review of the project done by AAA in Colombes into the perspective of urban revalorization, or how a bottom up project can be realized by a community.

Francisco de Borja Castillo AlberolaMaría Melo Obeso

Claudia Di Noi

INDEX//

INTRODUCTION

PART 1

PART 2

PART 3

CONCLUSION

4

7

11

17

27

R - U r b a nA bottom up strategy of resilience regeneration

INTRODUCTION//

what is the project. Claudia Di Noi

R-Urban is an action-research project led by Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée which proposes a series of temporary and permanent urban interventions to promote ecological, social, economic and cultural regeneration at different scales, from building to neighbourhood until the whole city and region. It acts through the principles of “reduce, reuse, recycle” and the consequent concepts of Re-pair, Re-design, Re-assemble and Re-think. R-Urban also aims to explicitly reconnect the urban aspect with the rural reality through new kinds of relations, more complementary and less hierarchical.

Moreover, as other emerging strategies, it wants to increase the social, urban and cultural resilience. But In contrast to simple ecological approach, this social, urban and cultural resilience could be adaptive and transformative, inducing changes that offer huge potential to rethink assumptions and build new systems.

It is this transformative quality that interests us within the R-Urban approach, which is not only about sustainability but also about change and re-invention.

In the case of European cities, the resilience capacity should also involve the preservation of specific democratic and cultural values, local histories and traditions, while adapting to more economic and ecological lifestyles.

A city can only become resilient with the active involvement of its inhabitants. To stimulate this commitment, we need tools, knowledge and places to test new practices and citizen initiatives and to showcase the results and benefits of a resilient transformation of the city.

where is the project. Claudia Di Noi

Atelier d’architecture autogérée(AAA) chose Colombes, a suburban town of 84.000 inhabitants near Paris, as a site of intervention to start the concrete implementation of the bottom-up R-Urban strategy. Since the beginning the city was very interesting for its particular combination of lack and initiative: while the location was economically depressed, it had a longstanding culture of civic participation, with over 450 nonprofit organisations already existing there. AAA’s projects are careful and collaborative insertions into existing contexts rather than hermetic utopias built from scratch, for this reason Colombes was the perfect location for this new challenge.

why the project is done. goals. Claudia Di Noi

The Earth’s population currently consumes two and a half planets. This consumption is mainly located in the urban and suburban areas of the developed countries. There is an urgent need for efficient new models of ecological living and urban retrofitting. While governments and organisations seem to take too long to agree and act, many initiatives started at a local scale.

“How to construct a socially oriented economy, which does not depend on the global market? How to initiate progressive practices and sustain ecological lifestyles while acting locally? How to reactivate cultures of collaboration and sharing in a world that promotes individualism and competition?”

These are just some of the most common challenges and problems with which contemporary cities and suburbs struggle everyday. In this context it is clear that new approaches to urban regeneration are desperately needed, also because municipal and private promoter too often fail to take into account the social and ecological interests.

The R-Urban strategy explores alternatives to the current models of living, producing and consuming in cities, suburbs and the countryside.

who is the promoter. Claudia Di Noi

R-Urban is an experiment without any promoter. AAA studio, which was initiated over a decade ago by architects Doina Petrescu and Constantin Petcou, has been deeply investing in their R-URBAN experiment since 2008. Atelier d’architecture autogérée (Studio for self-managed architecture) is a collective platform which conducts explorations, actions and research concerning urban mutations and cultural, social and political changes.

AAA, seeing the context in which the contemporary cities are (crisis, global warming, depletion of fossil fuels, natural resources, social problems that are growing ...) decided to act on it considering primarily the social and ecological interests of residents with new approaches to urban regeneration.

AAA acts through ‘urban tactics’, encouraging the participation of inhabitants at the self-management of disused urban spaces, overpassing contradictions and stereotypes by proposing reversible projects, initiating interstitial practices which explore the potential of contemporary city (in terms of population, mobility, temporality). The project draws on the active involvement of the citizen in creating solidarity networks, closing local cycles between production and consumption, operating changes in lifestyles, acting ecologically at the level of everyday life.

The ‘self-managed architecture’ is an architecture of relationships, processes and agencies of people, desires, skills and know-hows. Such an architecture does not correspond to a liberal practice but asks for new forms of association and collaboration, based on exchange and reciprocity and involving all those interested (individuals, organisations, institutions), whatever is their scale.

PART 1//

Basic Data. Maria Melo

The French country is divided in different communes which are equivalent to French municipalities or cities. These French communes still reflect the division of France into villages at the time of the French Revolution.

A French commune can be a city of 2 million inhabitants, a town of 10,000, or only a small village of 10 people. On January 1, 2009, there were 36,682 communes in France, 36,570 of them in metropolitan France and 112 overseas.

This intercommunity, being so small and so many municipalities, is creating different problems. “The Chevènement Act” was the first step toward a massive merger of communes, an attempt to commune work together and see the benefits of this. But even today administrations are still working on these different intercommunal structures.

Paris, the largest commune in the country, is divided into 20 municipal districts (arrondissements municipaux), created by the territorial enlargement of 1860. It has a population of 10,413,386 inhabitants.

For centuries, the center of the city consisted of narrow streets and medieval houses, but from 1852, Baron Haussmann did a great urban plan, largely demolishing the central area in order to create wide avenues lined with neo-classical stone buildings for the new bourgeoisie. Most of these plans are still in force, and the city has since that a law called “alignement” that defines the position of the building, leaving a certain width of the street and also has the height of a particular building based on the width of the street.

The commune of 84,000 inhabitants Colombes, is located in the northwestern suburbs of Paris at 10.6 kilometers far from the center of the French capital. The commune of Colombes with the years was detached in differents parts and now a days is two-thirds the size of its territory before 1896.

This territory is now divided into three contains: Colombes north-east, Colombes north-west and Colombes south.

In this map we can see the region of Paris where in showing the relation between the central city of paris and the suburbian areas, where we can see the commune of Colombes.

The map of France where we can see the situation of Paris, in the north of it.

Planning aspects. Maria Melo

AAA are working since 2008 in their R-URBAN experiment: a three-part initiative in the Paris suburb of Colombes that employs architecture as a fulcrum for leveraging an alternate economy and, in turn, creating a new social ecosystem. They started with the application of this project in 2011 in collaboration with the local municipality and a number of local organizations and residents. The team is composed of architects, artists, town planners, sociologists, activists, students and residents working within a network.

AAA has developed a practice of collective appropriation of urban spaces in Colombes transforming them into a series of self-managed facilities.

The project is intended to build gradually a network around collective centers where the citizens with small contributions are given the opportunity to create and invent their own jobs as part of a different economy.

These networks and production cycles are formed between community installations and neighborhood, creating a chain of just needs that are taken as locally as possible: local products produced to be consumed by the producers themselves.

This change in work habits and life of citizens wants to encourage democratic participation, promote the commons, collective practices and initiatives for the elastic transformation of the city.

PART 2//

Context. Identity & community. Claudia Di Noi

R-Urban chose the area of Colombes, which is marked by a mix of individual and social housing estates, because suburbia is a key territory for a today intervention in order to redevelop and regenerate one of the most problematic territories of our contemporary cities.

After the Second World War the most popular concept in urban planning was to separate areas of towns according to functions: living areas (blocks), commercial center and working places, everything connected by buses. But this model became to be strongly contested and in 1990s there were great demolitions in all the area of Paris. The point was that when the old buildings were demolished, only high level offices and dwellings were built in their place, preventing poor people from settling in these areas and forcing them to move in the suburbs, above all in the northern ones.

Spatial inequalities within French municipalities are quite important and have a lot of social and economic implications. Low income and level of education, deprived social housing have to coexist with wealthy neighborhoods producing phenomena such as social segregation and exclusion and sometimes even cases of urban violence.

In order to overcome this situation the local administration of Paris in 1996 selected three types of zones in the suburbia(“Sensitive Urban Zones”, “Revitalisation Urban Zones” and “Urban Enterprise Zones”) which could benefit from different higher tax incentives according to the problems they have to face.

Traditional models

Despite its innovative character, R-Urban follows the model of resilient development that was started by Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City and Patrick Geddes’s Regional City and that continues still today with Rob Hopkins’s Transition Town. However, it is not just a direct application of theory but tries to develop both an exploratory practice and a theoretical analysis.

R-Urban shares with the Garden City the interest in combining qualities of urban and rural life and in creating cooperative organisation and mechanism for inhabitants. Howard in fact supposed a model in which ownership would be transferred gradually from financial capitalists to inhabitants. R-Urban strategy too does not want to express cooperative aspects only with community gardens and popular kitchens but also in mechanisms by which the inhabitants could appropriate space.

The schemes summarize the main concepts in Howard’s thought.

Moreover R-Urban picks up from the Regional City the idea of the strong need of studying the natural resources and analysing the existing economic and social dynamics before starting any kind of urban planning. The difference between the two strategies is that in our case global concerns are addressed locally, within the current existing conditions and based on the bottom-up initiatives of inhabitants.

Finally R-Urban incorporates several principles from the Transition Town which is not a proposal for a new city but a set of rules and principles for an adaption of existing cities within the horizon of a challenging future whose main parameters are peak oil and climate change.

However, in R-Urban resilience is seen as a necessity to transform and invent new possibilities and not only as an imperative to maintain the status quo.

Rob Hopkins also widely discussed about localisation in relation to resilience defining it like this: ‘The concept of localisation suggests that the move away from globalised distribution systems is not a choice but an inevitable change in direction for humanity. The rebuilding of local economies offers a response to the challenges presented by peak oil, as well as a tremendous opportunity to

The scheme shows the main concepts associated with the selected four places.

The the twelve step process of initiating and running a transition town.

rethink and reinvent local economies’. However, within the contemporary condition, culture can’t be assigned anymore to a geographic location. If we can localise economy we will never be able to fully localise culture. Cultural resilience negotiates between the necessity of rebuilding local economies and keeping us globally connected.

R-Urban states the importance of culture. In this respect,the project operates with an extended notion of culture that includes material and immaterial production, skills, mentalities, habits, patterns of inhabitations, etc.

Together with the importance of culture, AAA state that nowadays urban life styles have gradually abandoned the different forms of solidarity but these relations of reciprocity constitute the basis of social progress. This is the reason why R-Urban proposes new collective practices through reinventing and regenerating relations based on solidarity, exactly those that we are missing in the urban environment today.

R-Urban in Colombes is trying not to separate the concepts of making community and making spaces for community: considering the social and relational dimension of the space architects create and integrate the specific temporalities and mobilities into the design process. The final aim is the re-appropriation and re-invention of public space through everyday life activities (gardening, reading, chatting…) and the creation of a network of self-managed places by encouraging residents to gain access to their neighbourhood and transforming temporary available and under-used spaces.

Reasons for intervention. Degradation. Claudia Di Noi

Issues like social and economical deprivation, car dependency, consumerism, youth crime are only a few of the problems of a suburban town like Colombes and this is why this city was seen as a kind of challenge, also because the regeneration of such a territory can’t start without an active involvement of the residents.

The maps below respectively show the distribution of the unemployment rate between 15 and 24 years old in 2006 and the average value of the fiscal income in 2008 in Colombes. Such a widespread phenomenon of people with no job and low income called for an intervention and R-urban was the right initiative in order to start facing and solving these problems.

This map show the distribution of the unemployment rate between 15 and 24 years old in 2006 in Colombes.

Strategy of the project. Borja Castillo

The R-Urban strategy is built upon coordinated actions at different local scales (domestic, neighbourhood, city, region) and complementarities between five fields of activity:

• residential (co-operative ecological housing)• economy (social and local economy)• agriculture (organic urban agriculture)• culture (local cultural production and trans-local dissemination)• mobility (no fossil fuel dependent transport)

These fields cover the essential aspects that define the contemporary urban condition. Flows, networks and cycles of production - consumption are formed across these fields and supply as locally as possible, but also in as many and as diversified ways as possible.

To overcome the current crisis, we must try, as French philosopher A. Gorz states ‘to produce what we consume and consume what we produce’. R-Urban interprets this chain of production - consumption broadly, well beyond the material aspect, including the cultural, cognitive and affective dimensions.

This map show the average value of the fiscal income in 2008 in Colombes.

The strategy explores as such alternatives to the current models of living, producing and consuming in cities, suburbs and rural areas. It draws on the active involvement of citizen in initiating collaborative practices and creating solidarity networks, closing cycles between production and consumption, operating changes in lifestyles, acting ecologically at the level of everyday life.

PART 3//

Design aspects. Step to step. Borja Castillo

1. Local Mapping

Everything has started by identifying micro-local practices and interstitial spaces that could immediately be connected and activated (i.e. local skills and ecological practices, active individuals and organisations, underused spaces and urban leftovers, opportunities or gaps in rules and regulations, etc.). Local residents are involved in the setting up and management of the strategy, contributing to its social, environmental and economic sustainability. The project fosters local exchanges and (rural and urban) networks and tests methods of self-management, self-build and self-production.

2. Prototypes

The beginning was the construction and the test of a number of prototypes for urban agriculture (in Paris and Colombes) and related practices: recycling and cultivating roofs (ECOroof), vertical green walls (AAA office), windows (aaa office), compost toilets, recycling of urban matters and their integration into agricultural soil etc.

Moreover social, economic and cultural networks based on existing and emerging local initiatives were set up, also experiencing ecological devices and locally closed cycles: water, energy, waste.

An important part of this process was to identifiy and encourage local skills necessary to support such initiatives, some of them marginalised or overseen, In order to achieve this some specialists were invited to contribute to learning and re-skilling processes.

These prototypes allowed the AAA Studio at first and then the inhabitants to experiment with simple methods of implementation an ecological approach at the level of everyday life and to generate self-managed collective use and environmental practices.

3. Active dwelling

The dwellings developed by R-Urban are composed of different active spaces, which allow for self-building and re-design by users. These dwellings include workshops in which one can acquire traditional techniques and skills in fabrication of objects and installations by using different organic or recycled materials, notions of medical and nutritional science, body techniques.

RepairCafé at Recyclab, February 2014.

R-Urban provides spaces for concrete transformation of green materials, experimentation with recycling techniques, methods of producing renewable energy and other ways of reducing the ecological footprint. All residents will have access to DIY facilities and collective workshops. Children’s game and playgrounds will stimulate the imaginary of fabrication, making, construction, gardening and care. Knowledge and skills in organic agriculture, as well as other forms of manual work will be revitalised.

The dwelling will rediscover its intrinsic quality of productive space, being liberated from the limitations imposed by a society that promotes lifestyles strictly based on consumption; the consumerist dwelling will be replaced by an active and productive dwelling.

R-Urban is based on a micro-urbanism approach: a soft urbanism which activates at a small scale, at the level of everyday life and through self-built and re-design approaches. This ‘soft urbanism’ valorises other essential dimensions of dwelling; it provides spatial opportunities for social relations of proximity and micro-facilities to activate collective living and ecological practices at the level of everyday life.

4. Green productive spaces

Considering the living condition in a broad sense, which extends to include everyday activities, R-Urban proposes another presence of nature in the city. Green productive spaces will be integrated into residential, public, cultural and economic spaces, which will be, in this manner, retrofitted through ecological activities and collective care. These green productive spaces will be defined according to the urban local contexts and the particularities of the users involved.

By hybridising different types of activity, the aim is to encourage interactions between different kinds of production (economic, social, affective, etc.) and between different users. Such activities include workshops, music, debates, cooking, pedagogy, gardening, etc. This multiple productivity which encourages exchange of knowledge and skills, allows, at the same time, new local actors to

Agrolab, the built facility of Agrocité, June 2013. The building comprises a series of ecological devices for rain water collection, graywater phyto-remediation, compost heating, solar energy production and is constructed with reused materials (ie. industrial panels, salvaged wood, reclaimed windows, etc.).

emerge while creating porosity between different types of knowledge: contemporary and traditional, amateur and professional, popular and savant. In this way, the urban activities will contaminate each other and articulate new cultural, social and professional configurations. These urban articulations have by themselves a capacity of regeneration and activation, creating what Guattari calls ‘new productive agencies’.

The buildings will include prototypes of organic intensive farming and a range of equipment and know-how coverin (like a a vegetable market and local agricultural products)

Public Space. Network. Claudia Di Noi

In R-Urban strategy small scale defines the public space itself and the projects are based on the temporary appropriation and use of leftover spaces and urban interstices.

Flows, networks and cycles of production - consumption are formed across these fields, closing chains of need and supply as locally as possible, but also in as many and as diversified ways as possible. To overcome the current crisis, we must try, as A.Gorz states ‘to produce what we consume and consume what we produce’. R-URBAN interprets this chain of production - consumption broadly, well beyond the material aspect, including the cultural, cognitive and affective dimensions.

The projects aims at gradually generating a network around collective facilities hubs that function through locally closed cycles and are progressively linked with other urban facilities contributing to increase the urban-resilience capacity such as self-sufficiency, local production and local recycling.

The first three collective facilities include a social economy unit specialized in recycling and eco-construction, a cooperative housing unit and an urban agriculture unit.

In detail:

- Recyclab is a recycling and eco-construction unit including several facilities for storing and reusing local materials, recycling and transforming them into eco-construction elements for self-building. It will work as a social enterprise.

- Ecohab is a cooperative eco-housing project relating to partially self-built and collectively managed ecological dwellings, including some shared facilities such as food growing, production spaces, car sharing. Ecohab, which is run as a cooperative, also considers two public housing units and a temporary residence unit for students and researchers.

- Agrocitè is an agro-cultural unit made of community gardens, an experimental micro-farm, pedagogical spaces and a series of experimental devices for ecological processes such as compost heating, rainwater collection and use for garden irrigation, solar energy production. This is an hybrid structure run by both social enterprises and local organizations.

Community gardens at Agrocité—an agro-cultural unit within the R-Urban network in Colombes, June 2013.

Impact assessments. Borja Castillo

R-URBAN creates jobs that allow people to teach each other, gaining agency and eventually taking over management of their own institutions. Petrescu and Petcou assert that “architecture remains at the core” of the initiative. The physical presence of the three units means they are not only resources and communication hubs, but “showrooms” in which to demonstrate the viability of the model on a larger scale – in fact partners from Belgium, Spain, Romania, and Germany have shown interest.

The municipal government of Colombes is incorporating RURBAN in its current electoral campaign, and that the project constitutes a structural element of the proposed municipal policy for the 2014-18 term. Petcou says: “The capacity of architecture as a participatory strategy to have an effect on public policy is of extreme importance to us”. This highlights a fundamental and unique aspect of AAA’s approach: they do not propose citizens to take everything into their own hands. Instead they attempt to renegotiate the real relationship between private citizens and public apparatuses. R-URBAN intends to show how political systems can be altered or appropriated by private citizens via careful social and spatial organisation, renegotiating a symbiosis between crippled public systems and enterprising communities.

Beyond economic or ecological endeavour, R-URBAN is ultimately a socio-cultural experiment. If the way we spend our time, use our bodies and conceive of daily life is a key product of capitalist power systems, then changing basic processes will feedback into changing the ecology of the city. Thus the “ecological” work of AAA is also about personal ecology, the ecology of the organism in a broader city network. They have even proposed a new daily schedule for community members: working for 8 hours, having free time for 8 hours, and sleeping for 8 hours. The objective is to establish an entirely new lifestyle, supporting and supported by a self-sustaining micro-economy.

In their co-design approach, there is no border between design and use… They recognise that creativity is present in use, where one continually has to find ways of adapting and reinventing everyday life contexts … Co-design is inclusive and accessible: it prepares for new aesthetics resulting from a mix of the designer’s and the user’s aesthetics. It works with the concrete logics of bricollage rather than with abstract concepts, with presentations rather than representations. Although dismissed for their ‘crude’ or ‘dirty’ aesthetics – a simplified assumption which reinforces the presumed superiority of the standard categories of ‘refined’, ‘clean’ and ‘elegant’– the products of co-design have their own value system that stands alongside that of conventional design. This value system is perhaps more relevant and more appropriate to a democratic transformation of the built environment.

why social urbanism. why traditional urbanism can’t work anymore.Borja Castillo, Claudia Di Noi, Maria Melo

Today the traditional model of expansion and growth of the cities is definitely over. The administration and citizens are disappointed because their constructive tool seems to have run out of resources, limited by the lack of government capacity.

This disappointment is the revealing sign that the traditional urbanism cannot work anymore, or at least it cannot work if not associated with social urbanism.

One of the mistakes of urbanism in these days is to create functional spaces and with definitive solutions. Planners avoid places in which the solutions and the rules have to be adapted while flexibly. This new social urbanism is trying just the opposite, finding the answers that the formal planning and the housing market are not offering. One of the aims is creating spontaneous, temporary, incidental or open spaces that bring life to the closed spaces. These interventions give citizens the opportunity to express themselves, while trying to meet all their needs.

Traditional urbanism, the one “imposed” on inhabitants by planners and administrations, gives a general view, without considering local peculiarities that deeply affect the final result of a project or a strategy.

Moreover, nowadays small scale projects are excluded from planning strategies. This means that local inhabitants have to delegate design choices to architects and experts that rarely have a complete and correct knowledge of the local context. The consequence is that more and more often the buildings and the public spaces are improperly shaped and do not fulfill the needs of the local people.

The social way to do Urbanism. Maria Melo

Trying to analyze the new approaches of social urbanism, we studied the theories of Manu Fernandez, researcher and consultant on urban policy. He has been taking several conclusions which serve as reference to understand the whole social movement that was created in recent years and the new ways of thinking.

As he says, observation is important as a research method in order to explore the social use of public spaces: tyring to understand their use, to know if people changed, if their way of interfacing with others has changed …

To begin the analysis we need to know that the public space is that close space, a place with personal and physical sociability that opens to unexpected encounters. It is a lively place where people can live with their environment without being expelled from it. But the question that Manu Fernandez asks himself is that if in this era of current technological advancement, people and societies tend to be more isolated or not.

As data to be analyzed, a study in New York by Keith Hampton concludes that in public spaces only 3-10% of people are using mobile and in most cases these are people who are lonely or waiting for someone. What is clear is that people are looking for places where to meet with friends. According to Hampton, our tendency to interact with others in public has improved since the ‘70s.

Today it is the citizen, it is society that seeks, finds and appropriates places. For different reasons the citizen will have time and opportunity to start moving the pieces to get places alive.

One of the principal reasons of the new ways of citizen action is the crisis. The citizen is becoming more content and more austere; more and more small is more beautiful, we are getting more happy with less, less becomes more, we are reducing consumption and waste ...Work habits have changed

and this is creating new occupations of space.

All the social needs of citizens are coming to light. They are creating spontaneous, temporary, incidental or places that create different “scene” in our urban surroundings.

These interventions are very strong because they give citizens the opportunity to express themselves, to show themselves, and manifest, getting to have greater participation and civic organization.

CONCLUSIONS//

Democracy through living. Borja Castillo

In order to overcome the desubjectivised social systems in which we currently live, it is necessary to act tactically in accessible interstitial spaces and temporalities, to facilitate the participation of all those who have only limited availability. The R-Urban approach allows a first step into this little-by-little disassemblage of a system in crisis. The transformation of these small disassemblages into a sustainable and large scale strategy depends on the long term involvement of each person and on the collective dynamics that are formed around these individual initiatives.

R-Urban promotes an urban environment which can adapt itself to the aspirations of becoming as they are expressed by every city dweller. This should be constituted progressively, by welcoming the most varied range of activities proposed by all kind of residents, including everyday life activities that people can develop in their free time. In a second phase, these non productive activities could evolve into economic, cultural and ecological activities, which will gradually replace the current productive and reproductive relations and will fundamentally define more democratic and more sustainable ways of working and living.

R-Urban recognises the condition of ‘dweller’ as political, and promotes an emancipatory politics of living within populations who are usually limited in their existential choice by their social condition and the spatial, social and cultural experiences they have access to.

R-Urban actualises the potential of urban dwelling according to social and ecological values, which include ethical and environmental principles: waste and energy reduction, use of renewal resources, recycling, etc. In this way, sociability takes on ecological dimensions and becomes an eco-democratic sociability.

By introducing the capacity of multiple productions (green productive spaces, active dwelling, local economy, etc.) R-Urban enables a more sustainable democracy, understood as a re-appropriation of commons,but it also affects and contributes to produce all other aspects of social life : i.e. economic, cultural and political. This biopolitical production and the increased common which it creates, support the possibility of democracy today’. A sustainable democracy should not be based only on a long term politics of the commons but also on social solidarities understood as commons.

This diagram shows the social urban and bottom-up approach. Looking for a real government, or at least one socially pro-active in order to create “community”.

Cultural resilience. Borja Castillo

Within a resilient condition we need to reach an ‘ecosophic’ stage of culture, which considers mental, environmental and social aspects alike.

But how can we still be connected in a resilient way? How to associate and empower resilient practices, skills, mentalities, habits, economies at a bigger scale? Maybe ‘from local to local’, through relational institutions which federate heterogeneous components, both cultural and environmental, amateur and professional, civic and educational… In such way, resilient practices could go beyond the sphere of the local and become trans-local, could operate a re-weaving of scales and issues through the construction of a trans-local mode of functioning.

Living practices, deep locals, cultural and social biodiversity. Borja Castillo

In addition to existing local cultures of living, R-Urban proposes new collective forms of these cultures through reinventing and revitalising proximity relations based on solidarities (i.e. ways of being involved and deciding collectively, sharing spaces and group facilities, rules and principles of co-habitation etc.).

The ‘locality’ is formed through a multiplicity of micro-social and cultural phenomena which are embedded in their territories. It is this kind of heterogenesis process that can produce and preserve local cultural and social biodiversity which is based on sustainable solidarity.

Transformations have to take place at micro-scale with each individual, with each subjectivity and this is what constructs a culture of resilience and at the same time a resilient culture. As Hopkins states: ‘Resilience is not just an outer process: it is also an inner one, of becoming more flexible, robust and skilled’. The culture of resilience includes processes of reskilling, skills-sharing, building social networks, learning from others, learning from other experiences. These micro-social and micro-cultural practices are most of the time related to lifestyles and individual gestures. R-Urban offers a platform for such practices to gain visibility and feel empowered in their singularity while being connected to others through relations of reciprocity. This is a form of cultural resilience. This is R-Urban.

Recyclab is a recycling and eco-construction unit including several facilities for storing and reusing local materials, recycling and transforming them into eco-construction elements for self-building. It will work as a social enterprise.

In this image we can see the relation of the areas of the differents units in all parts of the project; existing, revaloration, peri-urban and new areas.

Alterotopias, are also other spaces as much as spaces of ‘the other’, they are spaces built and shared ‘with others’ with those ‘you do care about, who are different from you’. They are spaces to question daily life, its potential, its barriers, its imposed temporalities. By challenging the stereotypical mechanisms of conformed spaces, these alterotopias can become spaces to dis-learn uses that are subservient to capitalism and to relearn singular uses, by producing a collective and spatial subjectivity proper to those involved.

INDIVISUAL CONCLUSIONS//

Claudia Di Noi.

One of the most important things that urbanism nowadays should learn from the failures of the past is that a good masterplan cannot work properly if it does not answer to the needs of local citizens and if it does not take into account social and sustainability issues.

Associations of citizens helped by teams of professional figures should always be an active actor in the planning process. This can give the feedback if a particular intervention works at a small local scale and if it really benefits a certain environment and community. Social urbanism is the starting moment for a planning strategy and then during the design process it is just the other side of medal together with the traditional tools.

As the failure of some famous initiatives proves, the most difficult aspect is indeed this transition from the small social scale to the big one of traditional plans. One emblematic case is that of the Kreuzberg district in Berlin.

Kreuzberg, Berlin, 1980-84In 1984 Kreuzberg was interested by a strong revitalisation action in order to face the problems connected with a multicultural reality and the sudden conversion from a central area into a marginal one due to the building of the Berlin Wall just nearby. The initiative started from the citizens and the local administration that called attention to their problematic reality, until IBA 84 ( International Construction Exhibition ) chose Kreuzberg as one of the five sites for intervention. The aim was to keep the so called Kreuzberg-mix, enhancing the value of existing buildings and the traditional aspects of the area. Small scale interventions were set up, such as the creation of spaces with different functions (housing, schools, florists, day care centers, “mom and pop stores”), also including cooperative projects.

A variety of design and construction workshops were offered to the citizens and brochures and books were disseminated in order to promote discussions about the revitalisation projects. But when it comes to the long term evaluation of the success of the Kreuzberg 84 Revitalisation, the achievements were in many ways limited: as of 1990, only 360 of the planned 1600 new dwellings had been constructed, while only 15 day care centers and just one school had been completed.

Schlesisches Tor, one of the most important projects of IBA 84, designed by Alvaro Siza

ReplicabilityThe power of R-Urban and the reason why this type of planning can work together with the traditional one is its replicability aspect,. R-urban does not propose fixed interventions, but a network of three main public spaces and a step to step strategy to rise and organise them, always keeping central the idea of respecting sustainable principles and of making a community through space.

In this research I think it is important to underline the different moments of this type of social planning and of revitalisation, considering them as principles and steps that must be adapted to the several contexts that can be found in our cities. In order:

- selection of a site with particular problems of degradation, strong reasons for interventions and demand of action from the local citizens that have to face those problems everyday

- public consultations, active involvement of the inhabitants for the identification of the problems and proposals to improve the situation under the supervision of teams of architects, planners, sociologists, delegates of local municipality

- identification of the sites where to settle the network of the three main public spaces: Recyclab, Ecohab and Agrocultural unit. These can be leftover spaces, properties offered by citizens or local government

- running up of these three units at a small social local scale while creating public transport connections, dwelling areas and commercial facilities around them, evaluating the benefits and problems yet to solve

- proposal to local municipality and insertion of the strategy and spaces already shaped in the masterplan of the city, with the aim of keeping, reinforcing and increasing them through the cooperation of public and private actors and organisations of citizens.

Following these steps allows to preserve the human scale in urbanism and to create an emotional relationship between inhabitants and space, giving people the responsibility for their own environment and the capacity to take care of it.

María Melo Obeso

New Urbanism is the idea of improving the quality of life in cities, changing urban form; maybe one of the most important reasons behind traditional urbanism today costing more fit is the programming of each space both large as a small scale in which each activity is planned and determined.

The fact of not creation planned activities is able to adapt those activities to new activities, new movements, new developments and citizens. So do we get citizens involved; is he who really lives, appreciate, know and perceive all urban and social changes occur, so they should be the first involved in the decision of making each place. with them and with the help of urban planners, architects, builders ... to guide them, we can see that a neighborhood can go much further than we think with the main ideas marked during the work such as the citizen (not pedestrian), habitability of public space, resilience (strengthened, learning), biodiversity, self-sufficiency (energy, materials ...), adaptation and acceptance (of the place and the people) management, improved (urban, economic and social ).

Probably all this appear slowly and from projects that are around our day to day such as in the years 60-70s by the financial crisis, with the abandonment of many areas of the city, residents relived their neighborhoods transforming vacant lots in community gardens. Thanks to this simple action will rescue neighborhoods as collecting crime and grime, urging them to community action, giving them a healthy and desirable urban environment.

In turn, projects such as the pedestrianization of the streets, probably one of the projects with less work there is, we can see how the citizens received these places positively and appropriates in a very unique way. Those are places where citizens felt safe, attendence, where can be relax, where can create the most want activities.

We need places to create new activities where appropriate the place where interact freely. We have seen that we dont need great efforts to rescue these small places; maybe is the time to simply give the citizen what is his! to play, enjoy, and have the opportunity to get with him, as he wants.

urban tranquility

Borja Castillo Alberola

For several years we are witnessing an explosion of collective practices such as r-Urban, which try to draw through a more or less coordinated way a new urban scene. Proposals that are born as opposed to speculative and expansive urban model we have experienced in recent decades, and which have on participation, collaboration, horizontality, ecology and use of new digital tools its main distinguishing features.

While the post-bubble socioeconomic scenario has spurred such initiatives, we should not forget that they have remarkable historical references, of which we must take note when shaping a ‘new urbanism’. Indeed, experiences like the program “Barrios en remodelación” during the eighties in Madrid; or the more recent experiences as Ecobarrio Trinitat Nova, the remodelling of the Plaza Lesseps or urban regeneration neighbourhood of La Mina, all projects in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona. Internationally planning tradition of advocacy and community planning, for example, also has a long history, especially in the English-speaking world.

So, to the question of creating the connection between “traditional urbanism” and “social urbanism”, we have seen that all along the history, we have several references of that, so it is possible, also through institutional procedures. However, in order to consolidate an alternative urban praxis capable of creating a real impact on society and public institutions, recent examples and successful precedents are not enough. It also requires methodologies, tools and empirical theories that shape this new urbanism into something global, not punctual. After analyzing the work of AAA, some of the keys to this new urbanism could be:

1. Methodology:Need to systematize all common knowledge and work that these practices are developing. We need to start building a methodological rigor to the process in order to increase the impact and effectiveness thereof and to facilitate its replication in other contexts, through other agents and equipment.

2. Assessment tools:It requires instruments to analyze the results from a quantitative and qualitative perspective with which to be able to demonstrate the transformative power of our interventions.

3. Transversality:Is required to start creating connections for cooperation and dialogue between the various actors in the territory in 3 confluent areas:

- Relationship between departments: Integration, within urban projects, of several different government departments, which must work together.

- Collaboration between agents: Taking citizens the central axis, we must raise spaces and dynamics that enable collaboration among various agents operating on the territory (both human and non-human).

- Transdisciplinarity: To resolve the problems related to the complexity of the city and the territory is essential to combine different disciplinary visions. Therefore it is necessary to promote creative processes that join hands from the origin and establish a correlation of forces between them, without falling into the usual domination of urban-architectural perspective.

4. ParticipationCitizen participation is at risk of becoming the new “sustainability”: a term perverted and emptied of content. Two are the dangers facing: the trivialization and sensationalism. And this happens largely because participation and collective practices tend to link to the goodwill of the people, and these are usually not subject to methodologies, principles and clear objectives. Natural procedures tend not to be sustainable (emotionally, emotionally, financially, etc.) and, therefore, tend to self-destruct by our culturally built-inherited habits. That is why it is essential to begin to know and implement methods already developed and learn from previous experiences.

5. InstitutionalizationThis term is used on purpose, because today there is some suspicion by the teams and groups to professionalize their practices and make this way of working start to really climb from the bottom up. If you really want to build a new urbanism we must ensure that all such practices might displace current practices which govern the institutions and decision spaces. If it is intended to constitute a new profession and dignify the change to the new urbanism, not ignore the recurring debate between institution and movement is a good way to consolidate the necessary change of urban paradigm. And that happens largely through dignify, make feasible and make these practices sustainable as a lifestyle, which ultimately leads to institutionalization.

REFERENCES//www.r-urban.net

“The transition Companion. Making your Community more resilient in uncertain times”, Rob Hopkins. Green Books. Devon 2011

Harvard Design Magazine, number 37, 2014

“ATLAS: Geography Architecture and Change in an Interdependent World”, Renata Tyszczuk, Joe Smith, Nigel Clark, Melissa Butcher. Black Dog Publishing. London 2012

“Strategic Planning and the Complex Conceptualisation of the City”, Patsy Healey. Newcastle Uni-versity. Roskilde September 2007

“Peer to Peer Urbanism”: www.p2pfoundation.net

“Architecture, Politics and Identity in divided Berlin”, Emily Pugh. University of Pittsburgh Press. Pitts-burgh 2014