Cooler Capital: Renewing Madrid for the Decades Ahead
CityMakers Live Madrid Recap
CityMakers Live Madrid
A Cooler Capital
Last updated: October 27, 2026 Madrid, Spain
The panel comprised Myriam Peón González, who runs the city's planning office; Carmen Sánchez Guevara of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid; Ricardo de Pablos, CEO of Holcim Spain; Margarita Chiclana Actis, CEO of the developer Unexum Ltd; and Jorge Serrano Leal, Technical Director of Crea Madrid Nuevo Norte, the organization redeveloping the railway lands around Chamartín station.
The hosting venue itself was the first key talking point. Infinito Delicias began life as a 1960s metalworks in Delicias, a former industrial district between the center and the working-class south. When the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation, a Paris philanthropic body that backs sustainable food and the arts, chose it for its Madrid base in 2018, a housing developer had just bought the site to demolish it. Instead, architects Husos and Elii, working with the consultancy Ultrazul, kept the original structure, clad it in chestnut timber from Asturian forests, and created a sustainable design that earned it a Holcim Foundation Award in 2023. It opened in December 2025 as a 2,700-square-meter center for culture, food, and community.
On the topic of a Cooler Capital, the audience learned that the celebrated building has already moved beyond its brief. During this summer's heat waves, it joined Madrid's network of climate shelters, public buildings that stay cool and open so residents whose homes cannot keep the heat out have somewhere to go. After discussing the building's merits, the conversation moved on to the broader city plan. Since 2024, the city council has been consulting residents through the Sueña Madrid, "Dream Madrid" program. It began with sessions in all 21 districts and then moved to working groups with more than 200 experts. "In the old days you called a renowned planner, a Castro or a Cerdá, who came and said how the city should be," said Peón González, General Director of the Urban Planning Office, who leads that process. "Do you think that would now be possible in Madrid? It's unviable," she said. The participatory process shaping the plan chose sustainability as its major focus, and Peón González defined its tenets during the discussion: nature and shade to cope with heat, but also jobs, mixed-use buildings, and affordable homes. She added that Madrid is growing fast and becoming more attractive to new residents and talent, and that is precisely the danger. "We could die of success: a fantastic city that is a horror to live in."
Sánchez Guevara, an Associate Professor at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid who took part in those working tables, supplied more evidence. For almost 20 years, her research group, ABIO, has studied Madrid's urban heat island, the effect that makes the dense city several degrees hotter than its surroundings. In 2017, the group produced the city's first study of energy poverty with the Carlos III Health Institute and found that a quarter of Madrid's population couldn't afford to keep their homes at a safe temperature. Overlaying the heat maps with the income maps gave a clear answer: the hottest, poorest, and worst-insulated neighborhoods are in the city's southern belt. "We have large pockets in Madrid, especially across the whole southern belt, of population that, with rising temperatures, will not be able to adapt adequately to heat," she said. She advised starting the plan in the south: plant and shade those neighborhoods, and expand the network of climate shelters.
The panel agreed that the biggest changes needed to cool down Madrid lie in the buildings the city already has. Ricardo de Pablos, CEO of Holcim Spain, put the issue in numbers. "80 percent of the buildings we'll inhabit in 2050 are already built, and more than half of Spain's housing was built before 1980, so it has no energy-efficiency criteria at all," he said. Low-carbon materials and insulation systems are certified and on the market, he said; what is missing is speed in bringing them into the built environment. "We don't have to wait for the technologies of the future. The challenge is accelerating adoption of solutions that already exist." Peón González said the new plan is written to supply that speed. The council has gathered data on income, building condition, heat, noise and mobility for every neighborhood on a public platform, so it knows where to intervene first, and the plan will reward owners who renovate: a courtyard or insulation added in a retrofit will cost them no buildable area. "Rehabilitation must become a culture, because we have to fix the city we have," she said. "We can't keep expanding."
New construction, done on the right terms, also had its champions. Chiclana Actis described Campus for Living Cities, a 342-room student residence her company, Unexum, completed on the Universidad Politécnica's South Campus in Vallecas, south of the city, after winning the first edition of C40's Reinventing Cities competition for unused urban land. The residence is made of cross-laminated timber, the largest of its kind in Spain, and stands on public land under a 60-year lease. Once it was up, the City Council spent €14 million on the streets, pavements and cycle lanes around it. "Public land right now is a huge opportunity, and we have to know how to use it," she said. Serrano Leal, whose company is delivering Madrid Nuevo Norte, 10,500 homes and a business district over 20 hectares of covered railway tracks north of Chamartín station, said the project had been blocked for more than 25 years before its approval. What unblocked it was listening. "The key was the private developer's decision to listen to the residents and make them part of it," he said.
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