The studio investigated this social unbalance in the city from a spatial viewpoint. Milda Kulciviute decided to intervene in a central area of Bogotá where social-economical problems are omnipresent. Located on a stones’ throw distance from the central Plaza Bolivar, the Los Martires neighbourhood has been characterized by urban decay and social problems for the past decades. In the verge of radical urban transformations proposed by the municipality to overcome these pressing issues, Milda Kulciviute proposed an alternative urban strategy, which provides spatial clarity while accommodating the informal economical practices that characterize the area. Milda Kulciviute transcribed the insights of John Habraken and other “Open Building” theorists of the 1960’s to the contemporary urban challenges of the Latin-American metropolis. Her large urban structure re-organizes part of the dense urban tissue and provides various layers of public, private and collective space. The ground layer is kept open and provides space for a market and other economical activities; an elevated layer provides common facilities for dwellers while a series of towers offers new residential and office spaces.

Accommodating Common Practices

When looking at the commons in a city like Bogotá, we could argue that the city should be understood as the ultimate common: a collective social, cultural and material construct that is composed by and for its inhabitants. However, in the contemporary logics of urban transformation and urban development the city is progressively understood as the juxtaposition of private initiatives and domains. Squares, streets and galleries are increasingly becoming privatized and where the State intervenes they often become sanitized. Citizens have limited possibilities of participation in the development and experience of the urban common realm, and there are little spaces in the city where citizens can cooperate to produce the city and its resources.
This observation has challenged the students to find ways to connect different social groups. The project of Valentina Bencic and Yoana Yordanova aimed to look into “common practices” of inhabitants and to accommodate everyday practices that cannot easily be confined to conventional building types. Bencic and Yordanova took the historical city centre and specifically the squares Bolivar and Santander as gravitating point for their urban analysis. Making notes, sketches, videos, interviews, sound recordings, maps, and drawings showing fragments of different temporalities, they collected a substantial set of data showing how the historical centre is still a rich locus of daily urban practices. The everyday street practices of shoe shiners, garbage collectors, street artists, vendors and other characters that populate the streets of the historical became the anonymous clients for their urban interventions. Instead of a new building, Bencic and Yordanova designed a set of small interventions, which operate both on an urban scale and on the very detailed scale of product design for public space. Indeed, this project understands of the commons related to the notion of cooperation: it recognizes the value of different everyday practices as common resources, and the small but precise interventions offer people the possibility to co-create their urban common realm.
The research and design project of Silvio Pennesi, conducted in 2016-’17, focused on a problematic neighbourhood adjacent to the city centre of Bogotá, ”la Perseverancia”. Once built as a residential neighbourhood for the labourers of the nearby brewery, the area grew into a place with severe social-economic problems and criminality. Pennesi investigated the formal, material and social characteristics of this deprived neighbourhood, with the aim to identify potential for improvement while avoiding the risks of gentrification.