Cultivating the Commons

TEAM PORTRAIT

VIDEO (by the team)

INTERVIEW
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1. How do you define the main issues of your project in relation with the theme “Re-sourcing”? Re-sourcing thanks to nature, to social dynamics, to new materiality? In which way do you think your project can contribute to an ecological and/or social evolution? And in which way do you think your project can be called a “regenerative project”?
Cultivating the Commons, means to give a new attention to what and who is already there. Existing places obtain new meaning by getting connected to each other. Long-time inhabitants gain new agency, by establishing new organisational forms. The care routines for open spaces are adapted to welcome new non-human inhabitants adapted to the local climate. Putting the agency in the hands of the neighbours themselves allows for locally grounded and sustainable transformations, if these meet with visionary and trustful public authorities, setting the right support and incentive structures. In this way Cultivating the Commons can establish a new way of ‘making city’.

2. How did the issues of your design and the questions raised by the site mutation meet?
Central in approaching the Colonia Casa de Campo was the question, how a strategic approach, which starts with the open spaces, lead to a further transformation that might extend into the built environment, the energy supply and more. Thus a central point of discussion was the format in which to organize and empower the inhabitants, eventually leading us to the transformed corrala - a traditional typology of Madrid, that fosters neighbourly connections.

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