The ways of building and living that make a shelter come to life

Inteligencias Colectivas (IC) is a cultural project developed by the team at the Zoohaus Cultural Association in collaboration with various partners since 2010. It is an open research platform focusing on design and cultural heritage, an archive for sharing knowledge about construction details, inventions, objects and processes of a cultural, architectural or tactical urban planning nature that are not standardised.

IC Ethiopia aims to discover, catalogue, improve and develop ways of building and living that are specific to the Dolo Ado refugee camps in southern Ethiopia. Building on this, the project enables different communities to participate in a two-way process of design and development to achieve a better and more resilient life whilst they are in the camps.

In October 2022, we travelled to Ethiopia on a two-week mission to the Melkadida Refugee Camp. Melkadida is one of five refugee camps in the Dolo Ado region, alongside Kobe, Hilaweyn, Bokolmanyo and Buramino. Situated on the border between Somalia and Ethiopia, these refugee camps currently host more than 219,000 refugees, the majority of whom are from Somalia.

The main aim of the trip was to carry out an initial assessment of the camp, understand how it operates and explore potential opportunities for increasing collective knowledge. We managed to meet with many local associations, schools and co-operatives, as well as the camp’s local government, to hear stories and anecdotes about the camp.

During our many conversations, we recorded numerous examples of ‘low-tech’ solutions developed by and for the community, which we identified as the ‘collective intelligences’ of the place. These are practical, constructive solutions that the community has developed over decades, such as containers for carrying water, coverings for the walls and roofs of homes, and even play items. All this research is detailed further on in the project report, and the knowledge recorded is illustrated and catalogued on the Inteligencias Colectivas website.

This research was made possible thanks to the collaboration with the Spanish Office for Technical Cooperation in Addis Ababa and the organisations managing the refugee camps, UNHCR and ZOA. We would also like to thank the emerging local organisations and initiatives that did not hesitate to share their knowledge with the team and assist us at every stage: Women’s Group, Refugee Central Committee (R.C.C.), Dehabo Abikr Adam, Youth Association, Bekele, Mother Crafts Association, Abderrahman Ibrahim Soobou, Mohamed Adush Hasan, and the many other people who have supported us throughout this project. 

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Jugaad and other items

Under the title “Urbanities – art and public space in Pakistan”, the collaboration project between the Goethe-Institut Pakistan and the Lahore Biennale Foundation incites discursive and artistic contributions and interventions related to Pakistan’s controversial and contested urban space, recollecting Henri Lefebvre’s “right to the city” for critical discussion and contributing to a trajectory leading to the Lahore Biennale in 2017.  

The German-Spanish collective Zoohaus, cofounded by Zuloark, was invited to participate as part of their practice Inteligencias Colectivas. We spent 20 days in Karachi, Pakistan, discovering nearly 60 amazing objects (a term we use for non-standardized intelligent constructions), meeting more than 200 people, designing and building an urban structure using local techniques in collaboration with Marvi Mazhar and her team and engaging a human network of more than 30 people. However, we were still far away from knowing Karachi in all its complexity. 

Moving around Karachi with open eyes and as close as possible to what was happening around, we perceived from the very first second the city’s strong manufacturing character and the Pakistani way of doing things “better done than perfect” with unexpected intelligent design solutions that solve specific problems and are determined by the materials and technologies available at the time. Recycling is a leitmotiv in Karachi. As objects, these solutions shape the perception and use of public space. The systems of urban objects and bottom-up infrastructure (trash collectors, goods delivery, transportation) are in fact the cornerstones of urban behavior in the city. Urbanism in Karachi is handmade, built by objects and manufactures.

Together with the Pakistani community and through a series of workshops, we co-designed a critical construction centered on architectural and urban planning techniques that combine conventional know-how with present-day needs. Many materials —reusable, semi-industrialized, craft and manufactured— are incorporated into this customized construction. Karachi, the mega-creative city of makers, joint for this project the guilds of charpoy, truck art, masonry and motorcycle decoration to create a playful urban installation called “Jugaad”, right in the heart of the city. While this research and project was geared mainly toward amateur builders, it aspires to something greater: to encourage and cultivate citizen science.

In the process of IC Pakistan particularly noteworthy was the commitment of Sara-Duana Meyer and Stefan Winkler as initiators and curators of “Urbanities”. Is also remarkable the participation of initiatives like Pakistan Chowk Community Centre, represented by Marvi Maazar in this case, or the Vasl Artists’ Association, created and supported by Adeela Suleman and Naila Mahmood. We also want to express an immense gratitude for the ones who showed us the “real” Karachi and their streets: Ali Raza, Zoya Ahmed, Huma Tassawar, Shahana Rajani, Madeeha Syed, Basil Andrews and many others.

This network pushed the limits of Inteligencias Colectivas and enabled the development of new environments in a more sustainable, creative and common sense way.

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Construction of four new prototypes based on traditional knowledge

Palomino is a small town on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. From Collective Intelligences, a research platform that works with emerging technologies, Zuloark (co-founder of Zoohaus) carries out the IC Palomino project.

First, we carried out an extensive recording of the village’s knowledge. Thus, devices such as kitchen carts, zuncho rocking chairs, palm weavings or pop-up lanterns are catalogued as part of the collective learning and can thus be replicated in the future. In a second phase, we conducted a series of design and construction workshops to develop four infrastructure prototypes for Palomino, using the knowledge previously learned. These prototypes fit the main needs identified by the community: open cultural infrastructures, community meeting places and a network of dry toilets as an urban acupuncture action.

Basilia dry toilet

The water table in some areas of the village is polluted due to problems with the septic tanks in many of the houses. An urban strategy is designed to implement a network of dry toilets to avoid contaminating the soil and to extract compost and fertilisers. This dry toilet on the Basilia Perez lot is the first private prototype. Built with a local wood structure and enclosures of zuncho and cañalata, it rests on the ground with a shallow and removable foundation to allow its dismantling in the future.

House of Culture of Palomino

The Junta de Acción Comunal gave a plot of the Casa de la Cultura for the construction of a house for the village dance group. It was decided to place the covered stage in the second half of the site, with the mountains as a backdrop. A concrete slab was made because of the stability required for the dance. The supporting structure was made of wood. The roof was made of two different types of woven palms to perfect the joints and the changes in slope for water drainage.

In addition to dance, this place also became the site of traditional music workshops and workshops for the construction of handmade instruments, open air cinemas and worship meetings.

Mobile bleachers made of guadua

In order to provide the Casa de la Cultura with infrastructure, light, mobile bleachers were built. A pile of guadua or bamboo that was to be discarded was used as material. To use it, a construction detail was invented that doubled the pieces that worked horizontally, where the guadua could suffer more, and a single one was placed in the positions where the guadua worked in favour. The stands were divided into two parts for better mobility, and the union of these parts was thought of in a very simple way, fitting one piece into the other without screws or pins. The people of the village have continued to care for them, fumigating the whole structure to avoid termites and other pathogens.

Sports Office

The villagers needed a place to meet, to organise themselves, to keep some things or to file the reports of their sporting activities. This office was to be a temporary construction, on a plot of land full of vegetation, close to the village square.

For its construction, it was decided to use a completely reversible system. The platform, with a structure of wooden beams and unpolished planks, was raised off the ground to avoid dampness and to allow the piece to breathe underneath as well. The structure of the office was built with recycled guadua. The joints were made using the aforementioned double truss technique. The roof is a structure of two alternating hyperbolic paraboloids that run through the space, avoiding the vegetation and achieving the appropriate slopes.

We worked with Rogelio, a craftsman from Palomino, designing the exterior vertical enclosures of the office, built with metal frames and braided plastic straps, which are waterproof and translucent. The vertical enclosures were made with cane as if we were making a large wicker basket. The office furniture was also built at a later moment with the same technique.

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Rethinking future public facilities through citizen action

Madrid has not only been shaped by grand master plans, historic monuments, impressive architecture, and ambitious real estate developments—elements that collectively fueled the well-known “real estate bubble.” The city has also taken shape in another way: through citizen-led initiatives that represent the alternative side of an increasingly diverse city, what we have called in our eponymous project Los Madriles. These innovative practices in social, technological, and economic spheres demonstrate how we can reinvent the city from the perspective of its citizens.

Among these initiatives are community urban gardens: spaces where not only plants are cultivated, but also new social relationships, while collaboratively designing some of Madrid’s most intriguing green spaces. Many of these gardens have exceeded the capacity of the local administration, triggering an exemplary legalization process in which municipal technicians and garden participants work together in collaboration.

These gardens serve as laboratories for shared management models, where the City Council provides the infrastructure, and citizens decide how to use it. They are particularly compelling spaces for collective learning and public stewardship, blending social innovation with the development of technical expertise.

This dynamic creates the need for infrastructure within these spaces to facilitate learning. Our Urban Garden School project in San Fermín arises from this need.

“San Fermín is like a puzzle,” explains Víctor Renes, director of the San Fermín Neighborhood Association. This neighborhood, a pioneer in citizen-driven practices, is located along the edge of the Manzanares River, where gardens were once a common feature of the landscape. It was here that the first urban garden school was established, though its place was later taken by the city’s largest sports complex: La Caja Mágica, built by the City Council.

The Urban Garden School of San Fermín proposes a hybrid management approach between citizens and the local administration, directly reflected in the way the building is constructed and designed. It is envisioned as an ever-evolving space, never officially “completed,” conceived not merely as a structure but as infrastructure to support and inspire renewal projects in other parts of the neighborhood.

In the 1970s, Robert Venturi proposed a deeper understanding of contemporary architecture with his motto “Learning from Las Vegas.” Today, it is clear that one of the paths architecture must follow is “Learning from citizens.”

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Locating many different Madrids on the map

Los Madriles is a living atlas that evolves to show an effervescent but invisible city, a cartography that tries to value the power of a critical and active citizenship that makes possible another way of making a city through open governance and participation.

Los Madriles wishes to be a gesture of:

RECOGNITION
to all the neighbors of Madrid who in one way or another have participated in any initiative to improve their neighborhood in the past or at present.

GRATEFULNESS
to all the people involved in the mapped initiatives, for their attention and availability, as well as for their valuable contribution to the collective production of the city.

VISIBILITY
which allows all those people who have recently arrived in the city or people passing through, to discover the exceptional places hidden in Madrid.

COMMUNICATION
which offers all the city’s neighbors the opportunity to recognize their neighborhood, but also to find the excuse to visit other districts and areas of the city where they hardly pass through.

REFLECTION AND SELF-CRITICISM
inviting to think about new ways of dialogue with citizens that help to improve the city’s neighborhoods and districts, making decisions together with their neighbors. An invitation to think together how to build the city in a collective and participative way.

INCLUSION AND PARTICIPATION
for everyone who wishes to participate in the collective production of the map by contributing with the inclusion of any network, space or initiative that does not appear in this first map.

You can download your map of Los Madriles in this link. Here are some of the versions made:

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A collaborative archive of knowledge of collective designs, architectures and urbanisms, shared through Creative Commons licenses

Each region of the world has its own repertoire of construction techniques. These practices, perfectly adapted to their environmental conditions and shaped by social and technological contexts, are gradually being forgotten due to the growing global standardization of construction processes. With this in mind, Collective Intelligence is an open platform for research and design that collects real examples of intelligent construction, merging them with new needs through innovative prototypes.

By testing theoretical and practical methodologies in more than a dozen countries, the project questions the role of architects and the production of knowledge through diverse collaborative processes. Ultimately, it promotes the expansion of collective imagination about what the future of our built environment could be, starting by learning from what already exists.

Collective Intelligence focuses on cataloging and redrawing technical details of non-standardized construction methods from different parts of the world. It also includes agreements and urban strategies that diverge from traditional urban planning. In direct collaboration with local experts and cultural institutions, the project develops prototypes of architecture and urbanism, with a primary focus on how scientific and traditional (or emerging) knowledge can merge to generate innovation in urban environments.

Throughout these processes, all participants have the opportunity to learn and teach. Collective Intelligence is a research initiative with a pedagogical focus, an open catalog that freely and accessibly shares information online.

Instagram & Website

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Infrastructure for cultural self-management in the CCE of Malabo, Equatorial Guinea

Akôo is a project promoted by AECID (Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation), developed at the Cultural Center of Spain in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea. It is developed by Zoohaus (co-founded by Zuloark) and framed within Inteligencias Colectivas, a research platform that works with emergence technology. Its objective is to learn from informal knowledge that is considered peripherical and that we believe it is necessary to put back into the center and interact with it through new construction prototypes.

Akôo is one of these prototypes. It is an infrastructure of cultural self-management and also a meeting space, a place for study or collaborative work and a small stage, where to submit cultural activities proposals. All Akôo is designed and built in workshops that rescue local knowledge through an emergence behavior of the community that will use and manage the space later on.

The result is a structure of reused iron rounds that rests on a surface foundation made with wheel rings. Its cover, a woven surface that provides shade, is designed with different local techniques learned during the process, but introducing a more accessible material.

The design and construction process of the Akôo lasted two weeks, but its capacity for learning and evolution has had a much longer process. At first, we worked in open workshops with the community of the cultural center to identify the needs that we had to solve. Later, we designed itineraries in Malabo, to identify the emergence technologies that are hidden in its streets and from which the project could learn. We also identify artisans and builders who could help us. All together we designed the proposal: the community center workers, local artisans and ourselves.

You can find all the technical documents of the Akôo and its assembly process licensed under a CC By SA seal on Inteligencias Colectivas website.

We developed the construction during the second week. Artisans and workshop participants worked on the metal structures, the wooden benches and the woven cover. At the beginning the cover was designed using Nipa, a local plant tissue. After a debate with the center’s manager we had to change materials because the local authorities consider nipa a material from the past, so it was frowned upon.

Two years later, we were lucky to return to Malabo for another workshop. This time we should work in rocking chairs using wood and local fabrics. We could see how the Akôo had continued learning. People used it intensely and its roof has been rehabilitated, now using the nipa that we wanted to use the first time. The Akôo is always learning.

La entrada IC Akôo se publicó primero en zuloark.