On urban highways
Great mobility infrastructures, such as urban highways, most frequently transform the territory. They grind it, cut it up, and alter brutally its topography, hydrology, history and social structure. They are usually designed with poor economicist criteria, while in fact they build up a new artificial landscape, connecting people and places.
Their courses demand big quantities of land resulting in many residual areas which are inaccessible and unfunctional.
Urban highways reveal the rear of cities, their nondescript borders, where we have discovered a crude beauty. We cannot cynically hide these spaces because they are essential to our everyday social and political life.

Highways are generic and atopic, not bound to any specific “place”, but only to a numerical code that distinguishes them in the abstract net they weave.

Six reasons to build The Yellow Belt
1. It has the territorial scale of the highway and the economy of the great scale.
2. Interlacing with the highway, it is visually as powerful as the highway itself.
3. It allows one to view the raw landscape of the city borders that the highway reveals.
4. It identifies the non-place of the highway endowing it with character and singularity. It facilitates orientation for the driver rendering the numerical code that identifies the road secondary.
5. It is sustainable: it requires no maintenance and avoids slope erosion on the highway’s margins.
6. It generates a continuous green landscape that changes vigorously over time, resulting during more than two months in a formidable dream landscape as in a work of land art, powerful and light at the same time. It is also the consequence of the agricultural engineering logic.

The Yellow Belt is a proposal for a planted infrastructure that generates a continuous and fast new landscape that feeds on the mobility infrastructure while endowing it with identity and rendering it concrete and memorable. Burgos&GarridoArquitectosAsociados was established in 2002, from then on it has developed urban projects that interact with great infrastructures of mobility.