El centro histórico de Sevilla, estado actual y expectativas

Abstract

Architect Pablo Diáñez is a native of Seville and a veteran and keen expert on its historic center and its rich heritage. This text, in his own words "will try to keep an equilibrium between academic reflections and pragmatic action in dealing with the present and immediate future of what is known as the historic center of Seville". To begin with, he refers to the more recent urban evolution -the last 200 years, approximately- of the zone officially declared as "historic", so as to analize on that basis its present dysfunction, criticizing the regulatory measures adopted successively between 1963 and 1994, emphasizing how the magnitude and complexity of the historic center of the city invalidated the adoption of a single, all-encompassing plan for its protection, this having the obvious drawback of including too many buildings whose circumstantial and formal variety requires special treatment for each one. The simplification implicit in of establishing an abstract categorization (A, B, C, D, etc.) of the buildings that constitute the historic center seems today, in the light of the extreme variety of the functional and formal problems present in the city, to be wholly obsolete. Each zone of the historic center of Seville needs today a special conservation treatment. According to architect Diáñez, the typical problems in conservation and transformation of isolated buildings or urban contexts in the historic center of the city emphasize the ideological and conceptual clashes between the notions leading to the incorporation of more buildings and urban zones to the declared heritage of the city and the tendencies toward their eventual transformation and adaptation. The typical problems thus created include the physical effects of permissive measures allowing greater building heights and urban densification which have altered decisively many zones of the historic center, also causing the destruction of whole city blocks, so as to replace low and old houses by new apartment and office buildings of much greater height and density. The main expectation of the Seville Historic Center for the immediate future must be the adequate management of its public space, which qualifies as the city's most important cultural heritage. The most urgent measures to be proposed include the taking in charge by its citizens of the public space and its truly cultural use; as well as the decontamination of its environment, the suppression of commercial publicity, an adequate and rational system of signs and the provision of urban equipment and public lighting at a level of design in accordance with the present time.