Catharijnesingel, Utrecht. © Antoine-Thevenet.

The end of a year is usually the occasion to remember what happened throughout the year and in our case what has been published. The protagonists of the year, from our field, have undoubtedly been climate change, the consolidation of concepts such as the fifteen-minute city, the rise of regeneration as a mode of intervention in the city and the consideration of green infrastructure as an element to introduce and recover in the territory, and irremediably, the pandemic situatio, which requires us an effort of rethinking the city and how we want to live in the future.

The contents have followed the line proposed by the magazine regarding the subjects to be dealt with from the territory to urban design, showing projects of a greater number of countries, with special emphasis on Latin America, allowing us to access good practices with an increasing variety of approaches and different scales.

Even though it is not a monographic issue, in this number, water is the undoubted protagonist. It appears in different projects linked to rivers in different situations, always incorporated into the public space and as an element of connectivity, a place of coexistence and leisure, outlining a common culture in the reading, interpretation and design of its margins.

If Madrid Río was a pioneer in Europe as a project for the recovery of the Manzanares River and as a space that has allowed the city to be sewn by incorporating a large surface area for citizen leisure, once it has been landscape re-qualified by burying the M-30, an urban highway of the waist, today it is presented a project along the same lines with the recovery of the Utrecht border canal, converted in the sixties into a twelve-lane semi-buried motorway. This, after the recovery of its structure, is shown as a landscape element integrated into the city, with a wide range of leisure and wooded space on its margins, paying special attention to biodiversity. The recovery of the Catharinsingel is part of the Utrecht Central Station regeneration project, in whose liberated area the construction of a new car-free neighborhood is intended.

The next article in the issue exposes the Master Plan for La Estrella intermodal station, in Medellín metropolitan area, generating a new centrality, with a clear proximity reference to the Utrecht project by accompanying the Aburra river in its design. The consolidation of public spaces is proposed in which the environment prevails in multiscale planning, from the territory to the city, with special emphasis on the management derived from inter-institutional collaboration.

In the work in the city of Soria, a methodology is presented as a pilot experience for the Urban Regeneration Areas based on the Urban Regeneration Strategy of Castilla y León (ERUCYL). For this, an area is chosen in which various fabrics coexist together with important elements of the city's heritage. The choice of the work area responds to serving those areas with greater urban vulnerability in which to intervene based on the Index of Need for Regeneration (INR) that defines the ERUCYL and composed of four factors: population variation, aging rate, unemployment rate and age of the housing stock. The work is innovative from the verification of the need to incorporate new factors that allow choosing with greater knowledge and precision areas for such as Integrated Urban Regeneration Areas of the Spanish Housing Plan. This work gives importance not only to field work but also to public participation, vital in work of this scale and which helps to define planning and the anticipation of actions both in public space and in housing. The methodology, in addition to the planning process, presents the creation of a Management Office.

Regeneration is also the key word in the Urban Master Plan "Vies Blaves de Barcelona". It is a territorial plan of institutional collaboration, in this case with a broader scale and with an environmental nature that will allow adapting the courses of the Llobregat, Arnoia and Carderer rivers, relying on pre-existing tracks, for pedestrian use and non-motorized means , walking like a drift in post-pandemic times and the recognition of the historical anthropization of the landscape through the routes. It provides a methodology that is explicit in three terms: Ways, gates and nodes.

Once again, Colombia is the subject of an article, this time in Cali. The presence of Colombian projects in the last numbers is nothing more than a reflection of the great activity that is taking place in this country at very different scales, with a special commitment to public spaces and the improvement of environmental quality. This is how the Biopark Museo Vivo de Calí is presented on this occasion. This city, known as that of the seven rivers, has lived back to its values. The project is proposed under three principles: recover, connect and integrate by designing the recomposition of an ecological network, between the area of the rivers and the hills, articulated from pre-existing public spaces, through sustainable use, biodiversity and recovery of the water with the project that is exposed and tries to create a green infrastructure of penetration in the city.

The river is again the protagonist in the Antwerp project in which along the Shelde, cause of the city's flooding, a project is carried out in which public space is created in front of the river while it is being built a dam that protects the city from water, defining an ambivalent space in which a dry and a wet space is designed. It is an infrastructure provision work from the perspective of the landscape, integrating the river into the city as a great place for leisure.

A smaller-scale project is then proposed from the design of the exhibition of the landscape as a witness of human history, in order to create an itinerary of peace in the Hauts-de-France area, witness of the wars of the 20th century and which is translated from the Franco-German garden of the Compiègne armistice clearing into a future tour of thirty locations. Called the third train, it is a landscape project in which a route in the middle of a forest is integrated, in which the fundamental piece is a bench, a sculptural element that corresponds to that symbolic train and a series of labyrinth-like paths a network for the discovery of the clearing at the end of a pedestrian path.

The number is closed by a project of opposing scale, Taichung Central Park, a vast space in which the landscape and functional component is added to the protection of biodiversity and incorporates the reading of the space as a sensorial place, in which the environmental requalification its perception is added as a sensitive element.

It is therefore a number in which the public space is presented, from different perspectives, as the protagonist of the time that we have had to live and where it acquires more and more relevance as an expansion of the home or the workplace, it is the place of desire after confinement and hopefully the reflection of that more sustainable and healthy life that is our request for the new year.