URBAN RIZOMA

Urban Rizoma is an underground stem that grows horizontally, serves as a water and nutrients collector, and generates sprouts that grow upwards and roots that grow down, just as landscape infrastructure net of soft technologies such as open system nets that are sensitive to modifications.

In Colombia, the highly modified sector of the Medellin valley, we can find a prevailing natural structure of great ecosystemic value both in its urban ecological nodes as well as its guardian hills and its strategic ecosystem surroundings: eastern and western hillsides that communicate by its hydrological component through its main ravine that flow into the Medellin River. The Volador Hill with the Iguana ravine is a secular vortex where the dynamics that influence the territory cross.

The Avenue 80 light train presents an opportunity to generate a plan to organize the infrastructure system one of which is sustainable mobility, since with a light train the capacity and number of passengers moving within a short range increases, and the CO2 emission decreases. On the other hand, having a green and a blue infrastructure that connects to mitigate and make the city more resilient by focusing on 2 axes of the infrastructure, the Iguana Ravine and the urban runoffs of Avenue 80.

The projected strategies are to buffer the urban runoffs, and the impact of erosion, enhance cross-sectional and longitudinal water, ecological and cultural connectivity, make the water process visible, promote biodiversity, and mix and hybrid uses.