Water as a Tool for Interscalar Territorial Design: A Retrospective Reading of Mondéjar

Overview: This paper reads the final design studio project, in Mondéjar, Spain, retrospectively through a combined analytical framework: the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) from transitions theory and Metropolitan Cartography (MC). The studio, conducted with a team of seven students over one semester, engaged the municipality’s water system as the thread connecting multiple scales of analysis, from Mediterranean climate change through regional hydrology to the concrete drainage channel in the town center. The method is a diagnostic reading of the territory through its water system, using Metropolitan Cartography’s spatial scales (XL/regional, L/municipal, M/urban, S/site) and the Multi-Level Perspective’s dynamic categories (landscape pressures, regime configuration, niche potential). Water serves as the material flow that bridges these scales and categories, rendering visible the connections between seemingly separate problems: agricultural decline, demographic loss, hydrological stress, and infrastructure lock-in. The paper finds that the studio’s most significant output was not the Linear water park design proposal itself but the pre-design legibility that preceded it, the diagnostic understanding of the territory’s systemic logic. This legibility, produced through a three-stage process of computational modelling, fieldwork engagement with operational actors, and systems integration, deserves recognition as an architectural contribution in its own right. The design is presented as evidence that the diagnostic generated actionable spatial hypotheses: a linear corridor along the valley floor, positioned at a structural leverage point where a single intervention addresses drainage lock-in, public space absence, ecological disconnection, and agricultural water management simultaneously.