An open city: El Campo de Cebada in Madrid
An open city: El Campo de Cebada in Madrid Lorenzo Giordano
Politecnico di Milano School of Architecture Academic Year 2019/2020 Contemporary Cities: Descriptions and Projects Professor: Eliana Rosa de Queiroz Barbosa Teaching Assistants: Elena Batunova, Marco VedoĂ
ABSTRACT: In today’s environment, the basis of our system are questioned and challenged. A series of actions are now growing with a strong component of creativity and innovation. They have a strong potential to help develop sustainable change at different levels of society. They have been qualified as bottom-up approach, which is the opposite of the top-down one. This means starting with the detailed design of the individual parts and afterwards link them to form larger components that will end up conforming a complete system. Strategies based on bottom-up information flows are potentially necessary, as they are based on the extensive knowledge of all variables that may affect the elements of the system. To better understand this approach I’ll focus on a case located in Madrid, called Campo de Cebada. Till 2009 it used to function as a sport department and also as a market. That year the municipality decided to tear it down in order to build a new building producing a vacant lot in an otherwise densely built quarter of the city. Owing to the world financial crisis that began in 2008 and the explosion of real state bubble in Spain in the same period, intended construction of new facilities, parking lot and new housing was halted. So a group of citizens decided to take this 5.500 m2 area back. In 2011 with the help of some associations this area opened its door to the citizens. It’s a low cost project financed by local associations and also initially it was thought that it could be a Temporary Autonomus Zone. But now this area has been used for almost 10 years.
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The space was then devoted to cultural use, developed in a free frame in which local residents and general public alike joined forces in such activities such as theatrical performances, sports (the demolished structure wad the only sport facility in the district), the growth of a communal garden, different workshops and cinema projections, activities for children and so on, excluding nevertheless commercial
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uses. The aim of my final document is to study in deep how citizens took back this open space when they were given an opportunity and how this area is now lived. I’ll use data collected from the different social medias (Instagram, Twitter treads, Facebook), tools that can help us understand how people actually use this space. Also thanks to the help that I was given by some people that are behind this project I had access to some economic files that will help us understand how to realize a vital design we do not necessarily need large sums of money. They also helped me better understand how the different actors behaved in order to help each other and how they managed to exercise the participation of the whole district.
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A BRIEF HISTORY: In the 1870s, different open spaces in Madrid were covered with metal structures which modified them into municipal markets. One of these was plaza de la Cebada. It had this name because in the sixteenth century farmers piled harvested crops there. Since then the square has been a centre of social interaction in the neighborhood. Unfortunately in the middle of the last century, the markets fell prey to an obsession with hygiene that made them obsolete, so they were replaced with much heavier concrete buildings that were closed in on themselves. The case of La Cebada market was made worse in 1968 when a municipal sports centre was appended to it, taking up the last free space in the square. With the arrival of the twenty-first century, the Madrid City Council presented a plan for reclassifying the two public facilities, which were to be rebuilt and their management taken over by private concerns. The sports centre was demolished in 2009. It was the only sports facility in the neighborhood but, owing to the onset of the crisis, nobody was prepared to invest in constructing its replacement. So a vacant, sunken area of 5,500 square meters, surrounded by an opaque fence in the very heart of the historic centre of the city, was left in limbo, waiting for better times.
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The demolition of the sports field in 2008
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THE CITIZENS & THE OPEN SPACE: After a year of silence, in this area was organised an installation conceived as part of the “La Noche en Blanco” initiative, which has the aim of engaging in temporary occupations of public space. The space became the venue of a “rain forest” and an open pool which, for that summer, were the pride of the La Latina neighborhood. When the installation was dismantled, some residents asked why they had to give up their enjoyment of a space while the City Council didn’t fulfill its promise of offering new public facilities. People of all ages and collectives of young architects came together under the name of “El Campo de Cebada” to confront the challenge of how to maintain the community’s use of the space until work began on the new facilities. They opened up a website offering information and discussion, held many meetings in the bar opposite the space, and came to agreement on a series of demands to be negotiated with the Council. They were clear about not wanting any night-time commotion or problematic uses. Still, “ El Campo de Cebada” was not a formally constituted association so there were legal problems about the ceding of a public zone, receiving grants or presenting projects. Then, crucial points such as who would be in charge of keys, what might be considered good uses and good hours, who would be responsible for insurance, who would sign for any work and who would finance it, also had to be resolved.
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However, balking and difficulties aside, everyone agreed that they were determined to explore a new model of collaboration between the City Council and the neighborhood and, in particular, that the empty space would need to accommodate all kinds of activities that would foster social relations as well as being proposed, decided and managed as the responsibility of the residents themselves. In February 2011 an agreement was signed with the City Council’s Finance Department, the nominal owner of the site, for the temporary ceding of the space.
An elderly couple chat during a hot summer at the Campo de Cebada
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A LOW COST PROJECT: It’s a low cost project financed by local associations and it’s a Temporary Autonomus Zone. But now this area has been used for almost 10 years. We have to consider that to put the urban decor cost only 8.000 euros and the whole population helped realizing it. It came to life when members of the architectural firm Zoohaus (in which different collectives such as TODO PER LA PRAXIS, ZULOARK or BASURAMA partecipate) joined an association of residents that lived around Plaza de la Cebada in La Latina district of Madrid. This is El Campo de la Cebada, a community space created por y para los vecinos – for and by the neighbour. Even the “propaganda” was very low cost. The starting idea spread toward the neighborhood through word of mouth. That was possible because La Latina has always had a strong popular character. So people were willing to share their thoughts. Also the different associations used Social Network. The official Twitter account, created in 2011, has almost 7.000 followers and still posts weekly to update the citizens about the different projects. On Instagram the hashtag #elcampodecebada has been used more than 300 times and the location tag is used daily by dozens of people. This shows clearly how, even after a decade, Madrilenians still love this project and are more than determined to live it and change it according to different needs.
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People get together before one of the many public assemblies
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THE PUBLIC ACTIVITY: The space was then devoted to cultural use, developed in a free frame in which local residents and general public alike joined forces in activities such as theatrical performances, sports (the demolished structure wad the only sport facility in the district), the growth of a communal garden, different workshops and cinema projections, activities for children and so on, excluding nevertheless commercial uses. Some architects partecipated developing some experimental urban strategies, including the building of self-made structures under open sources conventions. They organized different workshops to develop, from design to actual construction, objects/prototypes of urban “furniture”, which they call “handmade urbanism”, engaging both local residents and general visitors. These tools were used to infrastructure the space. They are important because demonstrate the performative character of architecture and design. In this way they engaged people in new dynamics about the production and use of public space, developing new communal and political bonds. By doing that these spaces allowed people not only to use them, but transform and adapt them to the different needs. In the end what is important is not what they are, but how they are used, how they interact in changing relations. That’s way performative architecture is strongly political; because it imply constant confrontation, positing more democratic political environments.
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As I wrote before, one of the first activities developed in this program was the creation of a communication network between the neighbors thought to facilitate their appropriation of the space and their involvement in the project. Depending on the demands and criteria of the neighbors, activities like urban farming, open-air
Urban furniture built by the citizens with the help of different architectural studios
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cinema and sport fields were planned. Public space should originally reflect the wishes and desires of the society that creates it. It is the first field where action should not be imposed and where it is of crucial importance to take all opinions into account. The designer has to be seen as someone able to channel the needs of the user in order to translate them into a plan. El Campo de Cebada is a model for participative urbanism since it motivates collaboration between citizens and public administration to intervene temporarily on disused public space. Again, the aim is to take back the space for citizen enjoyment. In fact, the physical space has become a victim un city planning.
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The building of the urban furniture
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CONCLUSIONS: “El Campo de Cebada” is an urban experiment that can give us many ideas to think about, starting with its spontaneity, participation and social inclusion. The project started with a fight with the public administration but, in the end, established a strong relationship from which everybody obtained something. Now we have a precedent that can repeated anywhere, in fact as we now there are many areas that have been abandoned becuase some projects has been delayed or deleted. For architects and engineers, this project brings the benefit of temporality. What I mean is that they ended up having a calendar reached through consensus instead of something imposed by an outside institution that has power over the site. This is not something that we can observe in many other public spaces. Here there is the continuous shaping of a flexible container in an open and dynamic process in which people with technical knowledge never leave the area. They are in partnership with the users, they are part of the project by training them using sharing skills and goals with them. As for the local residents, “El Campo de Cebada” helped them speaking out against indifference. Proving that it is possible to shape a city together, that there is life beyond top-down urban planning. After having existed as a totally built-up site for decades, this space has gone back to being seen as a square since it now has an open-air surface available for community uses. Instead of being left as an indefinitely abandoned, inaccessible void, it has achieved the status of public space in every sense of the word. Everyone has been able to confirm that this condition is enjoyed in direct proportion to the extent to which the space is shared.
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An elderly citizen shows a sign in support of this initiative. The support for this actions spans all ages.
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INTERVIEW WITH FLAVIA TOTORO If you go on Facebook, you can see a picture of Flavia with this description: “She is to El Campo de Cebada what water is to a garden, she is the godmother, the president, the caretaker, the manager, the inspirer, the friend, the mediator�
Question: How did the Barley Field start?
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Flavia: The Barley Field started five years ago. There was a sports hall and a swimming pool in that space, but they removed them and a hole remained. It was requested to do an activity on the White Night, it went very well and then the neighbors saw that things could be assembled there. From that, a group was created that requested the space from the city council, which was given to the neighbors through the association AVECLA (Association of Neighbors of Centro-La Latina). Later, AVECLA detached itself from the responsibility of the Campo and then the Campo de Cebada Cultural Association had to be formed to represent us in front of the town hall.
Q: What is everyday life like in the Barley Field? Flavia: The Field is a living being. It does not have a very defined routine. We try to open the Field every day, from eleven or twelve in the morning until half past ten or eleven at night. If there is good weather, people go down, but if it is a rainy day nobody will go down. On Sunday there are more people from outside, tourists who pass by and already stay. It depends a lot, although there are usually people always. Q: How is the Field managed? Flavia: It is a space totally self-managed by a very small number of people compared to what that place is, in the center of Madrid, and the number of people who pass by. The proportion of people who pass through there in summer, compared to those who are participating more regularly, is much higher and sometimes becomes more complicated. Those of us who are constant in the field are five or six. Q: We have heard that the Barley Field is a piece of the street, in which sense do you think it can be like this, if it is like that? Flavia: One thing that sets it apart from other spaces is that it is outdoors and transparent. There are no closed places, there are no rooms. It is street when the door is open, but it stops being street when the door is closed. It is street because nobody looks at you with what you enter, with what you leave and what you take with you. It is a street in the sense of circulation, but it is not a street because it has a schedule, a gate and a lock. Translation by Lorenzo Giordano, from an original interview for Revista Alexia (Link in references)
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REFERENCES: David Garvey, Rebel cities. From the right to the city to the urban revolution, 1935 James Holston, Public culture, 1996 James Holston, Spaces of insurgent citizenship, 1998 Alexander Vasudevan, The Autonomous City. A history of urban squatting, 2019 https://www.publicspace.org/works/-/project/g362-the-barley-field https://openyourcity.com/2019/12/how-urban-data-reveals-the-hidden-lifebehind-cities/ https://www.huffingtonpost.es/2015/03/29/campo-de-cebada_n_6790650.html https://www.mascontext.com/tag/el-campo-de-cebada/ https://www.plataformaarquitectura.cl/cl/02-281490/el-campo-de-cebada-la-ciudad-situada https://ecosistemaurbano.org/english/placemaking-el-campo-de-cebada/ http://revistaalexia.com/campo-cebada-radiografia-ser-vivo/ https://twitter.com/campodecebada