At the end of last year, we received the news: the people of
Esta es una Plaza
had obtained the temporary transfer of the plot at number 24 Doctor Fourquet street by the City Council of Madrid. Since its inception, more than a year ago, this project to create a self-managed public space has gone through critical moments, especially when after its first inauguration in December 2008 it was razed by bulldozers – you can read the full story on their blog-.
It could be said that, in a way, the history of Esta es una Plaza stages the relationship, antagonistic at times, and symbiotic at others (parasitic, some would say), between the institutions of public administration and those groups that understand the city as a common space. The distrust that the idea of a space managed, not by the citizens – that abstract and transcendent entity – but by action groups united by diverse motivations, generates in the political representatives is evident; and yet the case of
Eco-Urban Network / ECObox
, an initiative
of the French collective
atelier d’architecture autogérée
, in the La Chapelle district of Paris, or
Park Fiction
in Hamburg, to mention two of the best-known projects. However, the model is being progressively regularized in cities such as Zaragoza, where also last year the program estonoesunsolar, managed by the private municipal company Zaragoza Vivienda, and which proposes the recovery of urban spaces in disuse within the historic center of the city, through citizen participation in its management, and especially of schools.
We think that it will be interesting to observe how the tensions between the idea and the practice of the city as a common space and those of the city as a governmental space are resolved over time; especially from the moment in which the negotiation and the agreement between those who are located at one and the other end of this ideological spectrum seems possible. Among other things, it will be necessary to see to what extent the tolerance or interest of public administrations towards this type of initiatives does not conceal a more or less conscious strategy of co-optation and neutralization.
But hey, while that kind of stuff arrives or does not arrive, we are happy for the success achieved by the people who participate in the project and we echo their open invitation to anyone who wants to collaborate in some way in Esta es una plaza.