Ciudad Escuela (City School). 15Muebles Workshop
Within the framework of the Museo Reina Sofía 2013-2014 residencies, the collective 15Muebles presents urban teaching based on an open code: Ciudad Escuela, a gateway and invitation to ways of discovering, learning about and making a city.
What does "making a city" mean today? Who and what make a city? And most importantly, what kind of learning is at stake? From urban allotments to self-managed sites, via citizens’ initiatives geared towards conserving heritage or promoting book exchanges, today, more than ever, the city is awash with flavours and learning that escape traditional tools and resources in teaching. With respect to the Playgrounds exhibition, with themes that include the reinvention of urban space, Ciudad Escuela takes on the challenge of making the emergence of the city as an educational setting, as an open classroom, visible. Based on Open Badges technology from the Mozilla Foundation, and devised to add value to unregulated learning in the Internet age, Ciudad Escuela tackles the design of open urban teaching. Thus, Ciudad Escuela transforms urban imagery and urban tools, practices, games and languages to work towards a common city, and, in short, to consider the city as a place of open teaching.
Participants
15Muebles is an infrastructure for collaborative work with Basurama, Zuloark, UrbanoHumano and the Prototyping project, and is one of the projects selected in the Museo Reina Sofía’s 2013-2014 research residencies programme.
Programa
Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
An open infrastructure is one with an open ‘code’ that other people can learn from, replicate and even contribute to improving. It is precisely this openness that prompts us to rethink street furniture: not only its uses and capacities, but also its potential, how to open it out and link it to other teams, other people, other spaces and other urban relationships. By opening the design of infrastructures that furnish the city, we are opening, therefore, the same conceptualisation of the major city: the uses its spaces may have, and what we want them to have, what we want to do with them; how we want to place ourselves in relation to the objects and technologies that populate the city, in terms of how it is governed and managed. The opening of infrastructures opens the conceptualisation, technical systems and ways of doing politics in the city. In this first session we will be taking a look at the ways the city is thought about today in critical urban studies: cyborg cities, metabolic systems, experimental urbanisms, ‘the right to the city’ and common urban uses. Within this context we will introduce the notion of the ‘right to infrastructure’ as a new place from which to deal with urban transformations.
Sabatini Building, Children’s Workshops
What does researching a city mean?. The study of social sciences has traditionally deployed methodological tools that make certain urban dynamics their 'object’ of study (space, gender, geographical inequalities). There is research 'about' the city and 'in' the city, yet what would happen if we researched 'with' the city?. What would happen if the city were no longer our object and became our research method?. Drifting and wandering are two paradigmatic examples of how urban practices revolve around a unique method of producing awareness. This second session looks to delve deeper into this exploration; therefore, our inspiration is drawn from exercises of material intervention in urban design, conceived as modes of experimental urbanism. We feel that the deployment of material infrastructures in the city generates environments that allow us to imagine and engage in a different city; thus, the aim is consider street furniture as an infrastructure that helps to reformulate methods of social research, to refurnish our ways of thinking and to explore what urbanising the methods of social research would mean.
Sabatini Building, Children’s workshops