An arts-based educational kit to rethink urban space

What would you protect in the public spaces around you?
What would you add?
What would you replace?

PLANEA is a network of educational centres, cultural organisations and institutions that use artistic practices in state schools in a cross-curricular and context-specific way. In late 2024, this network launched the Transformative Futures Kit project, in which three Spanish collectives would design three educational programmes based on artistic methodologies to develop skills linked to the social and solidarity economy in public education. These programmes took the form of three kits to be sent to schools to guide the students in carrying out the activities.

Zuloark has designed the Urban Parliament Kit, which proposes the creation of Urban Parliaments self-organised by the students. We understand an Urban Parliament as a civic infrastructure; a piece of street furniture for rest and enjoyment of public space, but also for the active, free and open promotion of discussion about the city from within the city, designed to include as many stakeholders as possible in the process. 

The kit received by each centre includes the materials needed to build a parliamentary totem – a symbol of the Parliament and a spatial organiser – which can be moved to different locations in public spaces, transforming them into settings for dialogue and critical reflection on the city. The kit’s design prioritises ease of assembly and adaptability to the schools’ logistics, encouraging the reuse of local materials and the free self-assembly of the various seats. Ultimately, the totem can remain at the school for other activities once the project has finished. 

During the Parliament’s proceedings, in the public space, discussions take place about the city’s future and potential changes to make it a better place. Answers are sought to three questions that guide the session: What would you protect in the public space around you? What would you add? What would you replace? All ideas are collected and noted on the totem, later serving as the basis for creating a Declaration of Urban Rights that reflects these thoughts about the city. Finally, a joint OpenSource map is drawn up where each school marks the public space where they held the Urban Parliament, along with their conclusions about it, outlining a possible dream future.

This project is led by PLANEA, the Art and School Network, supported by the Spanish Ministry of Labour and Social Economy and funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU.

La entrada Transformative Futures Kit se publicó primero en zuloark.

Navigating towards a climate island: activations of the Costanillas site from Suq Centeno

The Suq Centeno project consists of a series of actions of ‘protest’ and ‘proposal’ against the social, cultural and food degradation of the San Agustín neighbourhood in Córdoba. A souk (from the Arabic süq) is the name given in Spanish to the traditional markets of Arab countries. More than just a place for buying and selling, the Suq is the central meeting place for the active social participation of the community around food and crafts. 

Inciding on ‘learning by doing’ methodologies, Suq proposes eco-social change through the following actions: the organisation of a farmers‘ and artisans’ market, the rethinking of the potential of abandoned plots as climatic-community islands, the construction of an oven as a milestone in a new way of communicating community culinary knowledge and the creation of a library for the neighbourhood.

Workshop for the design and construction of the Climate Classroom

From Zuloark we held a meeting dedicated to the collaborative design and construction of a Climate Classroom for the project. In this workshop, we designed and built a space dedicated to children, equipped with devices that activate biodiversity and serving both as a market stall and as an emerging climate classroom.

The result consists of four different prototypes:

Prototype 1 – Parliament of Bodies: In the abandoned plot of land in Costanillas, the neighbours had begun to cultivate a vegetable garden. But, in order to inhabit the space, it was necessary to share ideas and desires for the place beforehand. For this reason, it was decided to design and build a space for conversation and rest, a symbolic and at the same time functional element: a parliament.

Prototype 2 – Shade: Inhabiting the site for days on end allowed us to see how the passing of the hours gave rise to more sheltered corners and others that were sunnier and more exposed. Thus, it was decided to take advantage of the existing dividing walls to stretch steel cables across the site and fix elements of natural reed on them to provide shade for a good part of the day.

Prototype 3 – Watering cart: The lack of a water supply on the site conditions the choice of the species planted and the dynamics necessary for their care. The easiest way to irrigate the garden was to bring water directly from the fountain of ‘La Piedra escrita’ with buckets or jars, as in the past. It was therefore decided, in collaboration with the artist Alvaro Albaladejo, to build a cart in wood and iron to bring more water from the fountain.

Prototype 4 – Totem: Finally, a representative, identitary and multifunctional device is built, which can be used as a work table, storage, exhibition space and communication support; but above all, it must be an infrastructure that can be modified and adapted to the needs of its users; this is how the Totem was defined.

On Sunday 12th May the third edition of Suq Centeno was held in the Luciana Centeno neighbourhood centre. For this occasion the pieces built during the workshop were taken to the courtyard of the centre, to communicate and make visible the work done during the week in the site.

La entrada Suq Centeno se publicó primero en zuloark.

Design and construction workshop for a children’s playground within the framework of the Modul project in Hospitalet de Llobregat

The Modul project was promoted in 2018 by the City Council of Hospitalet de Llobregat for the transformation of a disused site in the district of La Florida – Les Planes, with the intention of making it safer, suitable for play and inclusive. In 2019, the Contorno Urbano Foundation, a neighbourhood organisation, led the project to regenerate the space, creating a work plan in which our collaborative design and construction workshop is framed.

Our contribution implements the fifth children’s playground infrastructure, followed by the ship container (storage during the process and public equipment when the infrastructures are finished), the fitting out of the accesses and rest furniture, the giant mural on the retaining wall that delimits the space and the climbing wall also inserted in the wall. Many of the infrastructures have a multi-use condition, activating the space in a more continuous way given the different forms of use of the interventions according to the criteria of the users or the activities that are carried out. 

The excellent groundwork previously carried out by the Foundation with local community stakeholders enabled us to establish a well-integrated process of citizen participation in both the design and construction phases of the project. In the weeks prior to the construction, we proposed to the organisers to hold a parallel design workshop: on the one hand, our team would come up with creative options for construction and, on the other hand, the students from various schools in the area would give free rein to their imagination. The only condition we set was to work with the reclaimed materials we had selected from the public works warehouse of the Hospitalet city council.

The most difficult task was to combine the different designs that came out of this process, and we achieved this by working from the unification of the narratives that describe what happens in the space rather than from the diversity of designs. The result was a deconstructed tunnel reusing large pipes and a wooden framework and a corrugated floor made of tyres and wooden slats.

The facility has become self-managed by a network of agents and functions as an open-air community classroom for educational, leisure, sporting and cultural activities.

La entrada Children’s playground MODUL se publicó primero en zuloark.

Curated walks in Madrid’s Fuencarral neighbourhood to rediscover the natural and cultural heritage of its streets

Sendas (o)Cultas is a research project based on practice through different artistic and educational disciplines that provide a critical and reflective look at the disconnection we maintain with the urban nature of our environments.

The aim of Sendas (o)Cultas is to inventory the good environmental, social, artistic and educational practices that take place in neighbourhoods (allotments, meeting places, self-managed centres, community gardens, open spaces, neighbourhood actions, etc.), record them by creating a toolbox (maps, sound files or other formats) and use these learnings to apply them in forgotten spaces in the neighbourhood. The Fuencarral district was chosen for the development of the first path, specifically a strip of land between the wasteland of the future Chamartín operation and the old Fuencarral settlement.

Sendas (O)cultas Fuencarral is a project of Ciudad Huerto, a training itinerary that brings together the learning and experiences of community gardens in the city of Madrid. The project was born with the idea of being able to replicate the methodology in different neighbourhoods of the city. 

But, how do we clear these hidden paths?

Initiatory routes

In the first phase of the project, ‘Initiatory routes’, important agents in the neighbourhood are asked to guide us along a personal or thematic itinerary. These walks are done collectively, contacting neighbours and collectives who live in these corridors or who know them because of their connection with the territory. We work with physical and digital research, mapping urban nature, but also cultural projects or human landscapes.

Extracting learning along the way: The toolbox

The second phase of the project consists of identifying and translating the data extracted from the mapping of the paths into formats that make it possible to transmit what has been learned in a clear and concise way: digital maps, catalogues, sound files or manuals. The new ecological corridors identified hide a large number of intelligences (endemic species, citizen innovations, urban ecosystems) and it is part of the project to be able to identify them in order to make them useful on an urban scale.

Cultural and artistic interferences

In a third phase, artists, botanists and urban culture experts are invited to help us find and make visible the paths towards a city that is friendlier and more respectful of its surroundings: searching for hidden waters, discovering the origins of the flora of our neighbourhood through music or composing a collective sound score are some of the inspiring actions that we carry out on the territory we have travelled through.

Sendas (o)Cultas Festival

The result of this year-long research work was concentrated in the ‘Festival Sendas (O)cultas: Caminar para revelar’, an open-air festival to celebrate and discover what often goes unnoticed. It took place from 22 May to 4 June 2021 and involved walking through the village neighbourhood in search of hidden streams, forgotten stories of former settlers and the plant symphonies hidden in the neighbourhood gardening of its streets.

In addition, three actions were programmed as an artistic ‘distillate’ to be developed in the neighbourhood. Once we had catalogued the PONC (Points of Naturcultural Oblivion) that we discovered in the different thematic itineraries carried out, and using the learning gathered in the toolbox, interventions were carried out in these PONC, such as the installation of totems and plaques in the neighbourhood gardens or the collective planting of fruit trees in the inter-block spaces.

The aim of Sendas (O)cultas is not only to recover and enhance the value of these spaces and practices, but also to encourage dialogue and citizen participation in the construction of more sustainable, just and liveable urban environments.

La entrada Sendas (o)Cultas Fuencarral se publicó primero en zuloark.

Tracing itineraries in Madrid’s Villaverde neighbourhood in search of communities that drive more sustainable changes from their gardens

Sendas (o)Cultas is a research project based on the practice through different artistic and educational disciplines that provide a critical and reflective look at the disconnection we maintain with the urban nature of our environments.

In this project, art and culture are used as tools to communicate the innovation and knowledge of experimental gardening that have emerged from the citizens of Villaverde. The starting point is the discovery of good environmental (Nature-based Solutions (NBS)) and cultural practices that occur in a territory, documenting and extracting the learning observed, enhancing them by transferring them to environmental and social recipes and applying them collectively to deteriorated, forgotten or invisible spaces in the neighbourhood.

Thus, the methodology tested in 2020 with Sendas (o)Cultas Fuencarral is used to build and disseminate new imaginaries and narratives about the socio-environmental paradigm shift in which we are immersed. 

Sendas (o)Cultas Villaverde: Environmental Clinics

If in Fuencarral nature and culture were the connection to implement actions with citizens, in Sendas (O)cultas Villaverde the aim is to investigate the connection between nature and community health to heal the territory and contribute to adapt and mitigate the scenario of climate emergency towards which we are moving and in which the BNS can play a decisive role. One of the means developed for this are the ‘recipes’. The recipe is the traditional and classic format through which popular knowledge has travelled for centuries, a shared and common knowledge. Sendas (O)cultas Villaverde is thus configured as an itinerant clinic that will elaborate and apply environmental and social recipes.

ZASS (‘Yellow Sustainable Sensitive Zones’)

ZASS is a project co-financed by the Montemadrid Foundation that seeks to experiment with a diverse community fabric on new models of gardening that adapt in a more sustainable way to the climate change scenario in which we live.

Sendas (O)cultas proposes the generation of a diverse and open learning community . Through itineraries in which contact is made with the community fabric of the district, exploring local ecosystems, a learning community is forged around experimental gardening that will seek to implement ZASS gardens in the neighbourhood.

Garden Atlas

Building on the experience and complicity of the learning communities in the ZASS phase, this new phase seeks to further expand the recognition of ecosystems in collaboration with the Nomad Garden collective. A mapping of agents and species is being developed through the Garden Atlas platform, recording everything identified during the walks. The photographer Bego Solís accompanies us throughout the process to make a kind of portrait of each gardener and his or her garden.

The open field

In parallel to the artistic interferences, we design our own interventions that support the experimental gardens found in inter-block spaces, balconies and public spaces. The biodiversity of the district’s open spaces is highlighted with the aim of promoting a change in the aesthetics of gardening in public spaces. It also encourages the physical and digital connection of these spaces and promotes the emergence of new experimental gardens.

Sendas (o)Cultas Villaverde-ZASS Festival

Finally, a second edition of the Sendas (o)Cultas Festival is held as the culmination of the project. After travelling around the neighbourhoods to discover the district’s hidden neighbourhood gardening, artists, botanists, landscapers, chefs, etc. are invited to turn these experimental gardens into new scenarios for celebrating, listening, experimenting, prototyping and producing new narratives to reach new audiences.

The Festival is configured around six open and free artistic proposals , which will take place between June and December 2023:

– Sounds from the Third Landscape. Improvised musical piece composed by Chefa Alonso with the Afandice occupational gardening group, inspired by three species of wild plants. Held in the ZASS neighbourhood garden of the María Moliner Library.

– Hand Made Urbanismo. Self-building workshop in the Los Pinos vegetable garden in the San Cristóbal neighbourhood, in collaboration with students from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá.

– Invocamos al Butarque. Sound walk by the artist Susana Jiménez Carmona in collaboration with the Escuela Municipal de Música Antón García Abril de Villaverde along the old bed of the Butarque stream.

– A peripatetic garden. A strolling conversation with the landscape gardener Teresa Galí through the neighbourhood gardening of Villaverde Alto.

– Wild flavours. Gastronomic tasting of dishes made with wild flora by chef Kike Gallardo, from El Herbario Comestible, in the gardens of Afandice.

On 21 March 2024 we celebrated the change of season from Sendas (O)cultas Villaverde with a curation by Bosque Real together with the artists Lorenzo García-Andrade, Cris Blanco and Anto Rodríguez, once again realising the beauty and richness of the natural heritage with which we inhabit the city.

La entrada Sendas (o)Cultas Villaverde se publicó primero en zuloark.

Assisting discussions for the elaboration of Proposals on the Built Environment and Architecture

The PECa! Debates were online debate sessions developed by Zuloark between experts in different fields to open to the public the challenge of developing the Law on the Quality of Architecture and the Built Environment.

The Directorate General of Urban Agenda and Architecture (DGAUA) had to complete the legal framework established by the Land Law and the LOE, taking into consideration the Davos Declaration, and proposed a process of institutional opening that would generate consensus between civil society and professionals. This process was called PECA (Spanish abbreviation for Proposals on the Built Environment and Architecture).

Beyond the conventional process of drafting and processing such a law in Spain, the participatory process PECa! accompanies and opens the debate to the public through its website and thematic meetings between professionals, working groups, sectoral representatives and dissemination among the academic and collegiate sector. Topics such as social, environmental, communication, public, historical protection and innovation are discussed.

The curator’s proposal for the PECa! panel discussions aimed to form a sufficiently diverse, representative, useful and pluralistic group of panellists, taking into account aspects such as gender parity, background, profile and age. The audiovisual proposal, produced in collaboration with Malasombra Estudio, sought to connect the Palacio de Zurbano with the different technical correspondents in different parts of the country.

The Law on the Quality of Architecture was finally approved in the Senate Plenary, without any votes against, in June 2022.

La entrada PECa! Debates se publicó primero en zuloark.

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.

La entrada Citykitchen se publicó primero en zuloark.

How can architecture express itself as productive cooperation, exchange, solidarity and living?

Making Futures Bauhaus+ is an action-research project that addresses the future of architecture as a collective resource. Initiated in 2018, on the centennial of the Bauhaus, the project emerged as a collaboration between raumlabor and the Berlin University of the Arts, organizing activities in Berlin, Istanbul, Palermo, and Oberweissbach.

During the Making Futures Summer School at Haus der Statistik in Berlin, more than 150 participants come together in a temporary academy set up within the ruins of the former Department of Statistics of East Germany. Through Making Futures, this massive, abandoned building is transformed into a laboratory for exploring the city’s political imagination. 

Over two weeks, this non-disciplinary learning environment hosts a diverse curriculum led by practitioners in spatial practices. Participants design, build, negotiate, maintain, perform, and celebrate an educational and convivial space both inside and around Haus der Statistik. Simultaneously, the school becomes a dynamic actor in urban transformation, creating a shared sphere of action that connects participants, neighbors, and the wider civic community.

Over two weeks, participants construct experimental furniture pieces and engage in a program of talks, workshops, and lectures. Making Futures thus proposes, through practice, new forms of collective learning to tackle current urban challenges such as speculation, tourism, and pollution. This approach challenges the urbanism dictated by the real estate market and instead promotes a “furniture urbanism”: a city model built through small, mobile, and community-driven interventions.

During the construction workshop we lead with the participants, we collectively explore what we define as “pioneering uses” for Haus der Statistik: its infrastructure, furniture, methodologies of coexistence, and material conditions for hospitality.

As in a domestic space, the kitchen, resting area, and meeting and work tables become prototypes for learning to cut wood, use machines, and understand the logics behind the materials. Each small piece of furniture then grows to meet the needs of the different groups participating in the Making Futures School.

The kitchen transforms into a large bar with a terrace in the wooded garden; the resting area expands into an intimate pavilion with a large bench-lounge, and the deliberation space turns into a beautiful terrace that can host assemblies, concerts, and conferences in various formats throughout the summer.

The participants of the school exceed expectations, challenging schedules and organizing autonomous activities. They start the day with yoga, prepare collective lunches, and launch a fanzine to share their experiences and reflections. To close, they organize a large “presentation party” to showcase their work not only to those inhabiting Haus der Statistik but also to the city at large.

Making Futures transforms Haus der Statistik, once dedicated to statistics and planning,  into an example of how urban experimentation can shift from rigid planning to an open model that trusts in its own citizens. In doing so, Making Futures questions the traditional role of architects and urban planners as sole experts, diluting authorship and sharing the responsibility of imagining and building shared futures.

La entrada Making Futures se publicó primero en zuloark.

Making urbanism from the smallest scale

Since 2013, Zuloark has been collaborating with the Javeriana University of Bogotá in its PEI programme (Programme of International Experiences), hosting its Architecture and Design students in Madrid to carry out a series of participatory design and construction workshops in conjunction with local communities. This line of workshops is called Hand Made Urbanism, understanding the city and the capacity we have to improve it from a multi-scalar perspective, where the smallest constructive details affect and relate to much broader environments, from the scale of the neighbourhood to the city itself. Thus, we intervene in urban planning from the smallest scale: that of urban planning made with our own hands.

Since 2013 there has been a succession of buildings from the PEI programme, hosted in different parts of Madrid, which have become living laboratories of urban planning:

The auditorium of 100 chairs

The first Hand Made Urbanism workshops were the traditional summer workshops in the Campo de Cebada, a public space of vital importance in the history of the neighbourhood of La Latina that was for many years self-designed and managed by the neighbourhood.

In the first edition, the idea was to build an auditorium by putting together a large number of small chairs that were designed and built in situ with material donated to the Campo de Cebada. In the second edition, the work was different; instead of equipping the Campo with small infrastructures, a working methodology was proposed that would allow many people to work on small objects that could be used and shared with others. For the third edition, it was decided to prioritise the care of the space and efforts were dedicated to rehabilitating, caring for and protecting the furniture that was already in use.

Neighbours from El Campo de Cebada, ACETSAM, Daetsam, Medialab-Prado, students from PEI Universidad Javeriana de Bogotá, the Alcalá University Alumni Delegation of Architecture, San Jorge University of Zaragoza, CASC Villena, Zuloark, Basurama and PKMN architects participated in these workshops. 

Battle Royale

In 2015, PEI students returned to Madrid for a week of Hand Made Urbanism workshops at Medialab Prado, a cultural laboratory open to the city. Zuloark, together with the Basurama and PKMN architects collectives, called this edition ‘Battle Royale’, after a film directed by Takeshi Kitano in 2000. In the film, a group of students are destined to live on a deserted island with a number of personal tools, needing collective intelligence to power these tools and survive.

Based on this plot, a collaborative strategy was designed for groups who were assigned a toolbox and an outline based on a 60x60cm pixel grid, within which they had to design the best possible piece of furniture by seeking alliances. Their surprise at the end was to discover that the set of elements, which functioned as a catalogue of independent pieces, exceeded their expectations when assembled into a final piece.

Experimental furniture for the library

In 2022, the students participating in the PEI programme were able to connect with the community of the Villaverde neighbourhood in Madrid through a new edition of Hand Made Urbanism workshops. During one week, a co-design and co-construction workshop was held at the María Moliner Public Library where pieces of urban furniture were developed to serve as new infrastructures for the outdoor space of the Library.

This space, of approximately 400 m2, was presented as a place of opportunity for urban experimentation. Each of these pieces can serve as an individual bench, but they can also be combined and create larger compositions such as an urban parliament, meeting points or play spaces. Parallel to the construction, several lectures by Madrid-based architects and designers took place, creating a rich learning context.

Huerta Los Pinos has a new auditorium

In 2023, a new Hand Made Urbanism workshop was held to design and build furniture to equip the Huerta Los Pinos. Considering the participatory nature of this community, the aim is to generate a learning environment open to all interested people (neighbours, young people, adults, families and public entities), with whom we work collaboratively to improve the public space.

Being Huerta Los Pinos a new space for development and experimentation, a small auditorium is designed and built to host self-organised public events. Different tribunes for seating are created, as well as the stage that frames it and different elements that take care of the environment, such as birdhouses.

This edition of the PEI is developed in collaboration with the social laboratory platform for environmental solutions Redes por el clima, the project for reconnecting with nature in the urban context Sendas Ocultas and the active community of Huerta Los Pinos and the Asociación Vecinal La Unidad de Villaverde.

A particular school playground

In the last edition of PEI 2024, the idea was to design new furniture for the playground of the Navas de Tolosa Infant and Primary School in Villaverde. The project aimed to create an open learning environment where PEI students can integrate with a group of proactive young people who are already working with Villaverde council.

In the workshop, a series of multi-faceted tables and benches were built for resting, eating or meeting as a parliament, as well as a play area adjacent to the school. Collaborative ways of working were tested and different forms of innovation in design and architecture were introduced through the practices of the invited guests.

On this occasion, work was carried out in a joint framework that brought together two major initiatives. On the one hand, the event Compromiso con el climaX, developed by the Madrid City Council, La Casa Encendida of Fundación Montemadrid and the ITD of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. And, on the other hand, the Programme for Guidance, Advancement and Educational Enrichment (PROA+), in which the Navas de Tolosa School and the Ministry of Education collaborate through the Subdirectorate General for Territorial Cooperation and Educational Innovation.

La entrada Hand Made Urbanism se publicó primero en zuloark.

A new piece of furniture that generates energy for the city

The series of electrical installations called “Bicyclopes” was launched in March 2012. It is a participatory project in which users have the opportunity to be involved in the decision-making process and, in some cases, in the construction process. This involvement is what makes each “Bicyclope” unique and distinctive.

The opportunity to design one’s own living space strengthens each person’s motivation to maintain and take ownership of that space. Moreover, we believe that a sense of identification with and engagement in one’s environment stems from active participation in the decision-making process. For this reason, this project extends far beyond merely beautifying the streets with an electricity-generating installation. Instead, it aims for residents to design a prototype within a given framework, participate in part of the construction process, and use the resulting product for their own enjoyment or everyday needs.

Participants also decide how the generated energy is utilized: for example, powering the lights of a signaling system, playing music, activating a USB port, and more.

In addition, playful aspects such as self-generated energy and the effort required to produce it are central to the entire process. From this perspective, our proposal goes beyond simply creating an electricity-generating facility. We aim to provide an integrated system for the school that is grounded in participation, collaboration, mutual learning, environmental stewardship, and responsibility. In this way, the Bicyclopes operate on multiple levels:

Theoretical level: With Bicyclopes, we aim to spark an open and broader conversation about the use and design of public spaces. By making participatory theories accessible to the community, we seek to raise awareness about the vital role citizens play in shaping public discourse.

Physical level: At the end of the process, a functional electricity-generating installation for the city is created.

Social level: The project is built on a win-win relationship or horizontal collaboration between our professional team and the users. This dynamic allows each participant to learn through shared experiences and creative processes, fostering a “mutual learning process.”

Bicyclopes has been featured in Berlin, Germany (Programm Soziale Stadt, 2012-2014, and Kultur macht stark, 2015) and in Örebro, Sweden (OpenArt, 2013), serving as a reference for a more playful and collaborative approach to city-making.

La entrada Bicyclopes se publicó primero en zuloark.