Republished from Remix the Commons

Joan Subirats(1) (UAB) Conferencia FEPSU 2016

AA: In your recent article in La Vanguardia(2), you set out a framework for a cultural policy, you refer to putting into practice the key community values that should underpin that policy… Maybe we could start there?

JS: For me, whereas in the 20th century the defining conflict was between freedom and equality – and this marked the tension between right and left throughout the 20th century because in a way this is the frame in which capitalism and the need for social protection evolved together with the commodification of life while at the same time the market called for freedom – ie: no rules, no submission. But the need for protection demanded equality. But in the 21st century there is rejection of the notion of protection linked to statism: Nancy Fraser published an article(3) in the New Left Review, it is a re-reading of Polanyi and she claims that this double movement between commodification and protection is still valid, but that the State-based protection typical of the 20th century, where equality is guaranteed by the State, clashes since the end of the 20th century with the growing importance of heterogeneity, diversity and personal autonomy. Therefore, if in order to obtain equality, we have to be dependent on what the State does, this is going to be a contradiction…. So we could translate those values that informed the definition of policies in the 20th century, in 21st century terms they would be the idea of freedom (or personal autonomy, the idea of empowerment, not subjection, non-dependence) and at the same time equality, but no longer simply equality of opportunities but also equality of condition because we have to compensate for what is not the same (equal) in society. If you say “equal opportunities”, that everyone has access to cultural facilities, to libraries, you are disregarding the fact that the starting conditions of people are not the same, this is the great contribution of Amartya Sen, no? You have to compensate for unequal starting situations because otherwise you depoliticize inequality and consider that inequality is the result of people’s lack of effort to get out of poverty. So equality yes, but the approach is different. And we must incorporate the idea of diversity as a key element in the recognition of people and groups on the basis of their specific dignity. That seems easy to say, but in reality it is complicated, especially if you relate it to culture, because culture has to do with all these things: it has to do with the construction of your personality, it has to do with equal access to culture just as cultural rights and culture have to do with the recognition of different forms of knowledge and culture – canonical culture, high culture, popular culture, everyday culture, neighbourhood culture …
So for me, a cultural policy should be framed within the triple focus of personal autonomy, equality and diversity. And this is contradictory, in part, with the cultural policies developed in the past, where there is usually confusion between equality and homogeneity. In other words, the left has tended to consider that equality meant the same thing for everyone and that is wrong, isn’t it?, because you are confusing equality with homogeneity. The opposite of equality is inequality, the opposite of homogeneity is diversity. So you have to work with equality and diversity as values that are not antagonistic, but can be complementary. And this is a challenge for public institutions because they do not like heterogeneity, they find it complicated because it is simpler to treat everyone the same, as the administrative law manual used to prescribe `indifferent efficiency’: it is a way of understanding inequality as indifference, right?

AA: In your article you also talk about the opposition between investing in infrastructures versus creating spaces and environments that are attractive to creators and you put an emphasis on the generation of spaces. What is being done, what has been done, what could be done about this?

JS : In Barcelona we want to ensure that the city’s cultural policies do not imply producing culture itself, but rather to try to influence the values in the production processes that already exist, in the facilities, in the cultural and artistic infrastructures: the role of the city council, of the municipality, is not so much to produce culture as to contribute to the production of culture. Which is different, helping to produce culture…. Obviously, the city council will give priority to those initiatives that coincide with the values, with the normative approach that we promote. There are some exceptions, for example, the Grec festival in Barcelona(4) in July, or the Mercé(5), which is the Festa Mayor, where the city council does in fact subsidize the production of culture, so some productions are subsidised but generally what we have is a policy of aid to creators. What is being done is that 11 creative factories (fablabs) have been built, these are factories with collectives that manage them chosen through public tenders. There are now 3 factories of circus and visual arts, 2 factories of dance creation, one factory of more global creation housed at Fabra & Coats, 3 theatre factories and 2 visual arts and technology sites. So there are 11 factories of different sorts and there are plans to create others, for example in the field of feminist culture where we are in discussion with a very well consolidated group : normally all these creative factories have their management entrusted to collectives that already become highly consolidated in the process of creation and that need a space to ensure their continuity. Often the city council will cede municipal spaces to these collectives, sometimes through public competitions where the creators are asked to present their project for directing a factory. This is one aspect. Another aspect is what is called living culture, which is a programme for the promotion of cultural activities that arise from the community or from collectives in the form of cooperatives and this is a process of aid to collectives that are already functioning, or occasionally to highlight cultural activities and cultural dynamics that have existed for a long time but have not been dignified, that have not been valued, for example the Catalan rumba of the Gypsies, which is a very important movement in Barcelona that emerged from the gypsy community of El Raval, where there were some very famous artists like Peret. There we invested in creating a group to work on the historical memory of the rumba, looking for the roots of this movement, where it came from and why. Then some signposts were set up in streets where this took place, such as La Cera in El Raval, where there are two murals that symbolise the history of the Catalan rumba and the gypsy community in this area so that this type of thing is publicly visible. That is the key issue for culture: a recognition that there are many different cultures.

Then there is the area of civic centres: approximately 15% of the civic centres in the city are managed by civic entities as citizen heritage, and those civic centres also have cultural activities that they decide on, and the city council, the municipality helps them develop the ideas put forward by the entities that manage those centres.

So, if we put all those things together, we could talk about a culture of the urban commons. It is still early stages, this is still more of a concept than a reality, but the underlying idea is that in the end the density and the autonomous cultural-social fabric will be strong enough to be resilient to political changes. In other words, that you have helped to build cultural practices and communities that are strong and autonomous enough that they are not dependent on the political conjuncture. This would be ideal. A bit like the example I often cite about the housing cooperatives in Copenhagen, that there was 50% public housing in Copenhagen, and a right-wing government privatised 17% of that public housing, but it couldn’t touch the 33% of housing that was in the hands of co-operatives. Collective social capital has been more resilient than state assets: the latter is more vulnerable to changes in political majorities.

AA: You also speak of situated culture which I think is very important: setting it in time and space. Now Facebook has announced it is coming to Barcelona so the Barcelona brand is going to be a brand that includes Facebook and its allies. But your conception of a situated culture is more about a culture where social innovation, participation, popular creativity in the community are very important…

JS : Yes, it seems contradictory. In fact what you’re asking is the extent to which it makes sense to talk about situated culture in an increasingly globalized environment which is more and more dependent on global platforms. I believe that tension exists and conflict exists, this is undeniable, the city is a zone of conflict, therefore, the first thing we have to accept is that the city is a battleground between political alternatives with different cultural models. It is very difficult for a city council to set out univocal views of a cultural reality that is intrinsically plural. Talking about situated culture is an attempt to highlight the significance of the distinguishing factors that Barcelona possesses in its cultural production. This does not mean that this situated culture should be a strictly localist culture – a situated culture does not mean a culture that cuts off global links – it is a culture that relates to the global on the basis of its own specificity. What is most reprehensible from my point of view are cultural dynamics that have a global logic but that can just as well be here or anywhere else. And it’s true that the platforms generate this. An example: the other day the former minister of culture of Brazil, Lluca Ferreira, was here and talked about a program of living culture they developed, and they posted a photograph of some indigenous people where the man wore something that covered his pubic parts but the woman’s breasts were naked. So Facebook took the photograph off the site, and when the Minister called Facebook Brazil to say ‘what is going on?’, they told him that they didn’t have any duty towards the Brazilian government, that the only control over them was from a judge in San Francisco and that, therefore, if the judge in San Francisco forced them to put the photograph back, they would put it back, otherwise they wouldn’t have to listen to any minister from Brazil or anywhere else. In the end, there was a public movement of protest, and they put the photo back. The same thing happened here a few days ago, a group from a municipal theatre creation factory put up a poster with a man’s ass advertising a play by Virginia Wolff and Facebook took their entire account off the net – not just the photograph, they totally removed them from Facebook. And here too Facebook said that they are independent and that only the judge from San Francisco and so on. I believe that this is the opposite of situated culture because it is a global cultural logic, but at the same time it allows itself to be censored in Saudi Arabia, in China, that is to say it has different codes in each place. So to speak of situated culture means to speak of social transformation, of the relationship between culture and social transformation situated in the context in which you are working. But at the same time to have the will to dialogue with similar processes that exist in any other part of the world and that is the strength of a situated culture. And those processes of mutuality, of hybridization, that can happen when you have a Pakistani community here, you have a Filipino community, you have a Chinese community, you have a Gypsy community, you have an Italian community, you have an Argentinean community: they can be treated as typical folkloric elements in a theme park, or you can try to generate hybridization processes. Now at the Festival Grec this year there will be poetry in Urdu from the Pakistanis, there will be a Filipino theatre coming and a Filipino film fest at the Filmoteca – and this means mixing, situating, the cultural debate in the space where it is happening and trying to steep it in issues of cultural diversity. What I understand is that we need to strive for a local that is increasingly global, that this dialogue between the local and the global is very important.

AA: Returning to social innovation and popular creativity, social innovation is also a concept taken up pretty much everywhere: how is it understood here? Taking into account that in the world of the commons, Catalonia, and especially Barcelona, is very well known for its fablabs, which are also situated in this new era. How then do you understand social innovation and how do you see the relationship between education and social innovation?

JS : What I am trying to convey is that the traditional education system is doing little to prepare people and to enhance inclusive logics in our changing and transforming society, so in very broad lines I would say that if health and education were the basic redistributive policies of the 20th century, in the 21st century we must incorporate culture as a basic redistributive policy. Because before, the job market had very specific demands for the education sector: it knew very well what types of job profiles it needed because there was a very Taylorist logic to the world of work – what is the profile of a baker, of a plumber, of a miller? How many years you have to study for this kind of work. There is now a great deal of uncertainty about the future of the labour market, about how people will be able to work in the future and the key words that appear are innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship, flexibility, ability to understand a diverse world, teamwork , being open to new ideas: this has little to do with traditional educational profiles, but it has much to do with culture, with things that allow you to acquire that backpack of basic tools that will help you navigate in a much more uncertain environment. And for me, to find the right connection between culture and education is very important because it allows the educational system to constantly transform itself by taking advantage of the creative potential of an environment that is much more accessible now than before because of new technologies, and therefore to make the transition from a deductive system where there is a teacher who knows and tells people what they need to know – to an inductive system: how do we explore what we need to know in order to be able to act. And that more inductive, more experimental logic has to do with creativity whereas the traditional education system didn’t postulate creativity, it postulated your ability to learn what someone else had decided you needed to study. It’s art, it is culture that allows you to play in that field much more easily …

Translated from Spanish by Nancy Thede.

1 Joan Subirats is Commissioner for culture in the city government of Barcelona led by the group Barcelona en comu. He is also professor of political science at the Universitat
autonoma de Barcelona and founder of the Institute on Governance and Public Policy.

2 “Salvara la cultura a las ciudades?”, La Vanguardia (Barcelona), Culturals supplement, 12
May 2018, pp. 20-21. https://www.lavanguardia.com/cultura/20180511/443518454074/cultura-ciudadesbarcelona-crisis.html

3 Nancy Fraser, “A Triple Movement”, New Left Review 81, May-June 2013. Published in Spanish in Jean-Louis Laville and José Luis Coraggio (Eds.), La izquierda del
siglo XXI. Ideas y diálogo Norte-Sur para un proyecto necesario Icaria, Madrid 2018.

4 Festival Grec, an annual multidisciplinary festival in Barcelona, now in its 42nd year. It is
named for the Greek Theatre built for the 1929 Universal Exhibition in Barcelona:
http://lameva.barcelona.cat/grec/en/.

5 Barcelona’s annual ‘Festival of Festivals’ begins on Sept 24, day of Our Lady of Mercy, a city holiday in Barcelona. It especially highlights catalan and barcelonian cultural traditions and in recent years has especially featured neighbourhood cultural activities like street theatre. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Mercè.

Photo by PJ Nelson

The post Interview with Joan Subirats: The challenges of a cultural policy for the city appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Description

“Funding the Cooperative City explores experiments in community-led urban development in European cities. This book is based on a series of workshops (Rotterdam, Berlin and Paris in 2014; Budapest, Madrid, Rome, Rotterdam, Bratislava, Prague and Warsaw in 2016), site visits, interviews and research into the new financial and economic models of community-run spaces.
Funding the Cooperative City focuses on the post-welfare transition of today’s European societies: with austerity measures and the financialisation of real estate stocks and urban services, the gradual withdrawal of the state and municipal administrations from providing certain facilities and maintaining certain spaces have prompted citizen initiatives and professional groups to organise their own services and venues. The self-organisation of new spaces of work, culture and social welfare was made possible by various socio-economic circumstances: unemployment, solidarity networks, changing real estate prices and ownership patters created opportunities for stepping out of the regular dynamisms of real estate development. In some cases, cooperative ownership structures exclude the possibility of real estate speculation, in others, new welfare services are integrated in local economic tissues, relying on unused resources and capacities. The new cooperative development processes also witnessed the emergence of new types of investors, operating along principles of ethics or sustainability, or working on moving properties off the market.
Edited by the founders of the European community planning organisation Eutropian, Funding the Cooperative City aims at introducing and contextualising innovative practices among citizen initiatives, socially engaged private practices, financial institutions as well as municipalities when it comes to inventing new ways to enable, finance and govern community-run spaces. By looking at the economic contexts in which these initiatives unfold and the social challenges to which they give answers, as well as by analysing the ownership, management and economic models and urban impacts of the presented projects, the book highlights new urban development tendencies and emerging actors in contemporary European societies.
This collection brings together protagonists from various cities to help shaping a new European culture of urban development based on community-driven initiatives, civic economic models and cooperative ownership; its goal is to highlight the importance, the values and capacities of citizen-run spaces and services to all actors in the field of urban development and management, to give them tools to facilitate and strengthen these initiatives, and to inspire new commitments and frameworks enabling similar experiments to unfold.”

Excerpts

Community Capital

“The question if community capital can really cure the voids left behind by the welfare state has generated fierce debates in the past years. This discussion was partly launched by Brickstarter, the beta platform specialised in architectural crowdfunding, when it introduced to the public the idea of crowdfunded urban infrastructures. Those who opposed Brickstarter, did in fact protest against the Conservative agenda of the “Big Society”, the downsizing of welfare society and the “double taxation” of citizens: “Why should we spend on public services when our taxes should pay for them?”
Nevertheless, in the course of the economic crisis, many European cities witnessed the emergence of a parallel welfare infrastructure: the volunteer-run hospitals and social kitchens in Athens, the occupied schools, gyms and theatres of Rome or the community-run public squares of Madrid are only a few examples of this phenomenon. European municipalities responded to this challenge in a variety of ways. Some cities like Athens began to examine how to adjust their regulations to enable the functioning of community organisations, others created new legal frameworks to share public duties with community organisations in contractual ways, like Bologna with the Regulation of the Commons. In several other cities, administrations began experimenting with crowdfunding public infrastructures, like in Ghent or Rotterdam, where municipalities offer match-funding to support successful campaigns, or with participatory budgeting, like in Paris, Lisbon or Tartu. Yet other public administrations in the UK, the Netherlands or Austria invited the private sphere to invest in social services in the form of Social Impact Bonds, where the work of NGOs or social enterprises is pre-financed by private actors who are paid back with a return on their investment in case the evaluation of the delivered service is positive.
Alternatively, some cities chose to support local economy and create more resilient neighbourhoods with self-sustaining social services through grant systems. The City of Lisbon, for instance, after identifying a number of “priority neighbourhoods” that need specific investments to help social inclusion and ameliorate local employment opportunities, launched the BIP/ZIP program that grants selected civic initiatives with up to 40.000 euros. The granted projects, chosen through an open call, have to prove their economic sustainability and have to spend the full amount in one year. The BIP/ZIP project, operating since 2010, gave birth to a number of self-sustaining civic initiatives, including social kitchens that offer affordable food and employment for locals or cooperative hotels that use their income from tourism to support social and cultural projects. In 2015 the experience of the BIP/ZIP matured in a Community-Led Local Development Network, as identified by the European Union’s Cohesion Policy 2014-2020, which will grant the network access to part of the Structural Funds of the City of Lisbon. The CLLD is a unique framework for the democratic distribution of public funds: it foresees the management of the funding to be shared between administration, private and civic partners, with none of them having the majority of shares and votes. While, as the previous cases demonstrate, the public sector plays an important role in strengthening civil society in some European cities, many others witnessed the emergence of new welfare services provided by the civic economy completely outside or without any help by the public sector. In some occasions, community contribution appears in the form of philanthropist donation to support the construction, renovation or acquisition of playgrounds, parks, stores, pubs or community spaces. In others, community members act as creditors or investors in an initiative that needs capital, in exchange for interest, shares or the community ownership of local assets, for instance, shops in economically challenged neighbourhoods. Crowdfunding platforms also help coordinating these processes: the French Bulb in Town platform, specialized in community investment, gathered over 1 million euros for the construction of a small hydroelectric plant in Ariège that brings investors a return of 7% per year.
Besides aggregating resources from individuals to support particular cases, community infrastructure projects are also helped by ethical investors. When two artists mobilised their fellow tenants to save the listed 10.000 m2 Rotaprint in the Berlin district of Wedding, they invited several organisations working on moving properties off the speculation market and eliminating the debts attached to land, to help them buy the buildings. While the complex was bought and is renovated with the help of an affordable loan by the CoOpera pension fund, the land was bought by the Edith Maryon and Trias Foundations and is rented (with a long-term lease, a “heritable building right”) to ExRotaprint, a non-profit company, making it impossible to resell the shared property. With its sustainable cooperative ownership model, ExRotaprint provides affordable working space for manufacturers as well as social and cultural initiatives whose rents cover the loans and the land’s rental fee.
Creating community ownership over local assets and keeping profits benefit local residents and services is a crucial component of resilient neighbourhoods. Challenging the concept of value and money, many local communities began to experiment with complementary currencies like the Brixton or Bristol Pounds. Specific organisational forms like Community Land Trusts or cooperatives have been instrumental in helping residents create inclusive economic ecosystems and sustainable development models.”

Case: La Casa Invisible

“Two years ago, the cultural centre La Casa Invisible collected over 20.000 euros for the partial renovation of the building including the installation of fire doors and electric equipments to assure the safety of their revitalized 19th century building in the centre of Málaga. A few months later, East London’s Shuffle Festival, operating in a cemetery park at Mile End, collected 60.000 pounds for the renovation and community use of The Lodge, an abandoned building at the corner of the cemetery. In order to implement their campaigns, both initiatives used the online platforms Goteo and Spacehive that specialise in the financing of specific community projects. The fact that many of the hundreds of projects supported by civic crowdfunding platforms are community spaces, underlines two phenomena: the void left behind by a state that gradually withdrew from certain community services, and the urban impact of community capital created through the aggregation of individual resources.”

Photo by Dagon Hoyohoy

The post Book of the Day: Funding an Economy of Civic Spaces in the Cooperative City through Community Finance appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Combining nine of the blocks proposed by Ildefons Cerdà in the 1859 plan (very different from those realised) they are meant to reduce car traffic in the streets and squares inside the superblock’s perimeter, confining it to the perimetral streets, in order to create a solution for the serious problems deriving from pollution, the near absence of green areas, the minimal space for pedestrians caused by the omnipresence of cars.

The “supermanzanas” (superblocks, literally ‘superapples’) project aims at creating four squares in every superblock converting the inner part of the intersections in areas mostly dedicated to pedestrians. This is a proposal that —if completely fulfilled— will radically change the city.

The central part of the issue is the following: are we facing a change that is going to confirm the elements of the neo-liberal city, limiting to correcting them with the introduction of – essential and very helpful – measures for the reduction of air and acoustic pollution and for the creation of pedestrian areas? Or is it an opportunity to criticise the neo-liberal economy through urbanism, its production structure, its voracity, its unfamiliarity with ethics, its inequality and its destruction of the environment?

The international attention towards the project has been accompanied by the recent —and predictable— anger of a part of the residents of the site of the first superblock in Poble Nou, due to the concentration of traffic. This has remained unchanged in its quantity and quality because of the habits of people that use cars for travelling around the city, in the perimetral streets and due to the absence of areas dedicated to (for) the sacred rite of parking. These criticisms should make us slow down and reflect.

Here we are not going to analyse technical issues, flows of cars, directions, signalling, number of parking areas. On the contrary, we want firstly to focus on the resistance and on the criticism towards the superblocks made by the inhabitants, then we are going to analyse the elements that could turn the “supermanzanas” into a feature for a significant change.

The opposition towards the project can be explained through two elements. The first one, with deep roots, is the cultural educational problem: perhaps the blind rage caused by the offence to the sacred nature of car reveals an underlying problem in the (mis)educational system, whose main prerogative is teaching to accept the “status quo” of the neo-liberal society without asking, without knowing its bases, silencing any search for different horizons?

The still sacred element of our times —the automobile— despite its obvious destructive action towards the city life, is the main issue. This strange God continues to be venerated by the majority of people. Nevertheless, like every God, the automobile limits freedom —even more than the city does— increases air pollution, threatens our peace with its hypnotic noise, threatens our lives with accidents and with its support to the oil industry, to the pharmaceutical industry, to psychological treatments, to insurance companies, to the loans from banking institutions, among other things. It constrains freedom: as it has been known for decades —or as it should be known and taught during the compulsory education— the real speed of an automobile is 6 kilometres per hour.

«The typical American devotes more than 1600 hours per year to its automobile: sitting in it, in motion or stationary, working for paying it, for paying fuel, tyres, tolls, insurance, infringements and duties for federal highways and communal parking. They devote four hours per day in which they use it, look after or work for it […] But if we ask ourselves how these 1600 hours contribute to its circulation, the situation changes. These 1600 hours serve up to make a 10 000 kilometres ride, that is to say 6 kilometres in one hour. It is the same distance that people that live in countries without transport industry can reach . But, while North Americans dedicate to circulation one quarter of their available social time, in non-motorised societies time allocated for that purpose is between 3 and 8 percent of the social time. What distinguishes the circulation in a rich country and in a poor country is not a greater efficiency, but the obligation to consume in high dose energies related to the transport industry.»
Ivan Illich, Energy and equity [1974]

The substitution of the automobile with the bicycle in the city is an urgent need since decades.

The substitution of the automobile with the bicycle in the city is an urgent need since decades. The high energy efficiency of bicycle, its critical presence towards neo-liberal economy, its independence from fossil fuel —i.e. wars and environmental devastation— and from everything related to the automotive industry are fundamental elements for the boost of a radical change in the approach to the problems of our times. The issue of the veneration of the automobile could be solved with real educational action opposing the bombing from mass-medias in support of the automotive industry, insurance companies, etc. —who finance newspapers through advertising and content sponsored by brands— an educational action carried out in the streets, in parks, courts, social centres, truly independent and critical newspapers can help us understand the problems of our society, a process that requires time and effort. The disputed “supermanzana” could represent the beginning of the end of automobiles e in the city if it becomes the catalyst of profound cultural change.

The second element of the protests that we want to highlight is the inadequate feeling of appropriation of the project by the people who live in that area, due to the insufficient participation throughout its genesis and realisation. In order to feel comfortable in a place —public or private— it is necessary for this to be created, modified, lived, penetrated. The feeling of being subjected to the imposition of a project, or the insufficient participation in its creation and fulfillment, will always create direct or indirect opposition. Although there have been moments of conversation with the inhabitants of the neighbourhood, apparently these have not been sufficient, in quantity or in quality.

In order to convert “supermanzanas” in an instrument for a deep change, disrupting the structure of the neo-liberal city, schooled and submissive towards those in power, and in order to contribute to the establishment of a city that is human, cooperative, supportive, equal and respectful towards the delicate natural equilibrium, we have to take into account a very important element: urban agriculture. We are not talking about organising urban gardens to enhance the image of the city, which would immediately become a sustainable model for other cities; we are not talking about gardens so that “elderly people” —considered to be a problem when it comes to production, instead of being respected and considered repositories of wisdom and memory— keep themselves busy after a life of subordinate employment. We are even less talking of creating a new empty and commodified fashion, sap of the neo-liberal economy which consumes everything. We are saying exactly the opposite.

Urban agriculture can catalyse a slow and deep transformation of the city overall

Urban agriculture can catalyse a slow and deep transformation of the city overall, on different grounds, from food sovereignty and environmental protection to the economy, from a proper education to the win-back of personal autonomy and mutual peer support, at one condition: that this would be proposed, organised, lived, and actively shared among the people who live the city.

Barcelona has 1076 hectares of parks and public gardens (without counting the Collserola), which means an average of 6,64 m² of green areas per inhabitant, much less than what other cities can offer. Prague, for example, has 2650 hectares of urban parks – without counting natural parks and woods – meaning an average of 21.34 m² per inhabitant). In the Eixample district numbers are noticeably lower: 1.85 m² per inhabitant, due to —among other factors— the distortion and denaturalisation —in its literal meaning— of the Plan Cerdà during its implementation —speculation, certainly, was its main cause. The lack of green areas in the Eixample district is serious and requires urgent and energetic action so that people can live in a fair and healthy way.

In a city like Barcelona, in which —despite the many and laudable initiatives adopted by the city council to address the problems of the city— the number of people living in serious difficulties is high, the growing of food in the city would, on the one hand, carry a high symbolic value and be an opportunity to overcome the passive acceptance of a devastating system; on the other hand, it would bring an incredible number of positive effects on the short term and would be an impulse for change on the long term.

Among others:

• It would offer free food to people – in the program of Barcelona en Comú the intention of “ensuring the right to basic feeding” is outlined.
• It would make the quality of air and microclimate better. The presence of thousands of fruit-bearing trees would clear the air —reducing the levels of ozone, nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, particular matter PM10— and would bring important benefits for health, it would attenuate noise, provide areas of shade, enrich wildlife in the urban perimeter, it would reduce the levels of carbon dioxide contributing to the fight against climate change and would naturally regulate the temperature on the microclimate level, additionally bringing beauty in each season.
• It would push for cooperation, social relations, mutual support and peer dialogue in a society in which competition rules on every level, from the cradle to the grave —in school, work, relationships, politics, university, social activities, sport, etc. Using the words of Richard Sennet: “a city obliging people to tell each other what they think and realising from this form a condition of mutual compatibility.”
• It would enhance personal relationships through nature, its understanding, the culture of biodiversity as opposed to the logic of monoculture imposed by corporations and to the conquering and devastation of nature for profit-making.
• Together with the substitution of the car by the bicycle and the commitment to degrowth, urban agriculture would contribute to ease the energy problem, by reducing the consumption of fossil fuels to transport food between regions and countries —or even continents— as well as it would diminish traffic in the city due to the transportation of food.
• It would boost the vegetarian and vegan philosophy beyond fashion and commodification to reflect on the relationships between human beings and animals and the defense of the rights of the latter —who are not machines in the service of humanity, despite what Descartes thought; to reflect also on the ethical and environmental problems, contributing to the fight against climate change —being the production of meat and milk one of the main causes of global warming and of the processes of destruction of rainforests for the production of animal feed.
• It would contribute to boosting education in and through the city, outside of schools, transforming the city in a learning place. The observation of the process of food growing, from seed —defending biodiversity, using traditional patent-free local seeds, recovering traditional wisdom on harvesting— would change the perverse idea of food as a good coming from a conveyor, packed by unknown distant hands (often) with no rights, in a plastic bag with a barcode, sold by some speculator who harvests the fruits of the work of some other person. The city programme “Huertos escolares” (‘School gardens’), no doubts useful and positive, would be no longer necessary as it would have become part of the city life, without recourse to school. It is necessary to give to the city its educational role. The organisation of spaces for urban agriculture in the Eixample district would be a catalyst for the de-schooling of the city, for the collapse of a whole system of values that the so-called compulsory education teaches —dressed up as freedom of choice— through the acceptance of the neo-liberal society as it is.
• It would spread organic cultivation methods, the knowledge of the ecosystem, the understanding of the delicate natural balances, a new sensitivity towards life, nowadays unknown.

The city council would have the only role of presenting, through an honest, deep and detailed information the problems, not only on the urban level, but also on a larger scale, to discuss, propose and coordinate the actions of people in a real participatory democracy.

In the context of a weakening of democracy, that we have been living over the past decades —we are de facto living in an oligarchy— the role of urbanism is to contribute to breaking the ties between the city and the markets and to act in order to destabilise the current oppressive system towards the weakest by offering individual and collective tools to realise a participatory democracy, without excluding anyone. The only work that the city council would need to put in place, with a high symbolic value, would be to draw a circle in the middle of each crossroad in the Eixample district and remove the asphalt layer. Before an empty space, in the middle of each crossroad, a place in which market and power are not present, a space that nobody can sell, buy, exploit, rent or use as a parking, around this space we should think how to organise the city all together, without exclusions. It would mean taking away the asphalt layer , that for decades kept us apart from the land, waterproofing the entire city, waterproofing our sensitivity, and putting at the centre a source of public free quality water, a common good outside of the market, and around the source to grow vegetables and fruits for those who need them, apples that feed without calculating. The apple is here, hanging on a tree, a possibility to change into a new era. An apple that is a fruit of the social economy, with no barcode, each apple with a different taste. The apple, fruit of the land, redeemer of the metropolis, feeds people regardless of their passports and bank accounts. This would be the starting point to overcome the commodification of life and to go back to having a relationship with these natural elements in the urban context of the XXI century. Food and beauty for everyone, with no mediation, to take on a substantial slow and deep change.

It is necessary to stop any relationship between the city and the banks

In the symbolic space where the power cannot enter —in the website of the city one can read that the urban gardens of the city are organised by the city council in collaboration with the Fundació La Caixa, a foundation managed by one of the best-known Spanish banks. Having seen the collusion between banks and political powers, it is necessary to stop any relationship between the city and the banks. Until the “cooperation with the La Caixa Foundation” is on, whatever change will automatically convert itself into a simulacrum that will not really impact the organisation of the city— in this space for the democratic life, the act of taking away the asphalt and presenting soil and water as a common good represents another possibility for a radically different city, and gives both a symbolic meaning and crucial practical effect.

Far from being a step backwards —as if history was a linear process and what comes after is unquestionably called progress— introducing urban agriculture and putting at its centre water as a common good, means considering the past as a tool to change the present. From the errors and horrors of the vast majority of urban planning in the XX century that forgot life, we should quickly learn how to change the fundamentals of the way to live the city, facing economic, feeding, climate, social, environmental, cultural, aesthetic problems in the context of participatory democracy among peers based on social and environmental justice, non-commodified health, food production outside corporations, commons, popular culture, memory, independent thinking, education as a libertarian process of liberation.

The shopping mall Illa Diagonal, designed by Rafael Moneo and Manuel de Solà-Morales in 1993, is located in the Eixample district. The first stone that was placed —as it is said on the website of the mall— contains an insurance policy and a certificate of deposit. The symbols of our era. Real progress, a slow and deep change, would start by taking away the asphalt layer, going back to the soil and substituting, as symbolic elements of a new era, the insurance policy and the certificate of deposit with a seeds and a source of public water.

This substitution of elements would benefit the majority of people, except speculators. As Orwell said, “Journalism consists of printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.” In the context of the neo-liberal city one can say: “Urbanism consists in doing together things someone does not want you to do: everything else is speculation.”

Massimo Paolini is an architecture theorist and author of the Blog Perspectivas anómalas around the issues of relationships between city, architecture, ideas (and freedom). He contributes to journals in the field of critical thinking and he is advisor of Art in Translation | University of Edinburgh for what concerns arts and architecture.

Photo by Ibán

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Future architecture should look for ways of living (al)together, as all power structures and capitalist formations push us more and more away from each other. Merve Bedir talks with Future Architecture about her work, including the project Bostan: A Garden for All which she presented at the 2015 Idea Camp and for which she’d received an R&D grant.

Merve Bedir is an architect and researcher. Her research and practice is about urban transformation, migration and forced displacement and architecture education.

For more information on Bedir’s idea for Botan: A Garden for all, see here:

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The aim of the conference is to explore citizen-centered design approaches for the smart city. Central theme is the role of design(ers) to create opportunities and practices for citizens, (social) entrepreneurs and policy makers towards more liveable, sustainable and sociable urban futures. How can citizens meaningfully be engaged in the process of city making? What new social processes and business models do we need for the future of city making? And in what way changes the role of the professional in the process of city making, and which new design methodologies, approaches and roles they have taken on towards the creation of a sociable smart city.

Lab of Labs – Tuesday April 19th and Wednesday April 20th

Explore methodologies for design research in the two-days Lab of Labs programme. Five leading labs will share their design approaches and methodologies with the participants and work with them towards the design of a conceptual prototype. Taking place on April 19 and 20, around 50 professionals, designers and students will be able to join in for this event. Participating Labs are Kitchen Budapest, Fields of View, Ideal lab, Waag Society and the Design Informatics group of Edinburgh College of Art. The Lab of Labs will close off with a public presentation of the outcomes and a discussion on methodologies for design research on Wednesday night April 20th. This presentation is open to the public. Tickets are free and will become available on March 20th via http://designandthecity.eu

Conference Design & The City – Thursday April 21st

With the addition of Dan Hill as the closing speaker, the programme for the main conference on April 21st is complete. International experts will discuss the implications of the rise of social media, big data and other new media technologies for the practice of urban design during the Design & The City conference. How can citizens meaningfully be engaged in the process of city-making? What new modes of social organization and business models do we need for the future of city-making? And what is the role of professional designers in the era of smart citizens? Find the programme here.

Workshops – Friday April 22nd

On Friday April 22nd, a broad variety of design offices, research groups and cultural organizations will host fourteen workshops related to the themes of Design & The City. Themes range from finding a solution for the bicycle parking in Amsterdam and the design of more walkable cities to participatory sensing and critical investigations of the concept of the smart city. Programme and registration (before April 1st) here.

Parallel events

Besides the Lab of Labs, workshops and conference, there is a full calendar of interesting events. One of them is a shadow EU-summit organized by the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences which invites students and young professionals to discuss the future of European cities, and their main challenges and solutions for them. Also highly recommended ‘Sense in the City’ about active and healthy living in the city (April 18th) and ‘Smart city projects’ about the lessons which can be learned from the experiences so far (April 20th).

More information about the event can be found here.

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Human Ecosystems, workshop at SESC Vila Mariana, S. Paulo

RTCM – Real Time Museum of the City , S, Paulo, SESC Vila Mariana

HUB – Human Ecosystems Bologna: emotional map

Matteo Lepore, Councillor for the Digital Agenda and the Promotion of the City, states that:

“With this project we intend to concretely experience the use of big data. We have launched the new civic network in Bologna and the city wi-fi, extending the coverage 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with free access, offering high speed connection to schools, theaters and soon to enterprises and homes. We are reaching now the European goals for 2020, with social networks at the center of our innovation policies. We are aware that the digital ecosystem is an infrastructure for development, growth and inclusion. But to make this leap, we have to learn to systematize the data we produce: with HUB, we are going in the right direction, in particular considering the transition of Bologna toward metropolitan area and the public investments to come“.

At the end of the exhibit, the collected data will be released as set of Open Data, published by the open data portal of the city.

 

HUB – Human Ecosystems Bologna: visualizations

This is a major breakthrough: for the first time the relational ecosystem as of a city, as it is expressed publicly on social network by city,  becomes formally a commons secured by public institution. A process in which, as society, we can begin to question the controversial public/private/intimate space  of social network – as well as the upcoming Internet of Things scenarios.

At the present time, most individuals generate data in ways in which they don’t realize or understand, and which they cannot understand, due to the opacity of collection processes, algorithms, classifications, parameters.And individuals are, currently, the only ones who cannot fully benefit from Big Data: to organize themselves; to create meaningful, shared initiatives; to understand more about themselves and about the world around them.

This overall scenario is what we confront with with our projects. Thanks to the City of Bologna today we are moving a big step forward.

Links

HE – Human Ecosystems
www.human-ecosystems.com

“Collaborare è Bologna”
http://www.comune.bologna.it/collaborarebologna
http://www.urbancenterbologna.it/collaborare-bologna

“Human Ecosystems @Ars Electronica 2015”, on “Fastforward 2” by Motherboard, 1° episode
http://motherboard.vice.com/it/read/fastforward-ars-electronica

Human Ecosystems in S. Paulo (BR), documentary by Universidade Metodista
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEgKX-M4AOI

Human Ecosystems in New Haven (USA), documentary by YWF – Yale World Fellows
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXCeAHgKcHU

Credits

HUB – Human Ecosystems Bologna is a project promoted by:

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