MAKING COMMON CITY

Making common city is an investigation around various actions of urban intervention that, appropriating and subverting the city’s brand strategies, aim to support the collective construction of a critical citizenry and aware of its capacity as a legitimate agent in the negotiation for the taking decisions that affect their environments and living spaces.

Universal Exhibitions, European Capitals of Culture … What city escapes today from the race to become the host of one of these great events of great promotional impact? Events that finally manage to place their name on the international map, brand operations that lay the foundations to promote rapid processes of urban transformation that, under the pretext of “adapting” the city for the event, activate mechanisms capable of miraculously aligning public and private investments that manage to seamlessly involve the entire city.

Events such as the Olympic Games, one of the most precious trophies of urban marketing, or the finals of the World Cup, Tennis Master Series … are some of the strategies most pursued by cities that, in continuous competition, seek immediate impacts that, however In the long term, they do not usually achieve the expected results with transformations that can only be explained from the logic that the event imposes, generally speculative.

Image: Logos of Spanish cities candidates for European Capital of Culture 2016

This competition between cities, which frequently leads to waste and the carrying out of bulky operations, is usually successful in terms of generating broad consensus in the immediate future thanks to a spectacular mercantile and cultural neutrality, finally resulting in debt on almost all occasions. of the city and in the expulsion of population from the areas on which it operates.

Making common city proposes various urban intervention strategies and actions that, appropriating and subverting the aforementioned marketing strategies, aim to provide a critical point of view to these large operations, through which city expectations are frequently generated which, avoiding the needs Everyday and from day to day, they invest a large amount of resources in short-term policies that prove incapable of building a durable and sustainable city project.

Faced with the politics of spectacularity and large events aimed at attracting rapid investments that rarely affect the public, Making a city in common proposes a series of diverse actions in which the inhabitants of the city are placed in the center through of urban interventions of an artistic nature that take over the public space of the city and that also seek to support a citizen conscience aware of the importance of their role and their critical and constructive capacity in shaping their environments and living spaces and their capacity to position themselves as legitimate agents in the negotiation for the decision making that affects their day to day.