A new space for learning about the city and its conflicts
Citykitchen is an experimental programme born in 2012 that proposes to explore and develop new tools for collaboration and urban management between citizens, the Public Administration and professionals from different fields.
This project is promoted by the architecture collectives Basurama and Zuloark in complicity with Intermediae and supported by La Mesa, an initiative for sharing citizen projects around tables where public management issues are discussed. Following this trajectory, the Citykitchen Tables were created, a programme of meetings between citizen groups and technical professionals from the Madrid City Council hosted by Intermediae. Its aim is to experiment with new dynamics of collaboration to learn how to manage, among many people, other ways of making and managing the city.
The menu of Citykitchen Tables
Can a table become an urban infrastructure that takes part in the interventions for the development of the city itself? In the search for this answer, a working space is generated that periodically meets to think and cook the six meetings that make up the ‘menu’ of the Citykitchen Tables:
The Aperitif and Entremeses are the moments to present the Campo de la Cebada and the Autobarrios San Cristóbal project as active cases of a form of coexistence with the Administration, addressing issues such as responsibility and care for the space shared by citizens, economic sustainability and the empowerment of the citizens and associations involved to continue with these projects once the driving group hands over its responsibility to the community.
The First Course takes as an experience a project of the Administration that incorporates the participation and collaboration of an active citizenry: Paisaje Tetuán. In this case, the theme of public commissioning is used as a pretext for analysing new forms of intervention protocol and urban contract.
The Second Course presents the case study of Urban Gardens for the analysis of some of the problems that intersect in the emerging construction of the city and its coexistence with ‘the public’, with the intention of developing and proposing useful tools that allow us to develop the possible futures that we imagine.
During the Desserts, the closing moment of the public meetings, several national and European governance projects and citizen initiative projects are presented and a common reflection on a virtual future is carried out, making it possible to better understand the working contexts of each actor and the difficulties that each one is facing. The last meeting, the ‘Sobremesa’, is mainly used by the driving group to draw conclusions on the most recurrent themes and possible lines of work for the future.
The achievement of Citykitchen is not to transcend the citizenship-administration dichotomy, but to overcome the antagonism that traditionally relates them. Citykitchen recognises two parts that are different because they come equipped with different knowledge and is able to generate a pedagogy that defends this diversity of knowledge, sensibilities and ways of being as a new motor for teaching and learning, speaking and listening.