ATELIER MOB: THE BEST PLACE EVER

FRANCESCA GOTTI: As an architect, when you are doing your projects, do you think people understand the dimension you work with, or do you think they don’t give it the value it has?

TIAGO MOITA SARAIVA: More and more, mostly western countries tend to individualise people, to push them to take care only of their private business and to stay at home. Many people feel that what is outside of their door is a space intended for the State, and what belongs to the State doesn’t belong to them, it’s distant. My work is mostly on how to make people feel that this is also their common space, to use and reuse. All the politics for the last decades have created a feeling of distance between people and this dimension: when they license the use of chairs and tables outdoors for cafés, they are renting out something which is actually public, and making you feel uncomfortable in certain spaces if you are not consuming. Citizens are not made part of the discussion about what it should be. Another issue is that public spaces are perceived as insecure, and politics manipulates this aspect: for example, the right-wing parties use this to intensify the presence of police, to invest money in security, in arms dealing. But if common places were really felt by the citizens as space they belong to, if they took care of them and identified with them, then it would change and they would start to be safe. By common places I mean all the spaces in-between buildings: they can be void spaces with no meaning, streets as well, but in general any place where people can get together despite the city. To create a safer environment, we have to invest in public space and in local commerce with people that inhabit it. When neighbours start to interact, they also start to build a safer city.

FG: I saw that on your website you have a blog with updates on the research you are doing, and you also develop collective workshops. What’s your process of engaging with citizens?

TS: Well, we don’t have a model of participation, and sometime we fail a lot. I remember our experience on the streets of Marvila, a space in between two developing neighbourhoods in Lisbon (one used to be an industrial district and it’s now the most creative in the city, the other is a social housing area), where we started working in 2014. Here, we found the real working class of the city, old men who are now living on their pension. Our first approach was to organise meetings in restaurants, in places they frequented, using mapping. Then, after one year of working we decided to formalise it with an association: we knocked on everyone’s door (2000 doors, more or less) to call for a meeting on a Saturday afternoon and only two people showed up. So, it was clear that people didn’t want to form an association and we decided to open the office in the district in order to work with them. We didn’t move the whole office there, but just the team that was in charge of the project, and we rented a studio: our door was always open. At that point, people started coming in and asking us to organise cultural events and movie nights: each Thursday we were having film projections; we organised a lecture by a man from the neighbourhood about the story of his life, about his working life, and he was promoting the event around the area, as well. It started to be a movement.
What happened afterwards is that there was a former palace belonging to the municipality and which was going to be sold to become a luxury hotel: people got together and objected to the sale, asking for it to become residential, because they wanted young families to move to Marvila, they wanted it to stay public. So, we made an agreement with the municipality to create a participatory process about the reuse of the building.
Each time we start a project we have to test different things, we don’t have a solution. Now, in Portugal everyone talks about participation and there are some former competitions asking specifically for participation. I remember there was one competition for houses in Lisbon, which we applied for, and in the programme they were talking about participation: so, in our proposal we stated that we couldn’t produce any image, because that would have been the result of the participation. We came last! We were the worst because we didn’t have any visualisation.
I think this is a big failure on their part: we are forced to compete to get a contract, but these types of jobs –that we usually do with other collectives – are much more symbiotic. We work together! I don’t want to compete with Orizzontale or Assemble, I want to join forces. The approach of the European competitions, and even more those on a national scale, makes it difficult to include participatory processes. Normally, they accept a process that talks about workshops and exhibitions…but still they rely on the idea that there is going to be an architect showing a final result and that’s it. And people will either react to that or not. These processes are not adaptive to this kind of work.

[...]
Extract from the interview "A talk with Ateliermob: The best place ever." Full text available in the book "The Design of Tactics: Critical Practices for Public Space Re-Activation," forthcoming.