Vivienda alternativa en el centro denso integral de Pacayas

Abstract

Costa Rica has 44200 hectares of urban growth zone within the Gran Área Metropolitana, an urban system that has grown with a low density pattern. A linear model has been promoted, where housing development is occurring mostly in the peripheries, which has a negative impact on the quality of life of the people, due to environmental problems, high costs for the supply of public services in this areas, the increase in vehicle fleet due to the long distances to travel between homes and workplaces and the large amount of time spent in dams to be able to move from one place to another. In view of this situation, the National Urban Development Plan for the Gran Área Metropolitana 2013 (Plan GAM 2013) establishes a growth model through the Integral Dense Centralities (CDI) within a poly-nuclear system of cities of regional scope that integrate and complement their functions through infrastructure networks and services. What is pretended is that these cities absorb the majority of uses, and residential development in a more compact and dense model, consolidating and giving the city a greater dynamic, avoiding that cities are empty at some point of the day. Alvarado is a canton that is located at the margin of the Gran Área Metropolitana, is a city in transition between the urban and the rural development; its urban center presents symptoms of the problems of large cities, where the center is provided with most services, institutional and commercial uses, and housing use has expanded horizontally, which generates a shift towards the periphery. This situation generates concentrations of houses outside the access routes and the mixed use of the center is lost. This research project aims to generate a compact and dense housing proposal in the district of Alvarado, Pacayas; being inserted within the urban nucleus allowing a new option of habitability for its population, breaking with the current scheme of single-family housing, where the use of the land is not optimal, through a proposal with greater environmental awareness that gives a greater dynamic to the city, in order to protect the resources of the area and prevent the invasion of land for agricultural use.