ANALYSIS AND EVALUATION OF THE QUALITY OF PUBLIC SPACE IN RELATION TO ITS DEGREE OF NATURALISATION, ITS PHYSICAL QUALITIES AND USES AND ACTIVITIES.THE CASE OF THE NORTHERN BORDER AREA OF THE MUNICIPALITY OF FUENLABRADA (MADRID, SPAIN) IN ITS CONTACT WITH THE AREA CALLED BOSQUESUR AND THE CASE OF THE CITIES OF THE DUTCH RANDSTAD AND THEIR MEDIATION OR BUFFER ZONES.

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to define a methodology for analysing the quality of peripheral public space in municipalities surrounded by natural spaces of environmental value, in order to evaluate their potential quality as environmental corridors, civic axes and natural gateways. The case of the northern boundary of the municipality of Fuenlabrada (Madrid, Spain) with the Bosquesur Periurban Forest Park and its comparison with the areas of intermediation between urban-natural-rural spaces in Dutch cities belonging to the area known as Randstad Holland.

Understanding the city as an ecosystem implies redefining our conception of the urban from a holistic approach to the dialogue between nature and the city. The return to nature, its recovery or reintroduction on the support of the consolidated city, situates our research in the contemporary framework of the renaturalisation of cities. Urban renaturalisation is a multiple challenge: economic, social and physical-spatial. Economic, because it involves reversing a development system linked to the urbanisation of grey infrastructure. Social, because of the need to transform the collective thinking that links progress with consumption and individual freedom towards a purpose of environmental commitment. And physical-spatial because all regeneration relies on existing support, image and formalisation of decision-making over decades that have not had the possibility to build with nature. The emergence of the concept of 'nature-based solutions' has meant the integration of multiple strategies with a multi-scalar multi-functional and place-specific approach. In addition, we can add the conditions of connectivity, strategy, inter- and transdisciplinarity, and social inclusiveness (Tzoulas, et al. 2021).

Freed from the intellectual straitjacket of a profoundly anthropocentric outlook, contemporary environmental activism has begun to move away from conservationism towards a more belligerent role that also advocates reversing the process of deterioration in certain areas in order to recover the environmental values that would allow nature to recover. It is no longer a matter of conserving, evoking or reconstructing a longed-for landscape, but of renaturalising, that is, of building the environmental values that make wildlife possible. In this sense, the public spaces of our cities can be evaluated to assess their condition as "renaturalising elements". To do this, it is necessary to use a specific methodology that can draw on already tested models of urban vitality (Gehl, 2010) or the impact of implementing nature-based solutions.

The edges of growing cities are often areas of ambiguity, particularly unstable in their forms and uses. Many of the peripheries of post-industrial Europe's urban areas show considerable differences with those built along the growth of industrialisation: unstructured territories, made up of pieces of fragmented urbanisation in their forms and functions, physically connected -or segmented- by motorways, roads or railway lines. The underlying territorial processes have been overwhelmingly dominated by markets, often under conditions of high uncertainty, and with environmentally unsustainable outcomes (Teixidor, 2014).

This is the case of the city of Fuenlabrada, of agrarian origin and with an enormous industrial development, which has required the construction of numerous infrastructures that now fragment the entire natural open space surrounding the municipality. This type of situation has given rise to comparable scenarios that have been treated with solutions whose effectiveness must be evaluated in order to be able to assess their replicability in Spanish cases. In this sense, the tradition developed by Dutch planning in the area known as Randstad Holland is particularly relevant. In this area, each of the urban enclaves that form it are separated from their neighbours by naturalised areas that mediate between the intensely urbanised space of each enclave and the surrounding landscape, a protected space known as the Greenheart.