Nonfigurative Urban Commons : anticipations of / interventions within public spaces

Abstract: I do not intend to talk about architecture as just shapes or forms but as an ongoing construction of the social, political and physical spaces we inhabit. I will concentrate on the different elements that constitute the process of making-the-world, together with the text, interventions on site, understanding the design as one of those elements, not as the final output of my work. This project is a reaction to the impact that the recent and on-going changes in society have in public space, or in other words: a reaction to changes in public life such as individualization being opposite to the commonality and ability to share in relationship with the effects those changes have had on public space, such as an overwhelming and growing privatization of those spaces and an increasing threat to their very existence. First, I explore existing public spaces and their construction through analysis and involvement in the city. I continue my explorations being in the spaces and interacting with different actors and react on the discovered aspects (potentialities, failures) by virtue of interventions. This leads to the discovery of features such as playfulness, openness, common ownership, voluntariness, equality, freedom and other as conditions that emerge from the different experiences and situations in which I have intervened. Combinations of them give opportunities for other forms of togetherness to be thought and discussed, but also for them to appear in space. Finally, those features become also an input for speculative proposals that allowed me to test my reflections: an imaginary projection onto the current situation of intuitions, ideas and ideals, which are integral for what I call Urban Commons. The Urban Commons I propose are connected to public life and social behaviour in public spaces and reflect on the possibilities of new ways of commonality. I will consider one intervention, its process and current state closer as I relate it to the making of the Urban Common. This imaginary projection also allows to criticise existing construction of public spaces and society in common.