground and, consequently, greater absorption of water into aquifers.

With the ‘Water Infrastructure’ strategy, we proposed to reactivate the productive hydraulic heritage, ensuring a constant presence of water throughout the environment, providing constant hydration and humidity for vegetation and living creatures. This strategy also proposed a series of rainwater reservoirs in the city that can help to manage it during storm events.

Finally, our ‘Creation of new habitats’ strategy took into account human and non-human needs by introducing a series of biodiversity nodes in the bed of the ravine, designed as buffer zones between spaces for humans and riparian ecosystems (vegetation, animals and insects) where insect hotels, bird nests and ‘stepping stones’ for pollinators could be installed. We had also designed new ‘contact areas’ with the ravine, deconstructing part of the ground to allow rainwater to infiltrate. We believe that these actions could have mitigated the impact of the torrential rains: however, it should be remembered that this episode on 29 October 2024 was exceptional, and the solution to prevent it would have deserved to be thought out on a regional scale.

What lessons in town planning and architecture have you learned from this recent disaster?

We believe that every project should be understood as a new part of an ecosystem. This distancing allows us to understand the importance of small interventions to improve territorial relationships. With this proposal for Europan 17, we learnt how to plan a renewal through a sequence of public space projects that link large-scale natural ecosystems.

We worked with several types of data (flooding, physical disconnections, land use, natural habitats, etc.) which, once translated into operational maps, drew up our proposal for improvement, integrated into a complex public space project. The most useful lesson we can draw from this is that, ultimately, as designers, we are working with a powerful tool: space as a testing ground, but also as evidence of its history. Data relating to the history of an area gives us the opportunity to anticipate what will happen afterwards. Our designs have to adapt to this information.