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Un nuevo frente marítimo para Palma de Mallorca

Category: ⚐ ES+espacio público+sostenibilidad+urbanismo

En 2018, la ciudad de Palma de Mallorca se propuso reformar su paseo marítimo frente a la zona portuaria, y convocó un concurso abierto para ello. Hoy os contamos algunos detalles sobre nuestra propuesta, que quedó finalista.

El reto consiste, principalmente, convertir lo que ahora es una barrera, un borde, en un nuevo espacio urbano que conecte la ciudad con el puerto. Nosotros proponemos una transición en la forma de entender ese espacio público, desde concebirlo como un “paseo” lineal a verlo como un “frente” marítimo más amplio, un lugar donde la ciudad pueda expandir sus usos actuales y descubrir otros nuevos.

La propuesta es crear un espacio con nuevas cualidades, un eje cívico donde la ciudad pueda ver reflejada su identidad, aportando representatividad y, sobre todo, añadiendo a ese espacio valor de uso para ciudadanos y visitantes. No se trata, por tanto, solamente de un proyecto de pacificación del tráfico y renaturalización, sino de caracterización y activación.

El enfoque general del proyecto se puede desglosar en una serie de criterios o líneas de actuación. Estas líneas se han agrupado en cuatro “frentes” (integrado, ambiental, activo y conectado) entendidos como capas del frente costero que sintetizan las prioridades de la propuesta e ilustran la visión de la ciudad que la sustenta.


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On Cities Workshop by the Norman Foster Foundation

Category: ⚐ EN+city+events+news

Norman Foster Foundation On Cities Workshop

Belinda Tato and José Luis Vallejo will be participating in the On Cities Workshop, organised by the Norman Foster Foundation, which will take place this week (18 to 22 June 2018) in Madrid. The workshop will focus on Autonomous Innovative Communities, selecting a district in Madrid as a case-study for a research project that will be developed throughout the week. The On Cities Workshop will include seminars, lectures, one-to-one tutoring and urban architectural tours to learn more about the context of Madrid and it’s districts. During the course of the workshops, participants will have the opportunity to engage with the Norman Foster Foundation’s archive and research projects.

Can each community locally produce all of the energy, food, and clean water needed for basic living—requiring no centralised infrastructure? Can humans transition from ownership to sharing, while living and working in compact, agile, supportive environments? This workshop explores the premise that emerging urban innovations can dramatically reduce resources consumed by cities while simultaneously creating more livable, entrepreneurial communities.

‘We are living in an era of extreme urbanisation and rapid global warming’, states workshop mentor Kent Larson. ‘The challenges of both call for more than mere incremental adjustments.’

After reviewing applications submitted by hundreds of candidates from around the world, the selection committee awarded ten scholarships to students from the following universities and institutions: American University of Dubai, Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, United States; London School of Economics and Political Science, London, United Kingdom; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago de Chile, Chile; Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, Denmark; Technische Universiteit Delft, Delft, the Netherlands; Tongji University, Shanghai, China; Tsinghua University, Beijing, China; Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña, Barcelona, Spain and University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

These ten students will engage with a group of specialists through a series of seminars and lectures culminating in a five day workshop led by the Atelier mentor, Kent Larson, Director of MIT Media Lab City Science Group and Initiative, and his team. Nicholas Negroponte, Co-Founder and former Director of MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, United States will act as the Chief Advisor of the workshop tutoring the students through the research process.

The Academic Body spans a wide range of practitioners working in different fields interrelated with the City, including: Beatriz Colomina, Director of Graduate Studies, School of Architecture, Princeton University, Princeton, United States; Luis Cueto, General Coordinator for the Mayor in Madrid, Madrid City Hall, Madrid, Spain; Anupama Kundoo, Principal, Anupama Kundoo Architects, Madrid, Spain/Auroville, India; Winy Maas, Co-Founder and Director of MVRDV and Director of the Why Factory, Delft, the Netherlands; Tim Stonor, Managing Director of Space Syntax, London, United Kingdom; Leonor Tarrasón, Director of Environmental Solutions, Norwegian Institute for Air Research, Oslo, Norway; Belinda Tato and José Luis Vallejo, Founders and Directors of Ecosistema Urbano, Madrid, Spain/Miami, United States.

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Ecosistema Urbano en el Congreso “Menos arquitectura, más ciudad”

Category: ⚐ ES+eventos+noticias

V Congreso Internacional de Arquitectura y Sociedad "Menos arquitectura, más ciudad"

Belinda Tato participará mañana jueves 14 de junio en el congreso “Menos arquitectura, más ciudad” en Pamplona, en el que también participan con ponencias Eduardo Mendoza, Leonardo Padura, Manuela Carmena, Joan Clos, Iwan Baan, Dominique Perrault, Farshid Moussavi, Salvador Rueda, Deyan Sudjic, Jan Gehl y Jaime Lerner. De la presentación del congreso:

Con esta quinta edición del congreso Congreso Internacional de Arquitectura y Sociedad se inicia un nuevo ciclo centrado en la ciudad. La sesión inaugural correrá a cargo de escritores que examinarán la ciudad como un ámbito de libertad, introduciendo los dilemas del gobierno municipal que centran la segunda sesión, encomendada a alcaldes de grandes ciudades, cerrándose este primer día con una sesión que enfrentará las visiones urbanas de un fotógrafo y un arquitecto. El segundo día del congreso se abrirá con una sesión donde arquitectas en ejercicio presentarán su obra desde una óptica urbana, para seguir con personalidades destacadas de la teoría y la crítica que han prestado en su trabajo atención a la ecología política de la ciudad, cerrándose el evento con una reflexión sobre la movilidad sostenible y el futuro de la ciudad, que será abordada por protagonistas de la transformación urbana contemporánea.

Seguir el evento en directo

Más información en la página oficial del evento

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Impostergable | Workshop en la Bienal de Chile

Category: ⚐ ES+arquitectura+noticias+urbanismo

Los próximos días 1 a 5 de noviembre José Luis Vallejo participará en el workshop internacional de la XX Bienal de Arquitectura y Urbanismo de Chile en Valparaíso.

Este taller tiene como objetivo servir de plataforma práctica para los diálogos, conversaciones y temas que se discutirán durante el desarrollo de la bienal. Así, el Workshop se instalará como una oportunidad para que los estudiantes, guiados por un equipo de tutores, planteen a través de herramientas proyectuales soluciones tangibles a las temáticas impostergables evidenciadas durante la bienal, en la ciudad de Valparaíso.

La actividad propone centrar la mirada en las zonas menos observadas y más vulnerables de Valparaíso: las quebradas. ¿Cómo se debe construir en estos sistemas topográficos?, ¿Cómo se puede diseñar un proceso de transformación de los cerros?, ¿Cómo se puede intervenir en las zonas más desfavorecidas de Valparaíso?. De esta forma se plantea la construcción de los diálogos que den respuestas a la precariedad de las quebradas de Valparaíso, postergados e informales. De estas propuestas se espera que puedan imaginar y diseñar los procesos de transformación arquitectónica y urbana necesarios para la ciudad.

Profesores:

ECOSISTEMA URBANO ( José Luis Vallejo) – España
PRÁCTICA (Jaime Daroca + José Ramón Sierra + José Mayoral) – España
ADAMO – FAIDEN (Sebastián Adamo) – Argentina
ESPIRAL (León Duval + Jorge Brady + Luis Felipe Venegas) – Chile
BARCLAY & CROUSSE (Jean Pierre Crousse + Sandra Barclay) – Perú

Conferencias:

Gabinete de Arquitectura (Solano Benitez + Gloria Cabral) – Paraguay
Iñaqui Carnicero – España
Rahul Mehrotra – India
Hashim Sarkis – USA/Libano
Gehl Architects – Dinamarca
MGM (José Morales) – España
BARCLAY&CROUSSE – Perú
Ecosistema Urbano – España

Más información: www.impostergable.cl/workshop

Fechas: 1 al 5 de noviembre de 2017
Lugar: Parque Cultural del Valparaíso

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Ecosistema Urbano is recognized as a 2017 Social Design Circle Honoree by the Curry Stone Design Prize

Category: ⚐ EN+design+ecosistema urbano+news+urban social design

We are honored to announce that Ecosistema Urbano has been recognized as a 2017 Social Design Circle Honoree by the Curry Stone Design Prize.

What is the Curry Stone Design Prize?

The Curry Stone Design Prize is awarded each year to honor innovative projects that use design to address pressing social justice issues. Supported by the Curry Stone Foundation, the Prize highlights and rewards projects that improve daily living conditions of people in communities around the world. The Prize acknowledges work that is considered emerging in the professional and public consciousness.

What is the Social Design Cirle?

This year, in honor of the 10th anniversary, the Curry Stone Design Prize assembled a group of 100 of the most compelling social design practitioners of the last decade, a project called The Social Design Circle. As the organizers of the prize refer: These are practices which have captivated and inspired us over the years, as we’ve built a global community of visionaries, activists and game changers. The Social Design Circle project gives answer to what are defined to be the 12 most urgent questions in social design practice. Each month a new topic is adressed through a new open question. Answers come from different practicioners among the 100 winners.  The questions up to date asked are:

Should designers be outlaws?   Is the right to housing real? Can design challenge inequality? Can design prevent disaster? Can we design community engagement?

Can design reclaim public space?

Ecosistema Urbano has been included in the category “Can design reclaim public space?” of the Circle, together with other colleagues and collectives as Asiye eTafuleniBasurama, Collectif Etc., EXYZT, Interboro,  Interbreeding Field, Studio Basar, Kounkuey Design Initiative, Y A + K and Raumlabor Berlin.

Here follows the report of the jury regarding our work:

We honor Ecosistema Urbano particularly for their progressive ideas on community participation. The group has worked to update the very notion of “community participation” through the development of online tools which encourage global participation on local projects. The group has developed several apps to collect community input throughout the design process. New technologies work to break down barriers which traditionally inhibited the full participation of community. Many of our ‘communities’ today are in fact digital, so the idea of community participation must be updated as well.

In a physical space, the group is best known for their green projects like Ecobulevar – a project of ‘air trees’ in the Madrid suburb of Vallecas. The project is intended to be temporary, but creates the same sort of community space that one would find in an old growth allée.

The air trees are made from repurposed industrial materials such as recycled plastic, greenhouse fabric, rubber tires. They contain rooting vegetation and atomizers that cool and moisten the air in the cylinder and around it (8oC to 10oC cooler than the rest of the street in summer). The cylinders can be used for public gatherings, and solar panels provide electricity for lighting when needed (excess energy is sold back to the grid and helps fund the maintenance of the structures).

This and other sustainability projects like Ecopolis in Madrid speak to a shared sense of community responsibility and interaction.

Moreover, an interview we gave for the occasion together with our colleagues of Interboro constitute the episode 24 and 25 “Tools for urban action” of the Social Design Insight podcast. You can listen to episode 24 here, while the episode 25 will be shared on Thursday June 8 on Curry Stone Design Prize webpage.

Stay tuned!

 

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Ruralism: The Future of Villages and Small Towns in an Urbanizing World | Book and Interview

Category: ⚐ EN+publications+sustainability+urbanism

Ruralism: The Future of Villages and Small Towns in an Urbanizing World book

Last year we were contacted by Vanessa Miriam Carlow from the Institute for Sustainable Urbanism to make an interview for the book Ruralism: The Future of Villages and Small Towns in an Urbanizing World. This book is dedicated to the significance of rural spaces ‘as a starting point for transformation’. Different international experts were asked to reflect on rural spaces from an architectural, cultural, gender-oriented, ecological, and political perspective and ask how a (new) vision of the rural can be formulated. As the introduction states:

In an urbanizing world, the city is considered the ultimate model and the measure of all things. The attention of architects and planners has been almost entirely focused on the city for many years, while rural spaces are all too often associated with visions of economic decline, stagnation and resignation. However, rural spaces are transforming almost as radically as cities. Furthermore, rural spaces play a decisive role in the sustainable development of our living environment—inextricably interlinked with the city as a resource or reservoir. The formerly segregated countryside is now traversed by global and regional flows of people, goods, waste, energy, and information, linking it to urban systems and enabling them to function in the first place.

Today we are publishing the interview, answered by Belinda Tato. If you find it interesting, there is much more in the book! We recommend you to get a printed copy here. Here is the full transcript of the interview:

Q: Your office name, ecosistema urbano, brings with it a certain tension that somehow combines unexpected contrasts. How did you come to this name and what do you want to express with it?

A: It took us a while to choose a name or concept that communicated our interests and the complex reality of urban issues we face. We found the idea of ‘ecosystem’ an appealing one, its definition implies a group of interconnected elements formed by the interaction of a community with their environment. This relationship between the natural and the artificial aims for a balance between these two worlds, and reflects the issues we care about when designing architecture and practicing territorial and urban planning.

Q: In your presentation, you said that during your studies the planning approach mainly focused on infrastructure and the physical environment. How would you describe the situation today?

A: I believe there is a clear shift between the object-focused educational approach from the nineties towards a more polyhedral approach and understanding of cities and design that is happening today. There is a growing interest in considering processes and interactions and taking the social, cultural, or economic aspects into account leading to more comprehensive and ambitious proposals to transform reality.

Q: Which approach does your office have today? How would you describe the current role of the architect and planner?

A: That is not an easy question to answer briefly! We recently made an effort to try to summarize our approach and the result is a kind of manifesto in ten points.

Urban. Social. Design. Three words that describe our dedication: the urban context, the social approach, and the design understood as an action, an interaction, and a tool for transformation. Understanding types of behaviour and processes at different levels is crucial.

Creativity is a network. In a globalized world, creativity is the capacity to connect things innovatively and thus we understand that the protagonist of the creative process is not just a team but an open and multi-layered design network.

Community first. Cities are created and maintained by people for people, and urban development only makes sense when the community cares about it. We work to empower the communities to drive the projects that affect them, so social relevance is guaranteed.

Going glocal. Just as cities have residents and visitors, and planning is made at different scales, every urban project is born in a constant movement between the direct experience and specificity of the local context, and the global, shared flow of information and knowledge.

Accepting –and managing– conflict. Participation, like conversation, means letting all the points of view be raised and listened to. Public debate only makes sense if all the stakeholders are involved. Every project affecting the city has to deal with both opposition and support, consensus and contradiction.

Assuming complexity. Encompassing the complexity of the urban environment requires simplifying it. Instead, we prefer to admit its vast character and understand our work as a thin layer –with limited and, at times, unpredictable effects– carefully inserted into that complexity.

Learning by doing. Our experience grows through practice. We know what we can do, and we challenge ourselves to do what we think we should be doing. We solve the unexpected issues as we move, and then we take our lesson from the process and the results.

Planning… and being flexible. Urban development is what happens in the city while others try to plan it. We think ahead, make our dispositions, but we are always ready for reality to change our plans… mostly for the better. Rigidity kills opportunity, participation and urban life.

Embracing transdisciplinarity: We assume that our role as professionals is evolving, disciplinary bonds are loosening, urban projects are complex, and circumstances are continuously changing. This requires open-minded professionals, flexible enough to adapt their roles and skills and to use unusual tools.

Technology as a social tool: Today’s technology enables us to better relate and interact with each other and with the surrounding environment. As the digital-physical divide narrows and the possibilities multiply, it becomes an increasingly significant element in urban social life.

Keeping it open: Open means transparent, accessible, inclusive, collaborative, modifiable, reproducible. Open means more people can be part of it and benefit from it. These are the attributes that define a project made for the common good.

Ruralism: The Future of Villages and Small Towns in an Urbanizing World book

Q: From your presentation, it emerged that the integration of the local conditions—as a climatic and social issue—represent an important focus of your work. How do you rate the relationship between global-local influence in relation to the architectural or urban design?

A: This is a very interesting question, and one we have asked ourselves several times. We have worked mostly abroad during the last years, and over and over we find the same situation where we have to balance the local and the global dimensions of design and planning. Local conditions are always the main terms of reference for our work. They give accuracy and pertinence to our proposals. They not only determine the boundaries we have to respect, the resources we have available, or the particularities we have to take into account, but also the potential for improvement that each particular place has. Local context is a source of invaluable site-specific knowledge, even if that knowledge is not always conscious or apparent, especially to locals. Opening a project to participation is a great way to make local values stand out and locals become self-aware… if you are able to ask the right questions and then read between the lines, of course. But relying solely on local conditions rarely provides the best solutions. You usually find situations that have become stagnant precisely by the lack of confrontation and external feedback. Then you need to confront the local ‘ways,’ often loaded with prejudices or relative narrowness, or with something else. And that is where global influence comes into play: the contrast, the opposition that clears concepts, breaks groupthink and gives a relative measure to local values. Global is the mirror that local can use to become self-conscious. We could speak of bringing knowledge from the global to the local, or even generating local knowledge by confronting it with the global. But it is also creativity that is being created or transferred. The ability to connect, articulate, and interpret different contexts is crucial whenever a new approach is needed and local conditions have proven insufficient to deliver it.

Q: You showed us some practical examples of your current work, which pursues sustainable approaches in terms of water recycling systems for the kindergarten in Madrid or climatic adaptations for the Expo pavilion in Shanghai. What opportunities do you see for the implementation of sustainable planning tools or strategies in larger, urban scale projects?

A: Urban planning and urban design have a great impact on people’s lives, shaping the way we live, move, relate, consume, etc… In addition to this, its impact will be of a long term as it is less ephemeral than architecture. For these reasons, it is important to design integrating with nature, its cycles and processes, taking advantage of the environment and optimizing interventions.

Q: Let us take a closer look at the countryside: in the current city-centered discourse, rural spaces are often dismissed as declining or stagnating. However, rural spaces also play a critical role in sustainable development, as an inextricably linked counterpart, but also as a complement to the growing city, as extraction sites, natural reservoirs for food, fresh water and air, or as leisure spaces. Do we need to formulate a (new) vision of ‘ruralism’? What would be your definition of the future rural? What new concepts for the rural exist in Spain?

A: When talking about ecosystems, it is crucial to understand the interwoven connections between the urban and the rural, and how they relate and affect each other in a critical balance. Although the urban expansion has some environmental consequences, there are also some interesting phenomena happening. As today’s IT keeps us connected and allows us to work remotely, this neoruralism enables us to have a renewed vision of the territory and its possibilities, offering development opportunities in towns that have been abandoned for decades, for instance in Spain. This new trend is transforming these abandoned towns into new activity hubs, creating a new migration flux from cities. It will be possible to measure the socioeconomic impact of this activity in a few years.

Ruralism: The Future of Villages and Small Towns in an Urbanizing World book

Q: The once remote and quiet countryside is now traversed by global and regional flows of people, goods, waste, energy, and information, interrelating it with the larger urban system. Is a new set of criteria for understanding and appreciating the rural required? How would you measure what is rural and what is urban?

A: In a globalized world with an unprecedented ongoing process of urbanization, and under the impact of climate change and global warming, it is becoming more and more difficult to precisely define the limits between the rural and the urban as the urban footprint is somehow atomizing and gobbling the rural. Cities are the combination and result of the simultaneous interaction between nature and artificial technology, and their ecological footprint expansion forces the extraction of natural resources from even further sources, with obvious environmental consequences. At the local scale, it is necessary to point out the close relationship between the way a city relates to its environment, the way it manages its natural resources, and the quality of life it can provide to its inhabitants. This could be summarized as: the more sustainable a city/territory is, the better its inhabitants will live.

Q: What role do villages and smaller towns have in a world in which the majority live in cities? Could you comment on and describe a bit about the situation in Spain or the other countries you have been working in?

A: In cities, innovation and creativity concentrate and emerge naturally. The rural environment also requires people willing to create, to innovate, to connect, etc…. This creative ruralism could lead to the creation of eco-techno-rural environments, which would provide some of the features of the rural combined with specific services of the urban…the perfect setting for innovation to take place!

Q: Which role could the rural play at the frontlines of regional transformation and sustainability? What are the existing and potential connections between urban and rural spaces?

A: The rural could provide a complementary lifestyle for people fleeing from the city to re-connect or re-localize. At the same time, we would need to explore and expand technology’s possibilities, pushing its actual limits, and foreseeing potential new services that could enhance life in the rural by making it more diverse, fulfilling, and even… more global.

Q: And what role can urban design play in preparing rural life and space for the future? Is the rural an arena for ‘urban’ design at all?

A: I think the challenge would be to create the conditions for social life and interaction. We do have the conditions for that activity to happen digitally, but how can we foster social activity in low-density environments? Would it be necessary to create small urban nodes in the rural? These issues are interesting challenges we have to face conceptually and design-wise.

Are you interested in this topic? You can get the book here…

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X International urban conference “City 2016. City management” in Katowice

Category: ⚐ EN+city+ecosistema urbano+events

Salesiam Museum in Katowice - photo by

Salesiam Museum in Katowice – photo by Ziemowit Cabanek on Flickr

Next Monday, November 14th Belinda Tato will be giving the ‘keynote speech’ on urban social design at the X International Urban Conference “City 2016. City Management” in Katowice, Poland.

This event is organised by Jan Olbrycht, member of the European Parliament, and Think Silesia, a regional think tank based in Katowice. Participants will reflect on environmentally friendly cities, discuss the conclusions on Habitat III and the opportunities behind big data and open data.

You can see the event announcement and the program at the URBAN Intergroup website.

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Seminario de Activación de Barrios. Ecosistema urbano en Santiago de Chile

Category: ⚐ ES+ciudad+colaboraciones+comunicación+ecosistema urbano+participación+urbanism




logotipo-revive-barrios

El pasado 14-15 Junio participamos en Santiago de Chile en el Seminario Activación de Barrios, parte del Programa de Revitalización de Barrios e Infraestructura Patrimonial Emblemática. El taller se ha realizado en el marco del programa de Revitalización de Barrios que cuenta con el financiamiento del BID, Banco InterAmericano de Desarrollo y con la colaboración de SUBDERE del Ministerio del Interior de Chile como organismo ejecutor. El Seminario se ha organizado en colaboración con el Centro de Ecología Paisaje y Urbanismo del DesignLab de la Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez.  El evento surge con el objetivo de ser una ocasión de formación y capacitación sobre los temas de activación y participación ciudadana en la gestión de las dinámicas urbanas para técnicos y funcionarios de diferentes áreas de varias municipalidades de Chile. Los 70 asistentes al seminario han llegado desde 5 municipios de Chile, con contextos y escalas muy diferentes (Santiago, Lota, Coquimbo, Arica y Cartagena). Cada municipio participante del programa debe elaborar un Plan de Revitalización Barrial PRB. El PRB incluye un conjunto de acciones sobre mejoras en las infraestructuras pero también una serie de acciones blandas para poder otorgar vida y activar de manera sostenible los barrios.

photo: Ximena Ramos Ríos

Durante la jornada del 14 se presentaron varias experiencias internacionales alrededor de 3 ejes temáticos: Innovación, con intervenciones entre otros de Alexandros Tsamis, Luis Valenzuela y Jeannette Sordi (implicada activamente en el proyecto de investigación Recycle Italy),  Participación, debate moderado por Felipe Vera y animado con la presentación de las experiencias de Ecosistema Urbano, Diego Uribe y Javier Vergara Petrescu entre otros, y Activación, bajo la coordinación de Veronica Adler, y con intervenciones de Andreina Seijas (recientemente hemos publicado un artículo de su investigación sobre urbanismo nocturno), Fernando Portal de Mil M2 Cuadrados, Angelica Figueroa y Carolina Pino.

Durante la siguiente jornada, Belinda Tato ha moderado un Taller práctico, cuyo objetivo era presentar y compartir herramientas innovadoras vinculadas con intervenciones blandas y procesos de participación ciudadana en la revitalización barrial. Para esto se han desarrollado formatos específicos y mesas de trabajo en las que los participantes han podido interactuar, intercambiar experiencias y desarrollar sus propias estrategias de comunicación, lo que resultó en una sesión distendida e inspiradora.

photo: Ximena Ramos Ríos

Exposición

photo: Ximena Ramos Ríos

photo: Ximena Ramos Ríos

 

El reto principal del día consistía en crear una hoja de ruta para la formulación de un plan de intervenciones blandas nutrido de los inputs recibidos el día anterior y apoyado en una entidad operativa territorial. Se trata de definir estrategias que tengan legitimidad en el ámbito de acción, que sean capaz de construir confianza y de establecer acuerdos vinculantes, empujar proyectos, dar soporte a iniciativas de ambos tipos, y eventualmente contribuir a diluir la propia diferenciación de los proyectos como “institucionales” o “ciudadanos”, abordando transformaciones “de, por y para la ciudad”.

Exposición

photo: Ximena Ramos Ríos

photo: Ximena Ramos Ríos

Estamos muy satisfechos con los resultados del taller y esperamos que la actividad sirva para empujar e inspirar el desarrollo de nuevas herramientas urbanas.

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Public Space for the Extreme @ GSD-Harvard

Category: ⚐ EN+architecture+city+networkedurbanism+research+sustainability+urbanism+work in progress

Breathing Streets, courtesy of Nan Liu and Adelene Yu Ling Tan

Breathing Streets, courtesy of Nan Liu and Adelene Yu Ling Tan

During 2015 spring semester Ecosistema Urbano principals Jose Luis Vallejo and Belinda Tato taught a studio at the GSD in Harvard, focused on the design of socio-environmentally responsive public spaces for the city center of Muharraq, in Bahrain. During the semester the students worked to develop ideas and designs to improve the few remaining public spaces in the city, almost completely wiped out by the continuous transformation of the antique city fabric into a contemporary -and rather generic- one, that basically followed the “wide car street + housing block” development pattern, during the last 50 years the city has completely lost its contact with the water, substituted by a wide belt of highways and also its interstitial, small public spaces, almost completely transformed into parking lots. Always considering the climatic conditions that can be easily defined harsh and extreme, the aim of those projects was to foster the use of public space, in a city where public space is not only often abandoned and absent but also where the right to meet and gather is strongly discouraged.


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Ciclo “Nuevas arquitecturas para nuevos horizontes” en Madrid

Category: ⚐ ES+arquitectura+eventos

El próximo martes 4 de octubre comienza el ciclo “Nuevas arquitecturas para nuevos horizontes”, donde diferentes estudios —Barozzi/Veiga, Carme Pinós, Nieto/Sobejano, Josep Bohigas, Harquitectes, Ecosistema Urbano, Batlle i Roig, Churtichaga, Quadra-Salcedo, SOL 89, Arquitecturia, Arturo Frediani, RCR y Emilio Tuñón— expondrán algunos de sus trabajos.

Desde Ecosistema Urbano contaremos uno de nuestros últimos proyectos, Cuenca Red, sobre el que también podéis leer varios posts en este mismo blog.

Las charlas, comisariadas y moderadas por Llàtzer Moix, se han estructurado en cuatro jornadas, cada una con un enfoque:

Horizontes Exteriores: La experiencia de los profesionales españoles en el extranjero durante los años de la crisis.

Horizontes sociales o colaborativos: Sobre la labor de los profesionales que priorizan una arquitectura de carácter social y colaborativo.

Horizontes de recuperación: Una aproximación a la labor de los arquitectos que renuevan el medio construido y el natural.

Horizontes singulares: Cuatro miradas a cuatro arquitecturas particulares, no adjetivadas.

Clic aquí para ver el programa completo

Fechas y horas:

4 de octubre a las 19.00h: Horizontes exteriores.
18 de octubre a las 19.00h: Horizontes sociales o colaborativos.
9 de noviembre a las 19.00h: Horizontes de recuperación.
23 de noviembre a las 19.00h: Horizontes singulares.

Lugar: Centre Cultural Blanquerna, c/Alcalá 44, Madrid