PAX is an initiative promoted by architects and anthropologists trying to reinforce a Heritage Community for urban regeneration and the reuse of traditional typologies in Córdoba, with social innovation strategies. PAX acts as a vector of civil society trying to promote a change in the collective imaginary to empower citizens and create residential opportunities through cooperative processes to safeguard the coexistence in patio-houses as an alternative to depopulation and touristification.
Regional
Spain
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Mainly urban
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
No
No
Yes
2022-09-13
As a representative of an organisation
Name of the organisation(s): Pax - Patios de la Axerquia Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Gaia Last name of representative: Redaelli Gender: Female Nationality: Italy Function: President Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: calle Pedro López 4 bajo Town: Cordoba Postal code: 14 002 Country: Spain Direct Tel:+34 659 01 27 41 E-mail:gaia@patiosaxerquia.eu Website:http://patiosaxerquia.org/
Following a decades-long real estate bubble involving a culture of ownership and occupation of land in Spain, PAX—Patios de la Axerquía implements an innovative system of governance in Córdoba as a laboratory that fosters a new urban model consistent with the aims of a Beautiful, Sustainable and Inclusive City. A system of multilevel co-management with social economy provides the basis for the acquisition & cooperative use of empty historical courtyards as a model of urban regeneration through social innovation in an heritage context. The rehabilitation of the patio-houses in the islamic Axerquía neighborhood aims to restore the environmental values of the Mediterranean city and upgrade its historical characteristics in a contemporary way together with the Community.
Córdoba is the city in the world with more recognitions by UNESCO, which puts its Tangible and Intangible Heritage on the same level (Patios are included in the Representative List of Intangible Heritage since 2012 and the Historic Center in which they are located was declared a World Heritage Site in 1994). Specifically, both dimensions interweave in a particularly paradigmatic way in their patio-houses. This traditional typology -result of its history, the climate, the sociocultural conditions, and especially the optimization of resources- has become obsolete as a result of a collective imaginary, which identifies the historic center with tourism, and the patio-houses with poverty. The abandonment of these houses is not only generating an emptying of the historic center and its degradation, but it is also loosing the traditional Mediterranean way of life: as a social and green cell, strengthening social ties and encouraging community life. PAX wants to preserve it, both in the material and immaterial heritage, thanks to the collective memory and the consolidation of an Heritage Community, according Agenda 2030 and Faro Convention Network, Council of Europe initiative of witch it is a member.
heritage community
urban regeneration
social innovation
citizen empowerment
sustainable cities
As in the Domus and the islamic traditional Courtyards that caracterize the Mediterranean traditional architecture, PAX looks for a urban ecology through the densification of the historic city and reusing the patio as a social & green urban system. To ensure that Córdoba becomes a beautiful, sustainable, and inclusive city, PAX is promoting an integrated project aimed to reactivate the sustainability potential of the centre, thus avoiding tourism-focused gentrification and strengthening of passive measures for traditional architecture. The most sustainable building is the one which already exists, and the most sustainable city is one that does not occupy more territory, regenerates itself, and embraces its heritage, environmental, and social values as Mediterranean traditions. The presence in the historic city of many abandoned traditional houses, such as the patio-houses, requires innovative actions that ensure the reactivation of both the architectonic and the intangible heritage by promoting co-habitation in neighbourly homes. After the pandemic emergency, the patio as a green space combines wellness and health, thanks to vegetation and social cohesion. PAX underlines that the Mediterranean city model as Córdoba can be strategic for the future : 1) promote a urbanism of proximity 2) allow the revegetation of the city within its porosity & patios 3) needs new mechanisms & co-management with citizens as makers of their own habitat. PAX underlines the links between urban and social sustainability, tangible and intangible heritage, city and citizenship. Innovative governance will provide new green economy based on the existing heritage city and preserve social and cultural cohesion. Offering both a meeting place and an interior garden, the patio is not only urban and architectonical values, but as repeated social-green cells guarantee urban and social ecology.
The pandemic underlined the need to live in better houses with open green spaces. The Courtyards of the historical city offer the opportunity to live in a beautiful heritage green and safe space that is more contemporary within the emergency of Covid.
The patios in Córdoba are a traditional example of how beauty can transcend strict functionality and, with very few resources, spaces can be created to fulfill their function, by appealing to feelings, as only art can do. Without going any further, the patios are just, among other things, the support of the Patios Festival, which emerged in 1921 as a strategy to encourage the collective embellishment of private spaces, although with a collective character, in the city. Its success and media pressure have, however, imposed a crystallization of the tradition, often imposing an aesthetic result that alludes to the past, against promoting the maintenance of the necessary conditions for the reproduction of the cultural practices that originated it.
PAX encourages a change in the collective imagination about patios: taste and sensitivity about beauty can be educated. Faced with the pretended exported image of patios, PAX promotes highlighting their essential material and immaterial virtues: the art of coexisting in spaces with pleasant scales and proportions to which citizens are already accustomed, introducing air, light and vegetation into domestic daily life, extracting the maximum potential of the intermediate spaces that multiply in the patio house.
Faced with the value of antiquity (romantic image), exchange value (real estate interest), PAX claims the value of use, also updating the image of the patios, turning them into living and current places, a reflection -cause and effect- of its inhabitants and their lifestyles, and not a museum of themselves. An important part of its beauty lies in that which is now capable of housing.
As member of the Faro Convention Network of the Council of Europe, PAX facilitates the creation of an « Heritage Community », involving in a co-managment strategy public administration, university, civic society & citizenship on the urban scale. Its main function in relation to this community is to serve as a trigger for the processes, and to accompany them, because the community must be the protagonist of its actions, agreed by its members, as makers of its own habitat.
On the one hand, PAX facilitates the creation of housing cooperatives to reuse multifamiliar empty courtyards as a democratic and horizontal decision system. A new governance which involves citizens to restore housings and service cooperatives that update the anthropological value of patio-houses and create local micro-employment based on the local Community.
On the other hand, PAX promotes that sectors of the patio-houses could be reserved for women in active ageing process, social emergency collectives or refugees, commercial local activities, non-profit organisations, or sustainable and responsible tourism that generates an income for the cooperative. It looks for increasing a sustainable economy network, linked to the market for heritage restoration and local activities, all fo them to improve the residential uses.
PAX works in collaboration with citizens, neighborhood associations and other agents, trying to identify both the material heritage that should be rescued, as well as citizen’s groups with the potential to join or contribute from their own experience to a process of urban regeneration such as the one proposed. PAX first identified empty houses and organized local labs involving a range of stakeholders and citizens. After discussing the needs of each cooperative group, PAX helps to find the best patio-house so that the material heritage (the building) is a consequence of the intangible heritage (people's way of coexistence).
In addition, PAX facilitates the creation of an Heritage Community according to the terms of the Faro Convention. In 2022, as a strategy of urban regeneration and social innovation, PAX has been received the European Heritage Awards/ Europa Nostra Awards 2022 in the category of Citizens’ Engagement & Awareness-raising. The Award Ceremony took place in the patio of the first house rehabilitated by PAX, bringing together the entire Heritage Community created around this house that is the pilot project and the symbol of the PAX strategy.
It was an important moment to link the Award to the PAX strategy and to the Community. In fact, we proposed that the award, a bronze plaque, be itinerant and that it travel among various actors. The meeting brought together many stakeholders from the heritage community: members of the Neighborhood Associations - which help us to identify the supply of empty houses and promote demand - representatives of Fiare Banca Ética - which has financed the operation based on criteria that transcend the economic-, the sellers of the property to the cooperative, the local builder, as well as the official representatives and the families that make up the cooperative.
PAX works together with public & private entities to facilitate the multidisciplinary & multilevel aspects of its strategy and with the neighborhood associations & citizens groups who are the most important agents of the bottom-up strategy. PAX shares its applied research processes also with the Cyprus Institute & the European Working Group (Dariah) developing Digital tools for crowdsourcing of information about Inmaterial Cultural Heritage (ICH), applied in Cordoba in 2022. The Andalusian Institute of Historic Heritage collaborates to upgrade the Digital Atlas of ICH with the patios local users’ data and to prepare training activities for the stakeholders, using traditional materials to rehabilitate the historical buildings.Since 2022 PAX is partner of the EU Horizon 2020 project IN-HABIT led by the University of Córdoba (UCO) trying to identify and quantify traditional practices around courtyards in Cordoba that have a positive impact on health.The University of Seville researched with PAX on the Ecology of the patio, measuring its ecological benefits as a microclimate temperature moderator in a hot climate. With the Institute of Advanced Sociological Studies (CSIC), PAX is working on a map of gentrification in Córdoba using annual data on the residents and their demographic dynamics.PAX collaborates with the municipality for creating economical entities and local employment within the strategy.Together with the UCO, association Club Unesco Cordoba and the Association for the Defense of Industrial Heritage of Cordoba, PAX works to create a guide for the action of a heritage resource in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to value the contribution of the courtyard houses in the sustainable management of heritage, as a model of socially and environmentally sustainable city in both urban and rural contexts.PAX is member of the Faro Convention Network, having been considered a Good Practice and it´s trying to consolidate a network of Faro good practices in Spain.
PAX works with professionals from the field of Architecture and Social and Cultural Anthropology, faced with the double desire to pay equal attention to tangible and intangible heritage.
The project is based on the realization of the heritage value of the building, empowering both the social component of the human group and the ecological and architectural quality of the construction. The accompaniment of the community towards rules of cohabitation through the statute of the cooperative, to bring about social sustainability, cannot be separated from the sustainability of the architectural design, its construction techniques and the treatment of the patio as an outdoor space, a place of coexistence and porousness at the same time. The architectural project is thus the reinterpretation in contemporary terms of the heritage, through a path of co-design conducted with the inhabitants.
PAX is a multidimensional ecosystem: the environmental component, densifying the city and promoting the “green” patio network –green-cell system– with revegetation reduce energy consumption; the economic component, through the inclusion of the social economy and local groups as protagonists in the design and implementation of the strategy, to promote social enterprises as a basis for a local micro-economy; the sociocultural dimension, with the development of cooperatives open to new ways of co-living, where recovering community spaces is central and guarantees the survival and authenticity of the patio heritage; and the technological dimension, as the process develops tools for training in restoration using traditional materials to respect patrimonial values.
In May 2022, the families that make up the first PAX cooperative «PAX-Astronautas» - a housing cooperative in assignment of use- became pioneers of the PAX strategy, living in a historic courtyard house located at 12 Montero Street (M12), after having carefully rehabilitated it and saved it from being transformed into tourist apartments. This fantastic patio house from the 18th century, in the midst of the Islamic quarter of Axerquía, in the eastern zone of the center of Córdoba, is the pilot project and a remarkable milestone of the PAX strategy. Winner of first prize in various iterations of the Fiesta de los Patios, protagonist of the candidacy for UNESCO intangible heritage listing, the house had been inhabited by as many as 16 families. Only Magdalena remained at M12, the owner and sole inhabitant of this multi-family space in a state of progressive decay. The decision of Magdalena’s two daughters to sell the property to a group arising from this strategy –in spite of a larger offer on the part of a tourism operation– has led to the start of the first PAX Astronautas cooperative: six families with children between six and ten years old decided to share a patio-house due to the educational and community value of this cohabitation process.
Among the various achievements made by PAX, we highlight that PAX was selected to participate in the New European Bauhaus Festival in 2022, as part of the "Rediscovering the Mediterranean" program promoted in Cordoba by the Contemporary Architecture Foundation, seeking to identify good local practices in the field of beauty, sustainability and community. In this framework, it organized several actions: a working meeting with national best practices of the Faro Convention Network, a visit to the first PAX cooperative, and the projection in a summer cinema of the audiovisual "PAX making City with Community", which was followed by a debate with representatives of the heritage community that is being consolidated.
The strategy of urban regeneration through cooperative processes aims to use the empty patio-houses in the historic centre of Córdoba to provide permanent accommodation for local residents. The potential to re-use the existing city, in terms of both its material and intangible heritage values through revitalising abandoned patio-houses in a central neighborhood that is earmarked for future gentrification, has provided the impetus to generate a bottom-up strategy in terms of housing policy, heritage, urban regeneration, and social cohesion by updating the use of the courtyards through cooperative processes. The housing cooperative is an instrument of the social solidarity economy that promotes co-housing for different groups of people. The constitution of a cooperative allows to build or rehabilitate a building as a collective property in which each person/family who is part of the cooperative has the right to use of a part of the building without owning the property. The unique feature of PAX compared with other housing cooperatives that have been established as an alternative to property ownership and rental agreements is that it operates in a high-value heritage environment, updating the coexistence that has traditionally characterised the Mediterranean city, and aims to operate as a neighbourhood urban cooperative that unites housing, rehabilitation, and service cooperatives to generate a local microeconomy.
PAX promotes a change of mentality by demonstrating that life in historic centers is possible, desirable and accessible, deepening the values of beauty, sustainability and community that characterize traditional Mediterranean cities. Therefore, it seeks to apply local solutions to global problems.
In relation to urban regeneration through cooperative processes that allow the recovery of abandoned patios-houses, PAX proposes a governance that involves citizens for creating housing cooperatives that update the anthropological value of patio-houses and create local micro-employment, betting that, as expressed by one of the founders of the association: "the recovery of the courtyard houses by cooperative groups would offer new possibilities for local employment that would result in fixing the population to the territory. This way, the need for housing would be satisfied without increase the consumption of land, the neighborhood would be reactivated, and its residential character would be maintained. In a very simplified way, the objective would consist of linking a tangible heritage in decline with a community in consolidation”.
PAX supports civic groups in the formulation of housing cooperatives and in the search for a house suited to their needs, coordinating the entire process, from legal and economic assistance to support of the group in human terms and architectural design.
It is summarized in the following steps :
-to detect empty courtyards houses in Axerquía;
-to meet with the groups interested in joining PAX as a cooperative of living place;
-to accompany the search for the house adapted to the needs of the group and the complete process;
-to accompany in the realization of the project and facilitate the economic an legal-financial needs;
-to coordinate with other agents such as ethical banking and public administrations.
PAX will now apply his model to different communities that are also seeking social and environmental sustainability for the Mediterranean city, opening the range to active ageing groups and young people, while experimenting with formulas of renovation and granting of use that respond to desires for coliving. The strategy can be applied not only in the Andalusian city, but also as an adaptable mechanism in other similar urban contexts, thanks to a heritage community that is increasingly aware of its capacity to contribute to the future of beautiful, inclusive and sustainable cities.For example PAX is working with others groups and women in the process of active ageing « PAX-Patias ». Women thinking about their life project in old age in a positive way, redefining personal projects in which mutual support networks or the conquest of time for themselves that contribute to redefine new community scenarios. Starting with the creation of the first PAX-Astronautas housing cooperative, we want to promote the expansion of this cooperative housing model to women in the process of active ageing because we believe that it responds in a relevant way to their concerns (loneliness, low incomes,…) and that it has an empowering capacity for themselves in old age. We want to encourage the updating of the community way of life and accompany other cooperative processes to:
1) on the one hand the rehabilitation and reuse of patios in poor condition
2) on the other hand recover them as community cells within older women are not left alone, but can return to live together and rely on the support of a network of neighbors.
In addition, PAX continuously participates in conferences and events, it is regularly present in the general and specific press, local and national, and, above all, empowers its members to act for the common good, serving as a loudspeaker to share, based on their own experience, this collective project that pursues a more beautiful, sustainable and inclusive Europe.
Goal 11 of Agenda 2030 “Promote Sustainable cities and communities” points the way to achieving greater social, urban, environmental and economic resilience, from local to global dynamics, from economic crisis to climate change and the pandemic emergency. Key strategies include access to housing in sustainable buildings, developing public transport and green areas, reducing pollution and disaster risks in urban areas and, above all, the need for consensual, inclusive urban planning, with a special effort to protect and save the cultural and natural heritage. As applied research–on architecture and heritage, urban and social, ecological and economic– PAX is a governance that sees the Mediterranean city and its community according to the definition of Bauman, namely as the «main laboratory in which to seek, design and experiment with local solutions to globally produced problems.».
PAX is a strategy for urban regeneration and social innovation through cooperative processes, which makes possible the consolidation of a "heritage community", as already was recognized by the Council of Europe. As the jury of the Europa Nostra Award 2022 remarked, PAX demonstrates that the return to this model of settlement prevents depopulation of urban heritage areas while fostering a way of life based on the community as the main protagonist of the habitat, also offering a local solution of resilience with respect to climate change: "The PAX-Patios de la Axerquía project is commendable for addressing depopulation and sustainable living and focusing on climate action," the institution declared. "By renovating these interior spaces in residential buildings, often forgotten, the project has shown how the revival of a way of life can offer solutions to cope, for example, with high temperatures affordably and without a negative impact on climate change. It is an example of how the revitalization of cultural heritage can be important to face contemporary challenges", it concluded.
