Metropolitan Shelter: An Abandoned Rail Trench Recast as a Slow, Reconfigurable Urban Refuge

Most cities treat a disused railway cutting as a scar to be filled, paved or sold off. Metropolitan Shelter reads it as a gift: a sunken, sheltered strip of ground already set apart from the traffic and noise above. The project keeps the trench, keeps its walls and its linear logic, and turns the whole corridor into a slow-paced refuge where the pace of the city drops by a gear. Its central argument is that the ruin itself, not a new object placed on top of it, is the most valuable thing on the site.

Developed by Cristina del Pozo, Àlvar Miralles, Sol Prieto, Pablo Lombardo and Elisabetta Nucera, the proposal received an Editor's Choice recognition in the Salut Paris competition. The team frames the abandoned railway corridor as a layered public landscape that reconnects urban life with nature, combining ecological restoration with a kit of flexible elements that users can rearrange, rebuild and claim as their own.

A Grandstand That Anchors the Trench as a Social Room

The central grandstand is the project's social anchor, and the sunset scene makes its role clear: children gather on timber tiered steps facing a wooden deck where a juggler performs. The steps work as seating, as an informal stage edge and as a place to simply linger, accommodating events, gatherings and casual leisure without needing to be programmed. Because the grandstand sits within the sunken cutting, the retaining walls frame it like the sides of an amphitheatre, giving a small performance the intimacy of an enclosed room while the sky stays wide open overhead.

This is a smart reading of the trench section. Rather than fighting the level change between street and track bed, the design uses it to generate stepped seating, turning a topographic obstacle into the most occupied piece of the corridor.

Pot-Away Planters and a Garden That Can Be Moved

The most inventive element of the scheme is what the team calls the pot-away system. Raised timber planters, seen here lining a gravel path beneath ivy-covered retaining walls, can be shifted, removed or reorganised. Clear them away and the corridor floor opens for a temporary market; cluster them and the space becomes an urban allotment where people garden and read side by side. Benches, deck chairs, tables and movable planters form a family of modules that let users reconfigure the ground to suit the season or the event.

The landscape strategy behind this is deliberately soft and low maintenance. Vegetation, paths and built elements are set up as a system that evolves over time, and the proposal goes further by suggesting that furniture modules be assembled from recycled materials by the community itself. That gesture matters: a public space people have physically built is a public space they tend to protect.

After Dark, the Cutting Becomes a Listening Room

The night view shows the same timber steps filled with people listening to a guitarist and double bassist beneath string lights and a full moon. It is a useful counterpoint to the daytime images because it shows how the corridor's spatial intensity can shift. The proposal describes a gradient running from active social zones to quiet contemplative areas, and here the grandstand slips into an evening register: lower, warmer, more acoustic.

The enclosure of the trench does real work after dark. Retaining walls contain sound and light, so a small concert can feel complete without amplification or heavy infrastructure. The design reframes a site that might otherwise feel unsafe at night as a safe, accessible and engaging urban environment, using occupation itself as the main safety strategy.

Walking the Old Track Line Through a Planted Microclimate

Circulation follows the former tracks, guiding visitors through a continuous sequence that blends movement, rest and observation. The street-level view shows a gravel and paved walkway threading between ferns, benches and ivy walls toward a glazed building at the end of the cutting. The elevated view pulls back to reveal the full section: tree-lined retaining walls, timber planters, a paved strip and a glazed greenhouse sitting alongside. Existing structural elements form the base of the design, while the new interventions stay lightweight and adjustable.

What stands out is how much the greenery changes the character of the linear trench. Planting along the walls and floor softens the hard infrastructure and creates a microclimate that contrasts with the dense city above. Stepped seating, planted zones and elevated walkways add a multi-level experience, so the corridor is not just a path to move along but a sequence of atmospheres, from open gathering areas to intimate green pockets.

Why This Project Matters

Adaptive reuse of rail infrastructure is a familiar idea, and the risk with it is always over-design: a polished promenade that erases the very roughness that made the site interesting. Metropolitan Shelter resists that. It preserves the character of the urban ruin and lets historical traces shape new spatial narratives, adding only what is needed to make the corridor usable, planted and social. The restraint is a design position in itself.

The stronger lesson lies in its treatment of flexibility as something residents control rather than something designers merely promise. Movable planters, modular furniture and community-built elements turn the trench into an evolving, user-driven public realm. For cities holding onto stretches of abandoned infrastructure, the proposal offers a practical and generous model: keep the ruin, soften it with landscape, and hand the final say to the people who will use it.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Cristina del Pozo, Àlvar Miralles, Sol Prieto, Pablo Lombardo, Elisabetta Nucera

Enter a Design Competition on uni.xyz

uni.xyz runs architecture and design competitions year-round that reward proposals with spatial conviction and real site intelligence.

Project credits: Metropolitan Shelter by Cristina del Pozo, Àlvar Miralles, Sol Prieto, Pablo Lombardo, Elisabetta Nucera Salut Paris (uni.xyz).