It was a Spanish architectural firm, Práctica, that regenerated and renaturalised 15 kilometres of the banks of the Somes River as it passes through the Romanian city of Cluj-Napoca. This stretch runs through the outskirts, the various residential extensions built over decades, and the historic centre. In other words, it affects the whole city. The river, it seems, bathed it, but did not affect it. And the architects Jaime Daroca, José Mayoral and José Ramón Sierra have put a stop to it. They won the competition to, with engineers and landscapers, reverse this bad relationship.
A river is a natural infrastructure that contains a key message: the renaturalisation of cities. The architects of the Spanish studio Practica started from a previous knowledge: the healing interventions in the rivers of Madrid, London, Paris, Rotterdam, Zurich or Hamburg, carried out thanks to the support of the European Union. Remember that word: Union. What do rivers do if not unite?
To rethink what a river can do for a city, and what a city should do for the good fortune of having a river, the European Union turned to the original ideas of the Bauhaus. This German school contributed to the democratisation of the best architecture, the modernisation of our home, the indispensable relationship between art and the arts – the trades – the democratisation of beauty and, hopefully, also the good life. Today, the New European Bauhaus has made a green deal: it looks after, supports and finances projects that improve the continent with ideas that are considered examples to follow.
In this context, in the city of Cluj-Napoca, the Somes River is a green corridor that, through a network of sustainable mobility paths, connects multiple public spaces and green areas. The Practica studio designed a series of natural terraces to renaturalize the environment, transforming the rigid boundary between the city and the river into a permeable front that promotes biodiversity. That was their proposal: the river as a green connector and revalued public space, a green corridor capable of connecting nearby public spaces, which functioned in isolation. Today, the Simion Bărnuțiur Central Park or the Cetățuia Park are connected by the river, by bicycle paths, by bridges over the river.
According to the studio Práctica, the river has become thicker, giving rise to a series of new public spaces: car parks converted into squares with views of the river and banks that incorporate beaches and steps. In the end, what the Somes has today are banks to access the river and contemplate and enjoy its fauna and flora.
The Somes, any river, essentially has a connecting role. It can unite territories, landscapes and values. It can also unite citizens. The project by the Practica studio recovers the natural character of the environment, expanding and modifying the thin and hard pre-existing edge into a softer and more natural environment thanks to the widening of the river section, which serves as a support for the implementation of a terrace system and allows the bank to be converted into a diverse ecosystem of dozens of hectares, which recovers different species of local vegetation, rocks and sand.
We are not just talking about landscape, parks or paths, this project promotes biodiversity, the formation of microclimates, the absorption of CO2 and the control of invasive species. To achieve this, architecture has ceased to be a line and has become a planting. 2,530 specimens of different native tree species have been planted.
The river connects and speaks. It is a meeting place because it permeates everything. It passes through us. For the more than 300,000 inhabitants of Cluj-Napoca, the recovery of the riverbanks has multiple benefits. The border, and the physical connection of the river, proposes a new framework for dialogue and coexistence and unites the efforts of a large multidisciplinary team, Spanish and Romanian, made up of professionals in architecture, landscaping, engineering, urban planning, government agencies and the citizens who use the place on a daily basis.
The project redesigns the river as a social space that operates at different scales and with different programs, a green infrastructure, a space for meeting and exchange between the various communities that inhabit the city.