Residential | Social Housing and Vertical Farm

Benidorm is a seaside resort in southeastern Spain which hosts around 5 mln tourists per year. Since 1956 tourism became a major route in the development of the city. Despite its ever-rising success Benidorm is lacking economic diversity. While the number of tourists halves during November-March period the problems of unemployment and hotels (staying predominantly unoccupied while local people are struggling to rent accommodation due to high rents along with no possibility to buy properties due to high market prices) are raising.

An undeveloped site at the boundary of Benidorm could bring a solution to these problems. The proposed leak of the Land into the City could help to revive the traditional Spanish industry - agriculture, long forgotten in Benidorm and its surroundings. The Land and the City would act as two pulsating organisms - while one shrinks another expands.

A proposed social housing at the edge of the city would aim to provide a cheaper accommodation for the young local people struggling to find it within Benidorm rental market, and to help them with the employment over the winter months, providing alternative work of growing winter vegetables in the farm fields as well as the vertical greenhouse incorporated into the housing scheme, and on-site cafe and market. To help with running costs of the building ecotourists would be invited. In exchange for lower rents local residents would be asked to provide workshops for the ecotourists eager to learn the art of the Land or the art of the Spanish cuisine.

If this scheme worked it could be applied on all suitable edges of Benidorm.