Ciudad Dulce

sweet city: defeating the city-nature antagonism CURRIDA B AT , COSTA RICA

contents Fact Sheet .............................................4 Project Description ............................6 Response to Charter Principles ....12 Lessons Learned.................................16 Photographs & Illustrations.............18

FACT SHEET S U B M I S S I O N C AT E G O R Y :

Neighborhood, District and Corridor

P ro j ect C h aracteristics ( Apply )

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Public policy program Temporary installation Regional/town plan Transit-oriented development Incorporates universal design principles Infill/previously developed sites Incorporates and meets AIA2030 Challenge Greenfield/previously undeveloped site Placemaking plan (exclusively public space, civic buildings, or infrastructure) Includes affordable/subsidized /social housing – How much?

Qualifies for LEED-ND certification – level?

Qualifies for other LEED certification – if so, list here

BEST OF?

Best Neighborhood Corridor Network

Broken Ground Project

Spaces of Sweetness (Espacios de dulzura), Transitions (Transiciones), Pilots and other public space interventions are projects developed as a result of the urban initiative Sweet City (Ciudad Dulce).

This broken ground project, envisions Curridabats future development in a 360 degree angle, and manages projects within five dimensions that together vitalize the citizens experience of the place they inhabit: (1) biodiversity, (2) infrastructure, (3) habitat, (4) coexistence and (5) productivity. These five dimension are the current Government plan, approved by the community through the electoral process.

The goal of Sweet City is to install natural conservation within urban activity, and more specifically, increase the number and variety of pollinators, providing them with better conditions to do their work, and obtain as a result, an urban environment that is also biodiverse, comfortable, clean, quiet and colorful, as well as better organized.

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Fact Sheet

Percentage/Quantity of benefited citizens: 40,8% / 29 609 citizens Estimated date of completion: 2020 Land Area (in acres): 1 025 acres Project Cost (optional): $ 45 749 324 (only Spaces of Sweetness and Transitions) Civic Uses (indicate type and size): 1 211 123 ft2 area Parks/Open Space (indicate type and size): 63 renewed and new parks, 139 acres Public Space area: 247 acres Number of Residential Units: 2 731 units Residential Unit Types: Town houses, apartments high-rise and mid-rise, Duplex, Collective Housing, sports residences and emergency shelter facilities.

Retail Square Footage: 1 365 650 ft2 area Office Square Footage: 715 455 ft2 area Transect zone(s) (optional): Due to the diversity and scale of the project examples of the T4, T5 and T6 transects are found in the neighborhoods, corridors and master plans. Also SD are shown in master plans.

Land preservation area: 110 acres approximately

location characteristics CURRIDABAT San JosĂŠ, Costa Rica

72 564 population

km2 1 5,95

square kilometers

9,69m2

green spaces per inhabitant

4 055

population per square kilometer

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project description program CONTEXT Physical, social and ecological Total area: 15.95 km2 Latitude: 9.91° N Longitude: 84.03° W

Within the municipal initiative Sweet City, and guided by the SmartCode principles, an integral network of 21 neighborhoods (Spaces of Sweetness) and 8 corridors (Transitions) has been designed through participatory processes. This network is complemented by an active steering of 20 private sites for development and the implementation and construction of a series of key pilot projects and other public space activations.

Altitude: 1.208 m asl Crossed by 5 rivers: María Aguilar, Tiribí, Ocloro, Puruses y Chagüite.

Inhabitants: 72 564 inhabitants Districts: Curridabat,Granadilla, Sánchez y Tirrases.

“In Curridabat, we maintain a very autonomous vision of development (…). The life experience of a citizen of a typical city of Latin America is dominant. In Latin America, the subcontinent with the highest urbanization rate, the interactions between citizens and nature happen in the city or they don’t occur at all. If children grow without interactions with nature, they won’t know how to defend it.

So, it is absolutely necessary to move the stage of conservation, from a far place to a close space.”

EDGAR MORA, CITY MAYOR

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Project Description

purpose Sweet City is the strategic development and innovation vision for the territory of Curridabat with the main purpose of establishing nature conservation as an urban activity. Sweet City aims to improve the quality of life of Curridabat’s community by defeating the long-lived antagonism between nature and urbanism, while encouraging citizen participation and local capacity building in order to increase wellbeing and beauty in the whole territory.

goals Environmental goal: increase biodiversity and improve the health of the ecosystem in the urban space.

Community goal: motivate citizen participation.

Pedagogic goal: facilitate interdisciplinary and ethic learnings.

Political goal: strengthen self-management and organization capacity of the citizens.

Urban goal: incorporate urban design within the local culture, adapt infrastructure to biodiversity to remodel the city.

extent 1. Spaces of Sweetness Spaces of Sweetness (Espacios de Dulzura) creates 21 master plans at the neighborhood scale for communities in accordance to their need or demand for high-quality public spaces and infrastructure or to revert the physical degradation of these components in their neighborhoods. The master plans were developed through participatory processes by interdisciplinary teams, centered on consolidating a network of “community centralities� that integrate nature with the community. As a result, the plans answer the main necessities of the communities in terms of co-existence, recreation and leisure, productivity, and access to nature and environmental health. The interventions range from recreational public spaces, green infrastructure, mixed-use buildings, productive spaces and pedestrian infrastructure.

- 21 neighborhoods (270 ha)

- 11 123 linear meters of inclusive streets

- 26 303 benefited citizens

- 31 500 m2 of civic facilities

- 61 participatory workshops

- 50 renewed parks / 193 847 m2

-155 hours in workshops with community

- 366 235 m2 planned and regenerate public space

-978 number of workshop attendees

- $ 29 545 287 approximately

17 neighborhoods at master plan phase, 4 at permissions phase

Community activity for a park at Tirrases in one of the analyzed neighborhoods, most vulnerable communities.

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2. Transitions Transitions (Transiciones) creates corridors by integrating disconnected areas due to poor infrastructure or physical barriers. With a linear configuration the corridors link different areas with a mean length of 600 – 800 meters. Transitions was developed by interdisciplinary teams through participatory processes and include traffic calming and complete streets strategies, public space interventions –and their integration with the right-of way, transit infrastructure and new, streetadjacent- buildings and activities.

- 8 corridors (7 758 linear meters)

- 8 998 m2 of civic facilities

- 8 860 benefited citizens

- 4 renewed parks / 35 156 m2

- 27 participatory workshops

- 98 176m2 planned and regenerate public space

-81 hours in workshops with community

- $ 16 204 037 approximately

-607 number of workshop attendees 4 corridors at master plan phase, 4 at preliminary studies

Participative workshop, community site analysis of corridor

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Project Description

“A project-as-process, the plan for an eastern suburb of San José envisions the city in coexistence with its flora and fauna. The project overlays several networks of interventions. The current parks are rehabilitated and some transformed into new wetlands for flood mitigation.

Roads double their function to act as “biocorridors” linking parks and forests particularly for pollinators that bring great benefits for biodiversity.

Punctual interventions for meeting points and cultural facilities at the neighborhood level are realized through participatory planning and renovation. Together, the discrete layers reconfigure the habitat of flora, fauna, and human beings as “citizens” of Curridabat” Jury Lafarge Holcim awards 2017.

3. Pilots and other public space interventions a. Road diets – traffic calming interventions: - Tree road diets/ traffic calming interventions as pilots and examples for the future.

- Analysis design and implementation of an integral network of complete streets.

- Reformulated right-of-ways. b. Artistic activations: - Participation of students of Jose María Zeledón School in collaboration for the artist mural and the seeding activity.

- Other artistic interventions such as murals and parklets. c. Build infrastructure: - “Pedestrian patrol”: geo-reference app for the pedestrians to mark where are obstacles in sidewalks and street-crossings. Currently, Dinia, a disable woman who travels the streets on her wheelchair collaborates in the initiative.

d. Seeding activities: Several native species planting activities have been made with the community engaging the inhabitants with their public spaces. Memory Park, Jose María Zeledón Park and Higuerón Park to name a few of them.

“Sweet City is a project that starts and it does not ends... I hope it never ends. It is a project that wants to involve people, and invites them to work for their communities, it is a life project. I would say it is not something that starts and ends.

It is something that we are going to live.”

MARCELA CASTRO, NEIGHBOR OF LA LÍA Community planting native species at one of the seeding activities

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TIMELINE 2006-2010 - Design of new parks and improvement of existent parks.

2012 - Curridabat Master Plan – Transect Based Zoning.

2013 - Implementation of Form Based Code - Construction of sport facilities and public space in Tirrases (most vulnerable district of Curridabat)

2014 - Charter Award – Best City Plan. Castillo Arquitectos

Furthermore, private areas with strategic location are included in a program entitled “Better and higher use of urban sites”.

This program identifies underutilized sites in Curridabat’s grid and develops programmatic and design proposals for them responding to a number of Curridabat’s most pressing needs: affordable housing, employment and office space, cultural and commercial supply, and landscape and land preservation, while setting a framework for future and current developers.

- 20 sites (80.87 ha)

- 2 731 residential units

- 72 471m2 of civic facilities

- 66 468 m2 office area

- 9 renewed parks / 331 725 m2

- 126 873m2 retail area

- 536 825 m2 planned and

2015

regenerate public space

- Sweet City is launched and different temporary interventions, trees were planted together with the neighbors and urban art was installed.

- 680 658 m2 construction areas

2016 - Spaces of Sweetness: 21 master plans were designed for selected neighborhoods.

- Development of construction documents for new parks.

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4. Private development under a territorial vision Since the approval of Curridabat’s partial Territorial Ordainment Plan 2013 -awarded by the CNU in 2014- a number of private developments have been presented to the Municipality (midrise and high rise residential buildings, parkings, multi-phase master plans in large urban plots, and commercial and retail developments). The projects have adapted their design to the regulations, in pursue of high-rise schemes and other incentives.

Project Description

Design excellence and ingenuity: - Public-Public agreement to channel national funds to invest in Spaces of Sweetness at most vulnerable areas (Miravalles and Valle del Sol).

- Knowledge transfer activities with other local governments begins

2017 - Transiciones: master plans were designed for 6 selected corridors.

- Sweet City is recognized by LafargeHolcim Awards, Le Monde.

Conceptualizing and implementing an innovative, inclusive, multi-stakeholder urban vision for a Costa Rican territory is an achievement without precedents in a country with great accomplishments in nature conservation but little experience in planned urban development. This task has required excellence in urban design, pragmatisim in implementation and coordination of vast interdisciplinary teams of experts, but mostly innovative paths to make decisions and manage a territory.

Sweet city has become a laboratory of urban development for the municipalities of the Great Metropolitan Area of Costa Rica and source of knowledge, best practices and experiences in terms of community empowerment, inclusion, equity, public management and governance.

- Development of Construction Documents of Miravalles and Valle del Sol Master Plans

2018 - Transiciones: master plans are designed for 2 aditional selected corridors.

- Expected construction of 4 out of 21 neighborhoods

Five dimensions of Ciudad Dulce

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response charter principles CHARTER PRINCIPLES 7. Cities and towns should bring into proximity a broad spectrum of public and private uses to support a regional economy that benefits people of all incomes. Affordable housing should be distributed throughout the region to match job opportunities and to avoid concentrations of poverty.

Spaces of Sweetness analyzed 21 neighborhoods considering each of their needs and wants. As a result, the plans incorporate residential areas with housing typologies corresponding to the population characteristics, these human habitats are linked to the urban network relating existing, new and emerging

13. Within neighborhoods, a broad range of housing types and price levels can bring people of diverse ages, races, and incomes into daily interaction, strengthening the personal and civic bonds essential to an authentic community.

activities/uses such as retail, cultural, entertainment offices, parkings, public markets and others.

Private developments are guided to consider the need for different types of housing in the same project, encouraging the diversity of the population, from town houses to dense apartment towers.

10. The neighborhood, the district, and the corridor are the essential elements of development and redevelopment in the metropolis. They form identifiable areas that encourage citizens to take responsibility for their maintenance and evolution.

11. Neighborhoods should be compact, pedestrian friendly, and mixed-use. Districts generally emphasize a special single use, and should follow the principles of neighborhood design when possible. Corridors are regional connectors of neighborhoods and districts; they range from boulevards and rail lines to rivers and parkways.

12. Many activities of daily living should occur within walking distance, allowing independence to those who do not drive, especially the elderly and the young.

Interconnected networks of streets should be designed to encourage walking, reduce the number and length of automobile trips, and conserve energy.

14. Transit corridors, when properly planned and coordinated, can help organize metropolitan structure and revitalize urban centers. In contrast, highway corridors should not displace investment from existing centers.

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Response to Charter Principles

As a whole Sweet City envisions a network between towns centers that merges the urban area and the natural environment, promoting constant activity in the city, considering both the core, the path and the edge of the urban composition.

Throughout the participatory activities carried out in the projects, it has been necessary to transform the paradigm that streets only have one single user, the car, this is an existing paradigm in Costa Rica.

Transitions is conceptualize as inclusive public space that can vary from pedestrian boulevards to recreational and landscape axes, biological (green and blue) corridors, road pacification strategies and linear parks.

18. A range of parks, from tot-lots and village greens to ballfields and community gardens, should be distributed within neighborhoods. Conservation areas and open lands should be used to define and connect different neighborhoods and districts.

As an axis of Sweet City, nature and local biodiversity itself play a central role for a balanced and sustainable urban growth. The natural environment in Costa Rica has a wide potential and it is maximized and integrated into the urban environment in Sweet City. The conservation and improvement of rivers, protection areas with different levels of impact, parks, linear parks and urban gardens are integrated into the proposals of the neighborhoods. In fact, one of the first activities implemented by Sweet City was the planting of species in existing parks for scenic beauty purposes but also to contribute to the maintenance and increase of pollinators such as bees and humming birds.

19. A primary task of all urban architecture and landscape design is the physical definition of streets and public spaces as places of shared use

For the planning and design of neighborhoods and private properties, the team –in collaboration with the community- carried out an analysis of the urban composition, the existing and required new activities, the insecure and the most used areas. With this information it was possible to design urban highquality spaces with the approval and appropriation of the community and clearly defining and activating public places as spaces of shared use.

CANONS OF SUSTAINABLE ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM (GENERAL) 4. Design must preserve the proximate relationships between urbanized areas and both agricultural and natural lands in order to provide for local food sources; maintain local watersheds; a clean and ready water supply; preserve clean air; allow access to local natural resources; conserve natural habitat and to guard regional biodiversity 5. Globally, human settlements must be seen as part of the earth’s ecosystem.

Sweet City considers the importance of five dimensions –biodiversity is one of them-, each of them with equal value, seeking a balance in the growth of urban elements and granting importance to the natural component within the urban environment and not, as usually happens, segregating it as an element alien to the city. One of the design and decision making premises of Sweet City is to adapt infrastructure to nature, and not the other way around. As a result, an increase on green land uses (parks, green corridors, conservation areas) and a valorization/respect of water axes is present in all the master plans and transitions.

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(BUILDING AND INFRASTRUCTURE) 3. Architectural design shall derive from local, timehonored building typologies. Building shells must be designed to been during parts of the public realm. Yet internal building configurations must be designed to be flexible and easily adaptable over the years.

Sweet city proposes a new urban composition, richer mix of uses and higher densities. Also, sidewalks and streets are redesign to foster bicycle and pedestrian transportation.

These

measurements

will

most

likely

reduce

individual vehicle use and reduce the distance of its use. Thus, reducing general consumption of fossil fuels in transport, which is the largest source of production of Green House Gases in Costa Rica.

5. Individual buildings and complexes shall both conserve and produce renewable energy wherever possible to promote economies of scale and to reduce reliance on costly fossil fuels and inefficient distribution systems.

In Costa Rica, renewable energy is an installation, since it is 98% of consumption.

Additionally, as part of the strategies used in

7. Renewable energy sources such as non-food source biomass, solar, geothermal, wind, hydrogen fuel cells and other non-toxic, non-harmful sources shall be used to reduce carbon and the production of greenhouse gases.

8. Water captured as precipitate, such as rainwater and that internally harvested in and around individual buildings, shall be cleaned, stored and reused on site and allowed to percolate into local aquifers

neighborhoods, corridors and private projects are: clean energy technologies, passive climate strategies, the life cycle of the material, use of certified wood, rainwater harvesting. As well as public space stormwater retention ponds and bio-swales for recreational, landscape and water management purposes Also, local production of foods in community gardens reduces carbon foot-print.

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Response to Charter Principles

“Small things bring forth the big ones. Butterflies know that. So do native bees and hummingbirds, which keep adding value to the planet each time they extract nectar and transport pollen.

Their bodies are small but their value is enormous. As the cities of the world have entered a new century, specially the small ones, they’ll transform to host the biodiversity that until now we’ve kept outside. Their street will be biological corridors, neighborhoods will be ecosystems, rivers will be clear and every garden a melting pot of aromas, shapes ans colors”.

EDGAR MORA, CITY MAYOR

Seeding activity with students of José María Zeledón School

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LESSONS LEARNED The vast scope and experience of Sweet City results in valuable lessons summarized in the following categories:

Citizen active involvement Participatory design methodologies, citizenship capacity building and

1.

communications campaigns have been key tools to identify and translate community demands into plans. Furthermore, empowerment of the inhabitants has foster placemaking, critical thinking of their city experience and involvement in community groups beyond the design process.

The high level of participation of the community sets high expectations and requires constant commitments of the local government, technical teams and contractors for the design and construction of high quality of architecture, landscape and public spaces.

Public management The challenge of financing 21 master plans, 8 transitions and pilot projects forced a change in traditional institutional relationships in Costa Rica, triggering new

2.

local-national public alliances. As a result resources from the Ministry of Work and Social Security and its poverty reduction strategy were channeled to invest in the construction of two of the master plans located in the most vulnerable communities of Curridabat. A new precedent has been set that contributes to a future modification in the institutional legal framework and public policy at a national level.

Nature-City Laboratory: Knowledge transfer Pollination as a guideline to shape the city is itself a new urban planning typology.

Paradigms are broken when the goals are to consider biodiversity a member of the community, to adapt urban infrastructure to nature and to an integrated society

3.

through territorial design. The Sweet City experience in theory and in practice has a high transference, replicability and growth potential to other territories, in Costa Rica, Latin America and the world.

Knowledge transfer and adaptation of Sweet City’s goals is especially important in neighbor municipalities, connectivity corridors and adjacent watersheds. Natural and social impact of the nature-city laboratory of Curridabat can be amplified and multiplied throughout the Great Metropolitan Area of Costar Rica.

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Lessons Learned

Technical Insights A multi-scale approach (district-neighborhood-corridor-block-street) allowed the remodeling of the city’s grid with blue and green connectivity axis.

4.

Sweet City became an opportunity for amplifying Curridabat’s partial Territorial Ordainment Plan guidelines beyond its main corridors towards selected neighborhoods, complementing the design with street level transparencies, façade, street and public space design,

pedestrian and non-motorized

infrastructure parameters, a broad mix of uses and the fostering of walking and recreation in the urban environment. All its related projects –Spaces of Sweetness, Transitions, Pedestrian Patrol, among others– apply the Territorial Ordainment Plan’s principles as design guidelines.

Aerial Photograph of Curridabat

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PHOTOGRAPHS & ILLUSTRATIONS Curridabat cantonal boundary Planned Neighborhoods (Sweet Spaces) Existing green areas Planned Green areas 400m radius Transitions Master plan projects

N

esc. 1:10 000

Neighborhood network intervention through participatory design. Sweet City is possible due to public, private and civil society partnerships. The Municipality leads the project with technical support from the private sector and in alliance with civil society. The Municipality and consultancy firms, created a series of master plans for mainly highly vulnerable areas throughout the territory in terms of income, risk to natural disaster and access to services, with a guiding principle to provide access to nature for economically marginalized communities. The participatory design of these master plans resulted in a proposal of collaborative workspaces, land use change (from industrial to mixed-use) and the steering of real state investment through PPP between the municipality, the private land owners and the developers.

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Photographs & Illustrations

Coordination between the community, the local government and multidisciplinary technical teams. The tools applied to attain our objectives range from new channels of communication and interacting with the community workshops, charrettes, education campaigns, social capital points, co-building, co-planting and co-design to the design and launching of new technology –apps and mapping exercises– that supply immediate and place based information every day. Citizens receive benefits –goods and services– in exchange for their positive actions and good practices for the environment and society.

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Hotel

Eco-Neighborhood

Stormwater retention pond

Mixed-use project

Shared Street

Recreational circuit

Renewed park

Renewed park- new wetland

Reforestation

Raised intersection The image shows 1 master plan of the 21 planned neighborhoods. Sweet City aims to consolidate natural conservation as an urban activity through the increase in the number and variety of pollinators and through the reintegration of flora to stimulate pollination, and the creation of new biodiverse corridors. This will not only bring beauty and amenity for the people of Curridabat, but will also bring better performing conditions pollination activities.

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Photographs & Illustrations

ECO- NEIGHBORHOOD “ Charter principle 13- Within neighborhoods, a broad range of housing types and price levels can bring people of diverse ages, races, and incomes into daily interaction, strengthening the personal and civic bonds essential to an authentic community.�

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Renewed park- new wetland.

Flood risk mitigation through new wetlands and improvement of 54 existing parks. “Charter principle18: A range of parks, from tot-lots and village greens to ballfields and community gardens, should be distributed within neighborhoods. Conservation areas and open lands should be used to define and connect different neighborhoods and districts.�

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Photographs & Illustrations

Current state of Site CNU 2018 Charter Awards: Sweet City: Defeating the city-nature antagonism

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The image shows 1 of the 8 planned corridors. The majority of the 70,000 inhabitants of the city live in areas of paved or sealed surfaces hinder the appearance of flora and fauna, hence, of pollinators that bring great benefits for the biodiversity and environmental health of the city. This barren ground for natural interactions and pollinator activities affects the visual quality of the urban landscape, dominated by asphalt and buildings. This rivalry between nature and city negatively affect the stress levels of the population, its productivity and its resilience capacity, as well as the overall ability for place making in the city. Sweet city includes investment in green infrastructure measures (SuDS, frontriver parks, springwater recovery), as ecosystem based disaster risk reduction and CC adaptation actions.

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Photographs & Illustrations

Entrance garden

Urban plaza

Shared Street

Kiosks

Wetland park

Multipurpose recreational facility

New parallel parking

Open Mall

Municipal building

Raised intersection

Public Urban Market

Mixted-use building

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Aerial view corridor proposal. Sidewalks and new public spaces have permeable concrete paviments and the proposed buildings include certified wood and metal structures. The live cycle of each construction was carefully analyzed. New community meeting areas and accessibility improvement

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Photographs & Illustrations

Wetland park

Multipurpose recreational facility

Open Mall

Municipal building

Public Urban Market

Mixted-use building

Shared Street

Stormwater bio-retention

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Inclusive streets, aiming to improve people’s mobility. “12- Many activities of daily living should occur within walking distance, allowing independence to those who do not drive, especially the elderly and the young. Interconnected networks of streets should be designed to encourage walking, reduce the number and length of automobile trips, and conserve energy.�

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Photographs & Illustrations

Industrial Regeneration.

Regeneration of industrial areas into new mixed used areas, with cultural and residential uses. As a result of urban growth, some industrial areas have been immersed in the center of the city, these have been abandoned because they are incompatible with the urban space in which they are located. Re-inhabiting the center of the city reusing the industrial infrastructure allows the sustainable use of the territory

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