The History Workshop of the City Interpretation Center from the Shack (CICdB) is back for another year!
And it’s back with a vengeance, with an exhibition in preparation for the end of the year at the Museu d’Història de L’Hospitalet, with an online digital archive, and with the proposal to build a headquarters that is at the same time a social space, a monument to the shacks, and a demonstrator prototype of the potential of informal architecture.
And what is the History Workshop? Well, it is a space for neighborhood organization for the restitution of the memory of the shacks neighborhoods of L’Hospitalet, open to former residents and all those interested in the city; because, above all, the CICdB is a tool to understand the contemporary manifestations of the urban, seen from the shack:
The dominant narratives about the city are generally produced from the spheres of power: the media, social services, the urban planning areas of the city councils, the universities… To whose interests do these narratives respond? What paradigms of the urban do they sustain and, in turn, produce? And on the contrary: How did the inhabitants of the shacks understand the city? What representations of the city as a whole are produced from the informal city?
The hegemonic discourses on the informal city offer an image of misery, insalubrity, and misgovernment and present its inhabitants exclusively as passive victims; however, and although these aspects cannot and should not be denied, there were also ways of producing the city and forms of collective organization that were potentially emancipatory in the shacks, which is why we intuit that the ways of understanding and being in the world of the shack dwellers have been erased from History.
This year the activities of the CICdB, such as this History Workshop, are part of the European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018 promoted by the European Union under the slogan: Our heritage: where the past meets the future.