In Hospitalet LaFundició focuses on collective processes to analyze the territory in terms of collective occupation of public space in order to make it “playable” as a way to counteract the narrative of security and control in the public space.
Prototyping playgrounds and playable neighborhoods is a way to put into practice the situated knowledge of neighbors while building alternative experiences of citizenship.
Bellvitge:
Bellvitge is one of the most iconic neighborhoods of the urban transformation experienced in Hospitalet during the 50s and 60s with the construction of massive blocks built to host the workers that arrived to Barcelona and its peripheral areas from other spanish regions. The neighborhood was built from scratch over what used to be an agricultural area and most of the newcomers came from rural areas in the rest of Spain. Nowadays Bellvitge hosts neighbors coming from more recent transnational migration processes, many of whom also have a rural background. In order to improve the few green areas of the neighborhood, we have launched collective interventions to green the public space of our venue in the Prado street.
Santa Eulàlia
For several years LaFundició has been collaborating with the elementary school Prat de la Manta in the neighbourhood of Santa Eulàlia. We have developed a collective process with the educational community (children, teachers and families) to analyze and transform the school playground conceived as a community public space, whose characteristics, needs and solutions have and echo in the rest of public spaces of the neighborhood.
Gornal:
LaFundició has a long term collaboration with the elementary school and the high school of the neighborhood of Gornal. It’s a special school as it has become a ghettoized educational structure that gathers the children of most of the rroma families of the city. As a result of this specificity, we have developed different strategies to introduce knowledges, values and ways of doing of the rroma cosmovisions in the educational programme of the school. As the rroma community has developed a deep knowledge of the vegetal ecosystem of Hospitalet and its surroundings and masters the crafts of basketry, we have put this knowledge into practice to build vegetable play structures in the playground.
Bloques Florida:
Los Bloques Florida is a section of the Florida neighborhood, a very densely populated area of Hospitalet. Los Bloques was built in the 50s as part of the social housing policy of the Franco dictatorship that consisted in building underhousing compounds to relocate the migrant workforce that arrived to Barcelona to work in the new industries. Currently the neighborhood hosts former migrants from the rest of Spain as well as migrants arriving from Latin America and the North of Africa as well as an important rroma community. The severe lack of community spaces leads to a very intense use of public space and a blooming mutual aid network since the rise of COVID19, we have activated the Pomezia community space to host the different initiatives run by the mutual aid networks of the neighborhood as well as the collective creative processes that we have launched around the architectures of play laboratory.
