Is it possible to rethink design and build new and better spaces for coexistence among different neighborhoods and with communities?
Luís Galán (Zuloark Collective): Perhaps the question for us is a bit different, as we rather not look at diversity as a possibility but as a responsibility. Seeking inclusion and positive conviviality in public space projects & designs should be a shared commitment of the professionals participating in the work with communities, territories and the ecosystems that inhabit them.
Rúben Teodoro (Warehouse Collective): For us, this question it’s actually the answer for what should be the main goal for urban designers: “to design better spaces for coexistence”. To achieve that, as Zuloark already pointed out, designers must get out of their offices and work on site with the challenges and solutions shared by local actors. They are the experts of their territory, their social dynamics and their potential. Designers should work as a critical tool to enlarge the alternatives of these spaces, not as behavior dictators that shorten future possibilities.
LG: As part of the collaborative process of designing and building better public spaces for coexistence, we believe it is really important for the architects and designers to abandon the central position and adopt a less-leading-more-constructive role when working with local communities. The myth of the designer as an isolated genius and inventor must disappear in order to promote more ecological, relational and situated perspectives that alter the criteria and indicators for what is now relevant in the design of public space.
Our experience at Here Be Dragons Oporto made us realise once again that creating vivid and meaningful public spaces needs a lot more than drawing lines on a paper in your office.
RT: We’ll like to add that actually this project is a proof of exactly that “more than drawing lines on a paper”, as all the people involved from both associations contributed to the overall project, making it better and more inclusive, by bringing their own dynamics to the equation.
LG: While preparing the Here be Dragons proposal for Oporto, we were lucky enough to meet two extraordinary local associations that work with people with intellectual disabilities, SOMOS-NÓS and AADID (Associação dos Amigos das Deficiências Intelectuais e Desenvolvimentais). The workers, participants and families of the two associations became the absolute protagonists of the story from the very first moment we met.
The associations took care of almost everything to make the project happen. They provided us with almost 100% of the resources that were necessary, they accompanied us throughout the entire process, they facilitated the development of the work sessions together with the monitors and finally they introduced us to the people with disabilities with whom we designed and built the street furniture and with whom we celebrated the opportunity to have been able to realize the project together. In fewer words, none of this would have happened if it wasn’t for SOMOS-NÓS and AADID. So a big THANK YOU to the monitors, Marlene, David and Miguel, and the biggest THANK YOU to the heads of the associations, Mimi and Filomena.