Parque Emancipación
Tómas Viðar Árnason
Royal Danish Academy – Architecture, Design and Conservation
Exploring how social housing and sport facilities can coexist on confined urban sites, this project proposes an alternative to the horizontal expansion driving residential development in Mérida, Mexico. By building over an existing football pitch, it provides shaded sport facilities and affordable housing without consuming new land or displacing communal space in a rapidly growing city. The proposal preserves the football pitch as the social heart of the neighbourhood while introducing new public spaces, community facilities, and adaptable housing organised within a shared structural framework. Residents are able to expand or reconfigure their homes over time, allowing the architecture to respond to changing household needs. Developed following field research in Mérida, the project also incorporates passive cooling strategies informed by earlier on-site testing of plant-fibre façade systems in the city's hot climate