An international network of urban research workshops

A fragment, a piece, an unfi nished, or incomplete part of something. The fragmented thinking reveals the partial

character of a learning process, always accumulative. New pieces are added to our knowledge, or sometimes subtracted,

contradicting and destroying past portions.

Fragments of is a set of academic workshops held in cities that

are interesting for its cultural, social and economic distance. These

workshops seek to learn from these environments through the study

of their fragments, portions of what they are, allowing the accumulative

partiality build the understanding of the context.

Dates_

February-March, setting the beginning of the second semester of the

academic year.

DURAtion_

Between 3 and 4 weeks.

NUMBER OF STUDENTs and PROFILE_

Between 15 and 20 Spanish students, as an ideal number, who will

work with the students from a local university in the destination city, in

order to create joint working groups in which students can learn and

share knowledge, working tools, methodologies and ways of thinking.

locations_

For the moment, the network is active in Ahmedabad (India), where

there have been two workshops in the last two years. The intention is

to hold a workshop in Johannesburg (South Africa) over 2016 where

relationships with universities, professionals and local actors have

already been initiated. In addition to repeating the workshop every

year in the destinations where a relationship and the logistics have

already been established, the ultimate goal is to keep on opening new

destinations to confi gure a network and an offer of workshops that

could give the students a wide range of experiences as well as serve as

a worldwide platform to create links between professionals leading into

many other types of collaborations.

Over a period of between 3 and 4 weeks, the students travel to a city in

continuous growth and transformation, with big contrasts in a context of

social and political change, to study a particular urban fragment, defi ned

by its physical and social environment or fragments. The understanding

of the context requires the analysis of the factors that shape it: their

culture, their values, their history, their beliefs and traditions, the

technologies used, its legal framework, social structures, economy

and business sector, its urban confi guration and means of transport,

the types built and unbuilt space, connections and edge conditions,

energy resources and effi ciency, its streets and the activity that it occurs

throughout the day, throughout the year.

A workshop to think, from an open but foreign perspective, inside a new

place. From inside but from outside. Looking for understanding in order

to produce tailored approaches to the specifi c context and generate

relationships of import and export of methodologies. The workshop aims

to develop tools of analytical observation and management in complex

processes of city building, with the student participation in collaborative

processes of creating the environment and redefi ning the position of

the architect in such participatory processes. It gives the opportunity to

meet other approaches to different problems, and to gradually approach

gathering fragments_

the understanding of the living organism that is the city, always in

process, always unfi nished.

The goal of this activity is to create personal links with other parts of the

world and its people. Ties that would be renewed every year generating

cross and overlapping conversations over time. Once the relationship is

created, each year the workshop can focus on a new piece of the city,

a new fragment, you learn a little more, a little less, something different,

contradictory, new.

This is a course that seeks to complement the training of the participant

through a dialogued look to the exterior. An opportunity to develop a

thorough analysis and initiate a project to continue later from a distance

as an exercise, as a thesis project or as a personal research.

Fragments of offers the possibility of generating synergies and

networking around the world. It is an opportunity to expand our

capabilities and enrich our vision through contact with other ways of

understanding reality. It is established as a platform to eliminate borders

and bring people together in a fi eld such as architecture and urbanism

in which maintain a global mind to act locally is therefore essential.

There are four basic pillars for understanding the structure of the

workshop: experience, information, analysis and production. The

process of studying the different fragments is articulated around this

four foundations. While the importance of each of them ranges along

the course of the workshop, they are all present in every stage.

Experience

The student is subjected to a shock through the discovery,

experimentation and the tour around the new environments, cultures

and ways of understanding reality, creating a context vision based on

experience. Loss of prejudice and formation of opinions are promoted,

with the premise of change and reformulation always present. This

mainstay of the workshop is not intended to be an unequivocal weapon

in which the student judge the new context, rather a bidirectional

resource where synergies occur both ways, from the context to the

participant and the participant to the context.

a methodology_

Information

Through the contact and exchange of ideas with authoritative voices,

among which are both local experts and external agents, the participant

is exposed to other people’s positions and discover different realities

to those experienced fi rsthand. The value of this foundation is to learn

from people who are actively facing the context, either through action

or refl ection. These voices, which have enough experience and rigor to

emerge as reference speakers will serve as a link and confrontation to

the subjective experiences that are developed throughout the course

of the workshop. It is during the early stages when these interventions

are crucial, considering, however, that it requires the participants ability

to put into question their own views and those of others, encouraging

discussion and collective learning. Therefore, the information fl ow,

although more intense at the beginning, must be constant and the

attitude encouraged in the participants, critical and with emphasis on the

debate.

Analysis

It is inherent to the process of understanding any circumstance the

need of an exhaustive analysis, however, the desire to catalog, defi ne,

categorize and draw conclusions prevents us from respecting the

schedule of a process that, although begin from the fi rst moment, must

follow an organic pace. Leaning on the experience and the information

will make the participant fl ee from fi nal analysis, to understand that

part of the learning process is based on their ability to observe,

analyze, discuss and re-think about the context. This foundation must

be continuous throughout the workshop, with a peak halfway when it

will be necessary to establish a number of analytical premises, always

reviewable, to support the performance of the other three pillars.

Production

Active learning forces to ask ourselves questions that we would only

be able to get by refl ecting for a longer period of time. Therefore there

is an aim of encouraging participants in registering from the fi rst step,

experience, information, and analysis in a steady stream of content

with a variety of formats and forms of expression always looking for

the best way to communicate (models, videos, installations, drawings,

illustrations…). This is therefore a process in which “results” occur in

real time. Unfi nished parts are built, shared, published and exposed

to a collective enrichment. Content production is therefore constant

throughout the workshop, and it is only at the end when a “fi nal”

product appears, a state, a phase or stage that should be the result of

restructuring all the fragments, produced, reviewed and curated by the

participants themselves.

Methodology in time: experience, information, analysis and production

MARTA BADIOLA RAMOS has been trained as an architect and urban

planner at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, ETSAM, where she

completed her Master’s degree, winning the COAM (Offi cial School

of Architects of Madrid) Award 2014 in the category of Urbanism

with her Final Thesis Project, titled: OverWrite, re-thinking Madrid’s

urban fabric. Marta has worked with TXT Arquitetos and the NGO Um

Têto Para Meu Pais in Sao Paulo, Hassel Architects in Shanghai and

Izaskun Chinchilla Architects in Madrid. Despite her young age Marta

has already established her own practice, with interests in research,

urbanism and the domestic scale, always with an international approach.

She has been involved in the organization and teaching of several

workshops in cities like Madrid, Barcelona, Ahmedabad (India) and

Struga (Macedonia).

JORGE PIZARRO MONTALVILLO is an architect and urban planner

graduated at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, ETSAM where he

completed his Master’s degree in 2014 with honours in his Final Thesis

Project under the title Ahmedabad: urban fabrics in confl ict. He has

collaborated with architectural practices like Estudio SIC and HUSOS

Architects, developing projects in Madrid and at the Bauhaus in Dessau.

Recently, he has been involved in a research about In-stitutional and

Ex-titutional Real Estate Processes in Madrid in collaboration with Vivero

de Iniciativas Ciudadanas and PAH Madrid (a platform for the affected

by mortgages) within the ARCHIPRIX 2015 Workshop where he leaded

a group of international students.

people involved_