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URBAN INNOVATION

Redesigning the city in your own image

Bicycle lane badly laid out? Design another. You want a public square where now there isn't one? Create it yourself

A participant in the Campo de Cebada urban project, in La Latina.
A participant in the Campo de Cebada urban project, in La Latina. CRISTÓBAL MANUEL (EL PAÍS)

Pedaling along an urban bicycle lane one day, a cyclist discovers it is dotted with traffic lights. A suspicion is planted in his mind. When he swings onto another lane that abruptly ends in a busy highway that suspicion grows. Hours later, when he realizes he has been cycling in a circle that goes nowhere, his suspicion is confirmed: the closest the person who designed the bicycle lanes in his city has been to an actual bicycle is looking at a photo of one.

To combat this, the Geomun2.0 association, which is dedicated to collaborative mapmaking, organized a workshop in January with the aim of creating functional bicycle lanes designed by cyclists. Arriving at the Medialab-Prado site where the sessions were held, participants took their seats in the white chairs set up for the event. Those that were unoccupied held their bicycle helmets.

Olga Terroba, the coordinator of the workshop, had two goals in mind: apart from the obvious one of designing a bicycle lane, she wanted to promote citizen participation in the improvement of public spaces and to popularize the free software her group uses to plan maps. Uploading information from home onto OpenStreetMap's templates is as easy as looking up an address on Google. Working with the guidelines established in the workshop, an administrator revises the data that users send from home. They can also attach photos or YouTube videos with more information.

"Instead of protesting, we want to promote more practical solutions than those that out-of-touch politicians are able to offer," Olga explains. "People make suggestions and we, as technicians, provide the means." The workshop took place over four sessions in which participants discussed the issues and undertook a fact-finding excursion, the results of which they uploaded to maps. The four days were aimed at producing the seed of a larger body of work that would later be presented to the local government.

Although 60 people signed up for the first workshop, only 30 of them showed up for the first session. By the fourth day, this number had shrunk to 10 participants, who would form the nucleus of the project. The majority of them brought their own computers and the sessions were carried out in the spirit of the 15-M assemblies: there were no discussion leaders, meaning that periods of useful discussion were often followed by lectures that trailed off into uncomfortable silences. Working together, they gradually added stretch after stretch to the lanes.

Instead of just protesting, we want to promote more practical solutions"

This experiment in collective urban planning did not come out of nowhere. The idea of group participation in city design is growing in popularity. Some groups are more critical of the role of the public administration, which they feel is out of touch with the needs of citizens. Others feel that residents are sometimes unable to correctly identify their own needs because they never believed they would have the opportunity to fulfill them by themselves.

One of the groups that has been most successful in this type of venture is Basurama, a group of architects specializing in recycling and social projects. A clear example of their modus operandi could be seen in the playground installation in the 2010 edition of Madrid's Noche en Blanco cultural night.

As commissioners of the event, they hired another architectural group, Zuloark, which had developed a project with residents of one of Madrid's most rundown shantytowns, El Gallinero. After consulting with parishioners of Santo Domingo de la Calzada church, Zuloark used pipes and tires to build slides and teeter totters that were set up on the Madrid street of Gran Vía on the night in question with the intention of later moving them to the shantytown.

The children of El Gallinero were thrilled with the recycled playground, and the project paved the way to further collaboration with the town's residents that has given birth to such projects as a new bus shelter.

A recent Basurama initiative is the Autobarrios (roughly, do-it-yourself neighborhood) in San Cristóbal, an area in the south of Madrid. The project, now in its initial stages, aims to help residents build their own infrastructure. "First, you have to decide if what is needed is a playground, an open air cinema or a building for fixing bikes," says Juan, a Basurama spokesperson. He says the discussion stage is crucial, and it's necessary to take a strong stance in order to ensure its success. "We make it clear that we are not arriving with gifts in hand. They are the ones who must build and take care of everything; we just help," he explains. "People have to learn to do without subsidies."

Zuloark has worked with one of Madrid's most rundown shanty towns

Autobarrios is aimed at creating a dynamic similar to that of Madrid's Campo de Cebada, a project in a former swimming pool complex in the city's central La Latina district. The city council tore down the complex in 2007 with the promise of building a newer, more modern one, but construction was halted by the crisis. Neighbors continued to complain about the site's abandoned state until, thanks to another Noche en Blanco installation (this time a mini-swimming pool built by French artists), they realized there was a lot they could do with it. A group of residents led a campaign to regain the public space and they were soon joined by Zuloark members who lived nearby.

Today, the Campo de Cebada looks like a big hollow in the middle of Toledo street, enclosed by graffiti-covered walls and boasting such peculiarities as its own electrical system. It doesn't aim to provide an alternative space but rather one that is the most communal possible. Since February, the square has been co-managed by residents and the local consistory. Nineteen-year-old resident Jacobo García explains how the public space is run: "We don't want to take the place of the municipal government. We want them to be responsible for it and to help us." Beyond the creation of their own self-designed public square, residents are hoping to establish a precedent for when the new complex is finally erected, because they are not willing to renounce their participation. "Our aim is that the final building is managed like a collective asset over which everybody has a say," says Jacobo.

A stroll by on any afternoon is enough to see how El Campo operates. At 5pm, there is only one Zuloark representative milling around and he prefers to remain anonymous (a reaction typical of the group, which is why they have covered their faces in the photo on this page). He is standing in front of a pile of stones that have just been delivered by truck. Half an hour later, the square is full of people shoveling and preparing plots for a communal garden, and crossing back and forth on the elevated walkways that lead to the container where the tools are kept. While he arranges a layer of plastic to divide the plots, another Zuloark member explains why he thinks the square is fertile experimental ground for architects.

"This is the role we must undertake now: to try and understand public spaces, to listen to people and build according to their needs," he says. Though he also refuses to give his name, he is easily recognizable to those who enter the area. He sports what must be the longest beard of any thirty-something man in Madrid. "These projects make people responsible for infrastructure because they own it, and they care for it as such. It is not just something the local government has placed there."

We make it clear that we are not arriving with gifts in our hands"

A few meters away, there are some goalposts and lines painted on the ground. He explains that the kids who play soccer there drag benches from all over the square to block off the field so the ball doesn't get away. "This is what we want," he says. "That public areas become dynamic and multifunctional, and that people adapt them according to their needs."

The children's actions have unwittingly converted theory into practice. Don't be fooled - there is a definite theoretical base behind these initiatives, which include such academic figures as the "prosumer" (a citizen who, along with consuming, also produces ideas and infrastructure) and studies on the role of the internet in human relations (the groups use social networks to arrange meetings, have their own blogs and promote the use of free software for collective creation).

Although the issue may be examined from an academic standpoint, however, it is hard to deny there are clear social factors that explain why projects work better in environments such as the La Latina neighborhood (which has a young, committed population with enough resources to afford to live in the city center) than those such as El Gallinero, where Zuloark has encountered numerous obstacles to their work. Specifically, the group has come up against another very powerful school of theory; that of the deconstructionists, a term that might be applied to those residents specialized in tearing down the infrastructure that the architects put up in order to sell it for parts.

This is why it is important to remember, theoretic discourse and architects and urban planners aside, that the Community of Madrid offers a perfect example of the model expounded by these new city builders. It can be found in Rivas-Vaciamadrid and involves a simple bike park built in 2009 by a few kids who were fans of cyclo-cross and who had no place to train. They pitched their idea to the Casa de la Juventud (the public youth agency) and were given tons of gravel and tools. In exchange, the kids agreed to give up their afternoons for six months to build a circuit in the middle of Montarco park, on a site that had until then been used as a waste site for the garbage left over from nearby parties held by teenagers.

The kids achieved their objective: a bike park where they could practice skids and turns. When Chapo, one of the members of the group, was asked why they did what they did, his answer could not have been simpler: "Because we wanted to and because we could." Action reduced to impulse: if you want something, don't wait for someone to do it for you. If you have a city council, ask it to help you build the city you want to live in.

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