URBAN HAPPENINGS. Spatial, Ephemeral, Reflective and Participatory Urban Actions.
It is a teaching innovation program that, interacting with citizens, produces ephemeral spatial constructions in urban environment.
Street installations cause, through occupation of public space, reflection on contemporary issues of social, environmental and urban interest. Reflection occurs at the moment of its conceptualization by the students and during its public exhibition in the city. By building these scenarios, academic objectives are achieved while knowledge is transferred to citizens.
Local
Spain
Cartagena, Region of Murcia.
Mainly urban
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
As an individual in partnership with other persons
First name: Jaume Last name: Blancafort Gender: Male Nationality: Spain Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: plaza de los Patos, 2, 3º Town: Murcia Postal code: 30003 Country: Spain Direct Tel:+34 607 61 21 57 E-mail:jaume.blancafort@upct.es Website:https://personas.upct.es/perfil/jaume.blancafort
First name: Patricia Last name: Reus Gender: Female Nationality: Spain Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: calle Antonio Torrecillas, 1, 3º Town: Murcia Postal code: 30003 Country: Spain Direct Tel:+34 655 61 87 08 E-mail:patricia.reus@upct.es Website:https://personas.upct.es/perfil/patricia.reus
This teaching innovation program offers the possibility of projecting, producing and building by architecture students from ETSAE, UPCT, physical architectures that directly challenge citizens on issues that affect contemporary society.
At the community level, the project proposes the symbiosis between university teaching and innovation, taking advantage of the knowledge generated in the curricular practice of students to revert to society in form of an urban product. Based on a current issue –the leitmotif of Mucho Más Mayo Emerging Art Festival (MMM)– and a social agent –the Culture Department of the City of Cartagena– a relationship of complicity is established that is positive for academia and society.
It is intended to cause with academic practice an impact on the conception of the interaction of people in the urban environment, reflecting on aspects that can be improved in the city, society and the environment.
The results are embodied in ephemeral architectural interventions in which citizens interact. Thus, based on the international public call for the production of artistic installations within the scope of the MMM Festival held in Cartagena, its leitmotiv of a social and/or environmental nature is assumed and its professional call is considered as a practical exercise to ETSAE students.
On all the occasions in which the call of the Festival has been incorporated as an academic exercise, at least two proposals of the student teams have been selected to be executed in the public space.
Disruptive architecture
Teaching innovation
Knowledge transfer
Tactical urbanism
Participatory process
Sustainability is approached from three complementary areas:
1. From the themes of reflection that become the project leitmotiv of the urban installations to be carried out. For example, work subjects of the latest editions have been:
- Interdependent_Ecodependent.
- Before the Collapse. Art and Climate Emergency.
- Extinguish, Cohabitate, Repopulate. Arts and Politics of the Living.
- Living Better with Less / Artistic practices and Ethics of sobriety.
2. From the teaching of architecture carried out by the professors involved, sustainability is assumed as an indispensable and unavoidable requirement of the spatial, functional and constructive conception of architecture. The Curriculum vitae of the directors of this teaching innovation program accumulates in projected works and research several sustainability awards such as ENDESA Award for the most Sustainable Residential Development in Spain, BASF Architecture Award - Special Sustainability or URBINCASA-UPCT Award for Eco-innovation; Their experience and knowledge in sustainable practices is transmitted and required in the students' project proposals.
3. Since 2017, the MMM Festival incorporates a serious commitment to the sustainability of the festival itself, with a clear vocation to become forever an eco-festival that calculates, reduces and compensates its environmental impact and, in addition to others commitments such as gender equality that was assumed in the 2016 edition. Therefore, if the student proposals can be eligible among those to be produced, they must incorporate sustainability into their DNA.
Architecture is understood as a service to people. It is assumed that good architecture can improve the quality of life of citizens both at an individual level, from the interior spaces they inhabit in their day-to-day life (home or work), and at a collective level, from the exterior spaces that make up the city. In this second case, with the possibility of achieving true civic spaces in public places lacking in urbanity. For this, the aesthetics and comfort necessary for the best functionality are intrinsic requirements of any architectural act; beauty dignifies function.
As urban installations that are first evaluated as an academic exercise of the subject of architectural projects and second as the constructed result of the collective conception of a team of students (which comes under load and is exposed to citizen criticism in public spaces), the aesthetic quality and potential to convey a spatial experience of the proposal is essential for the students’ proposal to be eligible to be built.
The installations generate beautiful, sustainable and inclusive spaces that provoke reflection on new ways of understanding and living the city, within a society that is connected to the world and exposed to globalization.
As communicated by the management of the MMM Festival as well as the responsible professors of the teaching project, it is firmly believed that culture is an extraordinary lever to change society, overcoming inertia and contributing to the construction of a better world for humanity and for other life forms on the planet. In this way, a set of experimental processes are developed that interrelate academic practice with emerging artistic practice, work with citizens, participation, artistic education and cultural production. The results demonstrate ways to transform the local physical environment by connecting with the local community, heritage, culture, society, contemporary lifestyles and the limits of natural resources.
The urban actions are built in the public space, so as a rule they must be accessible and by "public" definition are accessible and visitable by all the people who pass through the street, whether they are neighbors or visitors to the city, workers, unemployed, immigrants, elderly, children, ... On the other hand, as the leitmotif generator of urban installations always refers to a universal problem, urban interventions interpellate in one way or another to all social diversity.
The academic exercise is conceived as a group practice. It is a collective work in which each student has to find his role. Since not all the proposals will be selected, the students who have not succeeded in having their proposal selected, collaboratively help the group that has succeeded, which leads the production. Since real architecture will be built, students have to establish a professional relationship with society in order to carry out their project. They have to negotiate and collaborate with neighbors, suppliers, trades and local assemblers to be able to build their proposal. There is a multilevel commitment (students / teachers / Festival management / professionals / citizens) to achieve these urban interventions.
Once the work is installed in the street, its shape and its message interact with all the visitors it receives. It is already a tradition that not only the images of the works with their expectant visitors appear in the local newspapers, but also the reactions of the population when visiting them. After all, these tactical urbanism interventions have the vocation of questioning the present reality in order to make some social and urban habits evolve within the framework of environmental, social and economic sustainability.
The first point to keep in mind is that the leitmotif that guides each call for proposals for urban interventions arises from a social concern. From the teaching program this citizen concern is collected and transmitted to students so that they can analyze, reflect and propose possible ways to address the problems raised from their urban interventions.
The works contemplate from their conception the interaction with the neighbors and with the technicians of the City Council, who participated and consensually define the best place to position them. Then the works can generate a more passive and visual or more active and multisensory interaction, provoking the attentive reaction of the visitor. In any case, since the leitmotif that is proposed in each call has a critical background on current problems that affect society and the environment, and the works have an aesthetic desire to transform the surroundings, the results leave no one indifferent. They provoke sociologically interesting reactions that transcend the media.
The residents of the neighborhood also ensure that, by placing one of the ephemeral architectural works in the chosen public space, their urban environment becomes the focus of media and political attention. Spatial designs are purposeful and do not raise gratuitous criticism of the system, but always propose some evolutionary alternative. So, the opportunity to be the focus of attention, in turn, reinforces the spirit of belonging to the place and its community while empowering and visualizing the claiming neighborhood. Since the importance of the Festival in the media, the fact of achieving an ephemeral work of architecture in the neighborhood is a source of pride for many residents.
On the one hand, the organizers of the teaching program believe that architectural design must be inseparably linked to the society to which it belongs. For this reason, those actions that moving away from academic comfort and university asepsis allow students to approach the social reality in which they will have to develop as future technicians become valuable learning for them.
On the other hand, the organizers of the MMM Festival (Cultural Area of the Cartagena City Council) are interested in having a wide range of candidates who propose urban interventions, because that way they can select the ones that best fit the Festival's leitmotif and because with the competition the level and quality of the exhibited works is raised.
By coordinating wills, both interests are combined in such a way that:
• Professors provoke analysis and reflection on current issues that should be of interest of future architects and urban planners while they ensure extra-university financing to be able to build some student proposals.
• Students have the possibility of building real architectures (not models) in which the population interacts.
• The organization of the Festival has a wide range of artistic proposals to choose from.
• Citizens aesthetically enjoy the artistic festival offered to them, in addition to receiving and contributing questions and reflections that can offer visions of change in the status quo.
In this professional architecture essay that means the construction of their designs, students have to negotiate and interact with the society outside the university (neighbors, carpenters, blacksmiths, masons, fitters, electricians,...), with budgets, execution times, civility of walkers, etc. All of this constitutes a set of circumstances that, given the budgets being considered (between €500-1,200 per built urban work), offer a reality check away from the "academic elite" and close to the social base.
In this way, these professional practice essays not only show students a practical way of how the profession develops in the street, having to assume a complex reality (difficult to reproduce at university), interacting with a multitude of agents from diverse disciplines and with very different interests (economic, aesthetic, functional, claiming, cultural, etc.), but in line with the objectives of the ERAMUS+ program, they train, immersed in reality, the future architects and urban planners who will design the city.
These practices leave the students with an imprint of the way of proceeding and of the claim and change capacity that architecture possesses when it serves the citizens. In this way, these future architects and urban planners acquire an emotional and sensory involvement with reality, learn first-hand about different contemporary ways of living and deepen their understanding of the space of use and the quality of life of their fellow citizens.
The objectives that are proposed are outside the teaching obligations of the official Architecture study plan. This is an initiative to connect students and society in a way that the University has not foreseen. Reconnecting the social base with the academic base; knowing, practicing, interacting and reflecting on contemporary social concerns.
Main goals
• Leaving the classroom to practice the profession in the place where architecture happens: the street.
[Axis 1. Competency-oriented training. Project aimed at reinforcing the active role of the student in the design of their learning through constructive learning scenarios, disciplinary innovation, continuous evaluation and improvement of the acquisition processes of specific and transversal competences in a real professional context; from the project in the classroom to the production and commissioning by the citizens of Cartagena.]
• Interacting with society. Responding to their needs, managing to build with their help and assuming their subsequent criticism. A criticism that affects both the reflective proposal and the built fact.
[Axis 2. Integration of the SDGs. Projects oriented to the implementation and evaluation of learning experiences linked to social challenges, sustainability, equity, equality and solidarity.]
Complementary academic goals
• To enrich the creative exercise with factors such as empathy, spatial awareness and commitment.
• To carry out a social strengthening exercise.
• To practice working in complex teams; defining structures, assuming leadership and taking advantage of collective capacities.
• To confront the academic architectural project to the professional and social reality. Taking into account clients, inhabitants, budgets, execution deadlines, construction processes, plastic character beyond drawing or functionality, among many other requirements in the exercise of the profession.
Local communities can join forces (students + citizens) to find creative solutions that improve our lives. These local experiences and solutions can be methodologically translated and exported to other places and circumstances.
The contemporary university has three basic tasks that frequently develop independently:
- TEACHING: Preserving and transmitting knowledge.
- RESEARCH: To generate new knowledge.
- INNOVATION: Transfering new knowledge to society.
INNOVATION feeds progress, and this has been inextricably linked to RESEARCH. What this teaching project proposes is the symbiosis between TEACHING and INNOVATION. That is, to take advantage of the knowledge that is generated in the curricular practice of university students to revert to society. This attitude is easily exportable in any place where there are students.
Since the reflection focuses on global issues that affect us personally in a local way, the issues are exportable to each local environment.
This teaching program works with architecture students whose essays and spatial reflections are financed by an Art Festival, but the same professors have practiced these procedures on other occasions solving other issues of interest to public administrations (eg exhibitions). The issue lies in finding work niches that, due to the existing circumstances, the administration cannot hire professionals to develop them and, with relatively low budgets define assignments for students.
This philosophy is not only applicable to university architecture studies but to any type of study that offers a service to society (engineering, economics, biology, geography, law, sociology, ...) The difficulty lies in finding the professors who, going beyond the traditional curricula, look for ways to make their students' work serve to pass the subjects and in some way be useful to the society to which they belong. There are infinite topics outside the market logic that students could address to improve society.
Within the scope of teaching subjects that use the Learning by Projects method, this experience proposes three complements to apply in the workshop:
1. The first focuses on the statement and the process of creation. It avoids simulation and offers the effort, energy and talent of the students of a course of architectural projects to a cause for which they can be useful. To develop the creative process is not only nourished by emotional complicity and social commitment, but as the quality of the aesthetic result is also very important, the spatial and formal awareness of the students and their creativity is stimulated.
2. The second involves the transfer of the results obtained to society through an exercise that confronts the student to the scrutiny of the real recipients of architecture. As describes Prof. Calduch (2013) in relation to the teachings taught in schools of architecture, these tend to isolate themselves from the street, which is the place where architecture really happens. What is pursued here is that the practical learning, typical of the subject, is itself converted into an exercise of ephemeral architecture attending a place, economic, technical and human resources and certain deadlines.
3. The third complement is collaborative work. Inspired by R.Sennett (2012) who encourages us to exercise collaboration in order not to lose that capacity that defines us as a society, and also, understanding the opportunity to practice teamwork as a way to obtain a better result. This collaborative work brings them closer to the complexity of professional procedures that take place today.
In summary, a pedagogical methodology of active learning is proposed, based on collaborative projects and techniques and on statements close to students and the society in which it is circumscribed, complemented with the practice of cooperation in classroom and multidisciplinarity, encouraging spatial experimentation with the ultimate aim of producing a built architecture.
The first global challenge addressed by the initiative is the ability to make the work done by students to pass the subjects, socially useful. In other words, it is plausible to think about the possible transfer of knowledge from the students' academic results.
Beyond the personal academic curriculum of each student, Can the endless hours spent solving academic questions be socially exploited? If the academic problems posed in the classroom to develop learning are based on real problems that need reflection, although they hardly enter into the logic of the market, from the academy they can be addressed to transfer useful revised results to society.
The themes that define the leitmotiv of each edition of the Emerging Art Festival and the architectural-urban proposals of the students (Interdependent-Ecodependent // The Face of the Other. Art and Hospitality // Before the Collapse. Art and Climate Emergency // Extinguish, Cohabit, Repopulate. Arts and Politics of the Living // Living Better with Less. Artistic Practices and the Ethics of Sobriety // etc.) refer to universal issues to which from a local perspective an attempt is made to provide some kind of solution or improvement. The procedures applied locally are exportable to other places.
Local solutions to global challenges are small levers to promote changes that initiate improvement paths that can be expanded.
This Teaching Innovation program, specifically related to the MMM Festival, has been implemented on 5 occasions with students of various levels and is scheduled to be repeated in 2023 with sponsored budget increases, new commitments from the City Council and the potential participation of all students of the School.
The academic results obtained so far related to the competencies acquired by the students have been very satisfactory, as well as the extra-academic assessment of involvement with the social reality or the evaluations of the students themselves in relation to the practices developed.
Properties of the program:
• Transversal: Due to its nature it applies knowledge from many subjects to which collaboration is invited.
• Vertical: The participation of professors and students from different levels is promoted.
• Mulidisciplinary: Students are forced to collaborate with professionals from different fields outside the school.
• Collective: Each project is conceived by a team of students which must expand if it is selected to build.
• Disruptive: This form of teaching is not contemplated either in the university degree report or in the usual academic procedure. This program provokes a professional development that manifests itself in society.
In the year 2022, the book “MUCHO MÁS MAYO. Festival urbano de arte emergente, una oportunidad para practicar arquitectura” was published. It includes a selection of ephemeral assemblies, urban interventions and experiences that students and professors of the ETSAE, UPCT have developed and experienced as a result of their participation in the different editions of the MMM Festival between 2017 and 2022.
