How Madrid’s residents are using open-source urban planning to create shared spaces – and build democracy
►https://theconversation.com/how-madrids-residents-are-using-open-source-urban-planning-to-creat
This is witnessed today in the phenomena of laboratorios ciudadanos (citizen laboratories) created in vacant city spaces. Not the result of any urban-planning strategy, they seem to have materialised from the spontaneous impulse of ordinary citizens and highly qualified groups working together in areas like collaborative economy, the digital technology, urban ecology or social urbanisation. These laboratories are fertile grounds for open-source urban planning (in Spanish, urbanismo de codigo abierto) and collectively rethinking the urban commons. The challenge is to (re)make the city in situ, using neighbourhood resources rather than acting like public authorities or already-established municipal groups.
The Campo de la Cebada has since grown to include exchange services, workshops for street art, photography, poetry and theatre, and events such as open-air music and film festivals. Activities are totally self-managed by groups representing residents, retailers, and associations, as well as architects, urban planners, researchers and engineers. It’s administered collectively rather than within the closed circle of a few elected officials or experts. Its objective is “that anyone may feel concerned and be implicated in the functions of the place”, according to Manuel Pascual of the Zuloark architectural agency.
It going beyond social, educational and cultural life to coproducing city public spaces, equipment and other urban infrastructures. Thus Madrid’s movements are part of the “maker age”. In citizen laboratories, physical and material aspects come before intellectual and political considerations. Residents go first to the garden, where they can exchange and create; only then do they debate broader political issues. In this “soft activism”, the shared space becomes the new “interstice where political reconstruction could begin”.
#Communs_Urbains #Madrid