Comment: (1)

International award for good practice in Dubai

Category: ⚐ EN

We want to point out the possibility of exercising good practice in Spanish towns.

Thanks to the boulevard in Vallecas, we have been offered the opportunity to take part in the competition for Good Practice in Dubai. It is an interesting way to support large actions in towns and cities. The first competition of the Good Practice Program was organised for the United Nations Conference, Habitat II, that took place in Istanbul in 1996, “a means of identifying urban policies and actions that, according to sustainability criteria, were proofed to be efficient for improving living conditions in cities and towns and showed ideas and experiences for supporting national reports and acting plans that national committees were preparing for the conference”.

On top of this, Dubai created an international award for Good Practice with the purpose of better identifying it.

José Fariña Tojo says in his article “Good practice for a more sustainable urban growth”, published in CSCAE magazine, common practice is more important than good practice, since in Spain we suffer from plenty of bad practice.

What we want to point out is the opportunity that these awards bring to Spanish towns to make an effort to implement these quality actions and invest public funds on public wellbeing, not on individual benefit.

Comments: (7)

We are one of the 400 more influential blogs in Spain

Category: ⚐ EN+ecosistema urbano

It seems that nowadays everything is measured with a ranking. Even blogs have their own rankings. In Spain there are about 500 000 blogs. When we started, we never imagined we position ourselves, in just a few months, within the 1000 most influential blogs. Last week we checked the Alianzo ranking to find, to our great surprise, that we were among the top 500! To be precise,we were number 394 more influential blog in Spain…. Great! This is a fantastic news to end the year with. This is working and growing! Thank you all for reading us and thanks to all who take active part.

Comments: (0)

Antonio Jiménez Torrecillas – economy + beauty

Category: ⚐ EN+architecture+downloads+eu:abierto

Today we introduce Antonio Jiménez Torrecillas, an architect I had the opportunity to meet at the Jornadas Internacionales de Intervención en el Patrimonio Histórico that took place in Logroño last month. His work has stricken me as spectacular for combining economical resources and powerful beauty. Without a doubt, it is one of the most creative and interesting works I have seen recently. I hope you agree.

download: [download#10]

Comments: (0)

We welcome sustainable engineering

Category: ⚐ EN+engineering+sustainability

A few weeks ago, the British Institute of Structural Engineers published the winners of their international Structural Awards 07. I like some of the winning projects better than others, but there is a little bit of everything among them – slender bridges, complex geometry roofs, intelligent systems for earthquake-resistant structures, even buildings made of lime hemp blocks… but do you know what I could hardly find? Concrete… in return, the term “sustainable” appears in various occasions.

British engineers have surprised me, getting closer to the issue of sustainability, recognising the efforts of professionals who choose their materials to minimise environmental impact; professionals who bear in mind the life cycle of their structures, not only how much money the contractor can save today on a job, the future of which they don’t care about….

Steel prevails in the winning projects. I do know this is the British construction tradition, but I like to think that it is so for many reasons, some of which are positive. If it can favour future rehabilitation, dismantling or recycling of the structures, so much the better.

Despite the British society having apparently taken advantage of general concern about sustainability with their business around “carbon footprints”, I am pleased to see this effort for promoting concern about the environment among yet another group; in this case, structural engineers.

Comments: (0)

Invisible services have become visible

Category: ⚐ EN

Over the last few days, the image of ¡Madrid Limpio! (Madrid Clean!) has suffered some tough attacks by the cleaning service of the city Metro system. The first day I went down to the underground since the stroke started, I couldn’t believe what I saw. It looked like a late 1970’s movie set on the rough streets of New York, where rival gangs were fighting. Infected. It’s bizarre to realise how dependant we are of invisible services. These services have become strong and visible this week. We depend on services we don’t know anything about. On the other hand, we see how much waste we produce in the Metro everyday.

Comments: (0)

behind the nobel, the business man

Category: ⚐ EN

Al Gore, Nobel 2007, has turned climate change into an excellent business, according to an article published in ELPAIS this Sunday. The fortune of the former vice-president of USA is calculated to be around 100 million dollars (when he started the campaign it was calculated to be 2 million). He gets 100 000 dollars or more per conference and he has consolidated a few companies working on the environment. It makes you think.

Comments: (0)

Do you know what SUSTAINABILITY is?

Category: ⚐ EN+eutv+sustainability+video

Here is a spot made by Surconsciente. These guys never stop amazing us with their original proposals.

Comments: (2)

Summary of round table: new spaces for diversity?

Category: ⚐ EN+design+technologies+urbanism

Last Wednesday, I (Domenico) had the chance to attend the event held at Medialab (Madrid) about Wikis and Knowledge Standards. I could only watch the round table chaired by Adolfo Estalella, who was joined by Antonio Lafuente, Platoniq and Juan Freire.

Antonio Lafuente talked about the capacity of new virtual communities to generate knowledge that would never be possible without the use of new technologies, such as wikis. He talked about the production process of lay knowledge, which obtains a percentage of “error” of 6%, that is, lower than what is obtained in normal scientific processes.

Platonig talked about some of their most interesting projects, such as the BCC Banco Común de Conocimientos (Shared Knowledge Bank), concerned about favouring free broadcasting networks and free contents (education p2p).

What I most liked about Juan Freire (who I finally met) was his thoughts about the wiki technology: it allows us to generate knowledge while we design it, something that previously couldn’t be done. I’d like to add that it also allows us to associate a static element (design) to a dynamic element (knowledge). He also talked about the concept of standard, describing it as something arbitrary, something that doesn’t depend on nature and that isn’t inevitable.

Talking about Wikipedia, he pointed out how the whole debate about its functioning is taking place with full transparency, thanks to the very essence of the wiki system. All this is new, very new. We were used to standing aside this kind of debates between a few “chosen” ones.

Wikis are introducing transparency standards never seen before. I think we could take example and start thinking about the possibility of similar standards applied to public spaces. Is there a public space where one can enjoy the same transparency standard as in wikis? What would this space be like? I will carry on thinking about this topic, see if something interesting comes up… what do you think?

Ps. I met Marilo from La Fundacio, who told me about a very interesting project: http://projecte3.pbwiki.com/ I will write more about this in future posts.

Comments: (0)

[urbanaccion.org] Urbanaccion exhibition at embajadores 27, Madrid

Category: ⚐ EN

The URBANACCION exhibition is on the streets.
From the 5th December, you can visit it at the plot in Embajadores 27 (Madrid). This is where the last workshop and urban action of the series Urbanaccion took place. This workshop was directed by Raumlabor (Matthias Ricks & Jan Liesegang, Berlín) and Ana Méndez de Andés.
Here are some photos of the place and the exhibition panels. We hope many of you can visit it and that this kind of manifestations and experiences can continue.
Pablo Saiz / Ana Méndez de Andés / [ecosistema urbano]
Commissioner URBANACCIÓN

Comments: (0)

Data base for 20th Century Spanish Architecture

Category: ⚐ EN+architecture+findings+internet+research

Newspaper ELPAIS published some weeks ago an article about the setting up of a vast data base of 20th Century buildings in Spain. You can access this catalogue from the website http://www.archxx-sudoe.es/, where you will find 5600 buildings in Spain, as well as Gibraltar and the South of France. This ambitious project sounds very interesting – it’s a shame the website doesn’t seem to work very well… (at least we have tried and weren’t successful). We will see how useful it can be, how much information it gives, etc. You can read more about it (in Spanish) from ELPAIS digital, where you can also see some pictures (beautiful lavadero de Betanzos, 1901)