FlowerPowder

On 1 March 2019, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed ‘The Decade for Ecosystem Restoration’, running from 2021 to 2030, with the aim of restoring ecosystems. A challenge that the UN issued to prevent, arrest and reverse the degradation of ecosystems worldwide.

This mission takes different forms depending on the characteristics of the area concerned and that looks to nature itself the ways to bring them back to health.
These include the concept of rewilding, which refers to an action at the landscape level that has the goal to reduce human control and allow ecological and evolutionary processes to reassert themselves. In particular cases the final intention also includes the reintroduction of keystone species.

The following project aims to develop a design strategy that can respond to these challenges in a specific area of El Vallès plain, near Barcelona (Spain), using the existing abandoned crops as structural elements to improve the ecological connection between the North and the South of this region.

With the aim to identify the ecological corridor with the highest potential in the landscape, the methodology is based on a scale-down process.
The process starts from the land use analysis (GIS – Python), it continues with the generation of several connectivity maps (Circuitscape) and with the categorization of the abandoned crops (Grasshopper – GIS)  and it concludes with the identification of the ecological corridor.

New tools of analysis and simulation were used to create a data driven strategic design project, allowing us to develop a highly flexible concept, in terms of implementation, with short-term and long-term interventions, artificial and nature-based solutions, individual, collective, and more institutionalized interventions.

It is the best way to reach a large impact on the collaboration of everyone who wants to participate.