Abstract
Abstract. This paper presents the vicissitudes of a residential dwelling built in El Cabanyal in 1923 and how poor urban planning can be a risk. The building corresponds to one of the most common traditional typologies: a terraced house with masonry load bearing brick walls and timber floors, three storeys, a linear staircase attached to the party walls, a courtyard at the rear and a gable roof. In the past, this building, proved to be resilient, overcoming the risk of collapse in some important episodes which affected directly El Cabanyal: the air raid attacks of the Valencian coastline settlements during the Spanish Civil War and the floods occurred in 1949 and in 1957. In 1988, the building was listed in the catalogue of the General Plan with a protection grade 3. The special protection plan (PEPRI 2001) which was supposed to protect and rehabilitate El Cabanyal, projected the extension of Blasco Ibañez Avenue to the sea and consequently, the division of the neighbourhood in two halves, tearing down an important number of houses. Subsequently, the City council began to expropriate buildings facilitating their occupation by squatters. The level of degradation caused by the urban planning is such that this area is known as ‘Ground Zero Area’. At the time of writing this paper, the building appears to be illegally occupied and in a bad state of preservation. After almost a hundred years facing different risks, poor urban planning appears to be the cause of the destruction of this heritage building.
Highlights
1.1 Cabanyal quarter ‘El Cabanyal’ is one of the old fishermens quarters in Valencia
On the 14th October 1957, a natural disaster occurred in Valencia: The river Turia overflowed affecting the city and El Cabanyal neighborhood, where some houses collapsed
The plan to extend Blasco Ibañez Avenue was repealed, planned evictions have taken place in public and private residential buildings (Las Provincias 2016a, Las Provincias 2016b, La Vanguardia 2016, El Mundo 2016), public residential buildings, infrastructures and facilities have been built, renewed or retrofitted (Ayuntamiento de Valencia 2016, Levante-emv 2017, Las Provincias 2018; Plan Cabanyal-Canyamelar 2019a, Plan Cabanyal-Canyamelar 2019b), public buildings have been demolished (Plan Cabanyal-Canyamelar 2019c, 2019d), public residential buildings have been offered for sale (Levante-emv 2016, Las Provincias 2016c) and different funding programs to make residential building improvements, based on State or European subsidies, have been approved (Ayuntamiento de Valencia 2016, DOGV 2017, 2017, Generalitat Valenciana 2017, Las Provincias 2018)
Summary
1.1 Cabanyal quarter ‘El Cabanyal’ is one of the old fishermens quarters in Valencia. The origin of this historic settlement is set in the XIII century, after the arrival of James I the Conqueror, King of Aragon, to Valencia (which at that time depended officially on Caliph Bagdad al Mustàmsir), defeating Valencian inhabitants on September 28th, 1238 (Pastor, 2012). The area developed in an independent village in which the inhabitants built their thatched fishermen's cabins (barracas) that used to line the beachfront. At the end of the century, summer visitors of Valencia started to rent or buy the fishermen and dock workers’ houses, turning the area, named ‘El Cabanyal’, into one of the neighbourhoods of the spreading city of Valencia in 1897 (Figure 1). The old thatched fisherman’s huts were replaced by two and three-storey townhouses in the styles in fashion at that time (mostly modernism and baroque or eclecticism), while
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