GRAVALOS DI MONTE: HYBRID SPACES

FRANCESCA GOTTI: Your studio has been active since 1998 and has carried out a large number of very different projects, interweaving multiple areas but always placing the needs of the communities at the centre. How can a long-term dialogue be built with the city and its desires?

GRAVALOS DI MONTE: We are great supporters of spontaneous projects, which our experience has taught us to be the most productive and long-lasting. In 2014 in Germany, we conducted a workshop during the Ruhr Triennial, in collaboration with a refugee association, carrying out an intervention in a brand-new square that was not used. Through a participatory path, we understood that it was above all necessary to provide the opportunity to create jobs. We reused an old caravan containing tables inside which can open and be distributed in unused pre-existing public spaces: a sort of autonomous kit where a new public space overlaps an existing one as a mobile, temporary layer. The workshop lasted a total of one year and we chose both the neighbourhood and the associations that worked on the project. We decided to intervene in the square of a theatre because this allowed us to get a sponsorship from the art institution and pay the artists involved. Now Syrian girls run the caravan. This is also a best practice in the “Generative Commons” Horizon project that we are following.

FG: What is the most effective way to start a project of this type?

GDM: We can identify three ways of starting a project: institutional initiatives, informal group initiatives and hybrid ones that combine both. The Estonoesunsolar project is the best example of a hybrid initiative: it started with a proposal made by us to the municipality and which casually met the needs of different associations, responding to complaints regarding the state of abandonment of some urban lots. We have thus satisfied both a need raised from below and an institutional will, through an enlightened politics that has seized this opportunity and that has taken the risk of activating this experimental programme. The Maquina de bailar, on the other hand, was an informal initiative, born within a contemporary dance festival, which involved several schools where we were invited to collaborate. The festival wanted to bring dance to schoolyards as a new activity for young students, and what we proposed was to change the rules of the game and change the design of all the courtyards.
The involvement of future users is essential because it is what generates a sense of belonging and promotes self-organisation and thus respect for the place. It’s a topic that interests us a lot: our ambition is always to create “do-it-yourself cities,” by discharging public administrations from the role of control; favouring self-organisation and the affirmation of the sense of belonging also favour the maintenance of the places. The Superilla Pilot is another example of a totally informal initiative: in conjunction with the first phase of the municipality’s mobility plan, the city’s architecture schools decided to organise a workshop to understand what could be done in the new public spaces. The plan, in fact, provided for the construction of several junctions, each of which freed more than 2,000 square metres from traffic, which became pedestrian. Each university tutor, with a group of students, formulated a different answer: while most of the groups generally produced urban furnishings, we worked on formulating the most pertinent question. We conducted interviews with pedestrians and neighbours and through these meetings, everyone denounced the lack of identity of the place, although this was already defined as a public space by the municipality. The question we designed, which was also a semantic game of words (as often happens in our projects), was “Quien te ha dicho que tu no pintas nada?”. In Spanish it means “who said you have no role in this process?”, but pintar also means to paint, so this question was already a double invitation that we offered to all participants. After deciding together, the new identity to be given to the place, we collectively designed macro panots (a flower printed on the tiles of the city’s Gothic neighbourhood), which subsequently became a widespread practice in Barcelona. We used waste material (brushes and cans of white paint) to create a super graphic intervention that managed to transform the intersection into a meeting place.

FG: The idea of demand as a goal of participation is central. Often, the limit of projects of participation is that they start with an already defined programme and the goal is simply to carry it out together.

GDM: In fact, most of the invitations we receive work in this way, with a programme decided a priori, following a participatory process in which probably only a small and partial group of people took part. Instead, we try to implement an analytical approach that is as critical and deconstructive as possible. A virtuous case is that of the BellaFuori project in Bologna, an international competition in 2014 born from a very long participatory process organised by the Municipality of Bologna and the Urban Centre (which is now called the Urban Renovation Foundation). A peripheral area had been chosen in the district of San Vitale, and during many months with a complex participatory process, a specific intervention site emerged. We were among the three studios selected to participate in the project and therefore in the entire project: we had to respond to a long series of requests and, it should be noted that this adds complexity to the intervention, that would have been the first park built following the signing of a collaboration agreement. Following this formula, the project had to relate to both associations and individual citizens. It was the first time that we built a public space that required the signing of a collaboration agreement, and it was also the first case in Italy of this type of project. There are now many Italian municipalities that have signed this type of pact.

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Extract from the interview "A talk with Gravalos di Monte: Hybrid spaces" Full text available in the book "The Design of Tactics: Critical Practices for Public Space Re-Activation," forthcoming.