Vivienda social: necesidades comunes, caminos comunes y dificultades comunes. La experiencia uruguaya.

This paper attempts to describe a particularly successful model of social production of habitat, that of Uruguayan housing cooperatives, which has already been developed for more than half a century, linking it with the conclusions of studies on the management of common goods by the people own selves by the Elinor Ostrom. Uruguayan housing cooperative´s characteristics and central aspects are analysed. Main singularities of the system are self-management, direct involvement of future users throughout their work or savings, and collective ownership of the houses, granting the right to use and enjoy to households. Subsequently, it is made a brief presentation of Ostrom’s work on commons and the Uruguayan cooperative model is taken up considering these concepts. This paper concludes that this social housing model would have great potential if had the support of the governments, currently oriented to free market, throughout development of an adequate legal framework, public funding, and access to land.

Una aproximación al estudio de las políticas públicas de vivienda rural en Tucumán.

In Argentina, the housing policy model conceived and applied during the 1950s, 1960s and later, deepened by the National Housing Fund (FONAVI) in 1972, was based on the idea that mass production would favor the sustained development of the construction industry, making it possible to overcome the deficit and benefiting the economy as a whole. This model was implemented in the same way in rural areas, and public housing policies have not tended to address rural areas with their own identity, nor have they taken into account the ways of life and habitation of this population. In this sense, this paper sets out to carry out a historical review of the public rural housing policies carried out in Tucumán from 1860 to 2018, analyzing the logics and processes that they promote. The results show that, since the creation of the Provincial Institute of Housing and Urban Development (IPVDU) in 1969, the production of state housing continues to focus on works with urban characteristics, without differentiating towards the rural interior of the province. This excludes the lifestyles and ways of life of the target populations.

Construir la ciudadanía colectivamente: prácticas urbanas de una asamblea popular en Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Traditional ideas about citizenship in their liberal conception emphasize the role played by the individual as the holder of rights and duties. These ideas have been strongly questioned by various currents of thought and from some fields of studies, such as urban studies. In this paper we seek to contribute to these debates by analyzing the urban practices of a popular assembly in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (CABA-Argentina). These practices are enmeshed in disputes between the old and the new, the public and the private, and the visible and invisible, configuring citizenships that promote ways of understanding and building more participatory and democratic cities. We analyze the activities of “making visible” and activism in relation to the homelessness problem as well as the Assembly’s intention of building an urban habitat anchored in the decommodification of the city and in collective projects. We conclude that this case testifies to the construction of citizen experiences that have great potential to displace the individualistic corset with which citizens’ rights are usually defined and defended.

Se nos ha ido, como el rayo, Luz Marina.

Luz Marina García Herrera, professor at the University of La Laguna, colleague, teacher and friend, passed away in June 2020. A reference in Spanish Urban Geography, her contribution to the debate on the shaping of the city and the social dynamics inherent to it has opened up timely and necessary lines of work. She anchors her background in the interpretation of urban social processes under capitalism, focusing on key issues such as marginal developments, gentrification mechanisms or different facets of urban segregation. In addition she also approaches other issues in which we have been able to share time and space with her. Among them the constant and changing conditioning between physical and social environments in the city and consequences, or the reading of public spaces, their use and appropriation keys, as an indicator of cohesion as well as an instrument for the transformation of specific realities. All of this, and even more his commitment and his profound humanity, which we are proud to have learned from, motivate these lines.

Soluciones basadas en la Naturaleza: estrategias urbanas para la adaptación al cambio climático.

Cities will suffer the impacts of climate change in the next decades. These impacts will be different according to their geographical features, the distribution and number of green spaces, the characteristics of the exterior surfaces of their floors and the density of population, among other aspects. Given this situation, many cities have begun to adopt adaptation strategies to reduce their vulnerability to the adverse effects of the climate; among which Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) stand out, which respond to ecosystem services and climate challenges, and are classified from the main ecosystems in which they affect: water, vegetation and soil. Within this context, the interest of the SBN in the international field is analyzed and the adaptation measures included in urban strategies developed to respond to this task are reviewed. The review of interventions in cities of the Mediterranean area makes it possible to value the usefulness of the NBS for urban planning and design.

La Odisea homérica y la cueva como arquetipo de paisaje rural y primer hábitat mediterráneo.

The search for an answer to the question of when the landscape begins, brings us closer to a subject as complex as that of looking for traces of landscape in Homer’s genesic works. From a phenomenological analysis of literary texts, we are forced to draw on such heterogeneous sciences as psychology, painting or geography, to promote a transdisciplinary convergence that helps us in our search for landscape and housing archetypes from attentive and inquisitive readings of the Homeric hexameters and some of the possible objectifications of their places of indeterminacy. We focus on the Odyssey, Homer’s second masterpiece, recited and written at the end of the 8th century BC and considered the germ of Western literature. Such an epic narrative develops complex plots in settings belonging to known and differentiated territories known as “Hellas”. In short, Homeric stories necessarily take place in a “place”, be it real, imaginary or fictitious, of a physical space or vital territory- in which action and daily life will take place. The Poet, as aedo-educator, selects stereotypical natural or cultural spaces of the Mediterranean in order to show archetypes of nature, geography, the polis, and the Mediterranean landscape itself, as an educational and unifying program for the dispersed peoples of Hellas. And the objectifications of that Homeric world, carried out throughout history by different memory repositories, will be the basis for the creation of the West. Here we dare to identify the cave —located on mountainous limestone slopes and facing the sea— with the archetype of the first Mediterranean rural landscape and habitat.

Pedaleando con Lefebvre por el carril-bici de Sevilla. Por qué no debemos presuponer que las infraestructuras públicas restringen por defecto el derecho a la ciudad.

The notion —clearly inspired by Lefebvre— according to which public works have per se a coercive character that curtails the inhabitants’ right to the city, should not be applied when evaluating certain infrastructures which actually improve the livability of the urban space, such as those promoting urban cycling. Considering this possible error, it is necessary to examine the repeated exceptions that Lefebvre himself enunciates throughout his work when he characterizes some types of urban intervention that, when fulfilling certain conditions, contribute to the resignification and reappropiation of urban space. We here pursue not only to enumerate these notes by Lefebvre, but to illustrate them taking as a model an urban intervention of great repercussion such as the infrastructure for the promotion of urban cycling in the city of Seville in the first decade of the 21st century, and applying such Lefebvrian contributions to its characteristics. In the confrontation of the different space-producing strategies, some infrastructures —such as the one addressed in this case study— guarantee the right to the city, instead of being, as could be argued from a superficial reading of Lefebvre’s analysis, an element that restricts that right.

Movimiento vecinal, urbanismo y participación en Valladolid (1970-1995): una perspectiva histórica sobre el “derecho a la ciudad”.

Social History and urban planning History combine in this text in order to contribute to the knowledge of the neighbourhood movement in Valladolid (Spain) in the period of its birth and greatest development (1970- 1995). The perspective adopted axes on the concept of the “right to the city”, coined by Henri Lefebvre in 1968, and focuses the study of the conflicts hold for neighbourhood organisations face to municipal governments in the process of conquest of participation ability in all kinds of decisions on the city. The most of the sources are the local daily press, but also archival and bibliographical documents. Three periods characterised by the general climate of relations between the neighbourhood movement and the City Council structure the content of the paper, separated by two turning points: the municipal elections of 1979 and a deep rupture in 1986. The analysis shows, in one hand, continuities and changes in the role played by the neighbourhood movement in Valladolid as a “stakeholder” (in the Lefebvrian sense of the term). In the other hand, it identifies some effective conditioning factors and limitations in the conquest of the right to the city.

El proyecto urbano como experiencia colectiva, colaborativa, situada, perfomática y transdisciplinar.

The city we inhabit, the territory we share, it is nowadays under revision, and urbanism is central to these reflections. The experiences of “Territorio Tolosa” (Tolosa Territory), a collective project of urban contemplation and neighborhood transformation, comprised by architects, artists and the local community, which I have coordinated for the past five years. We have run walks around Tolosa, organized workshops, performances and different types of collective practices to re-signify the spaces we inhabit. Our research questions those architectures that support hegemonic ways of producing controlled and a priori spaces, proposing instead open processes to participatory practices, which include walks and collective mapping as ways of thinking about urbanism. In one hand, we want to explore procedures to deconstruct the traditional ways of producing architecture, based on individual skill, in order to promote them as collective processes, collaborative and transdisciplinary. On the other hand, we want to explore deeper into the architectures of delay, proximity and care, to enhance the pre-existing urban landscape and the sensitive encounter between people. Tolosa is neighborhood in La Plata city, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Tolosa will be taken as the research focus, to rethink the neighborhood in the xxi century from feminist perspective.