Two years ago Paisaje Transversal cooperated in the Transïtoak project, an initiative of an adaptive urban plan promoted by the International Contemporary Culture Centre Tabakalera of Donostia and finally, on 15 June, a tour was guided by the district in which the most unique spaces were visited because they need to be activated and a huge map was installed so people proposed activities and detected new areas, thereby the child's participation and the collective's participation who was interested in the equipment in the neighbourhood were encouraged.
Description of the project by Paisaje Transversal
We take care to develop #EgiaMap, an urban process in the Egia neighbourhood that was divided into two phases: the first one is aimed to make a collective mapping and generates a catalogue of unused spaces in the neighbourhood; the second one, it tools as starting point the results and aimed to design protocols for activating the identified areas. It was a tool to generate a set of easily understood guidelines so that any person, independently, could launch initiatives and develop activities in the squares, streets and shops of Egia.
Transïtoak is born, as the name suggests, as a transit project. A strategy by which Tabakalera treated their nomadic condition -it's planned to open its new offices after summer this year- to reflect on urban spaces and uses that people made of them. The project takes the "meanwhile urbanism" idea to approach the changing status of these uses and these spaces over time.
Strategies.- In this context, #EgiaMap starts as a process of planning and mediation to identify with citizenship and socio-cultural agents from the neighbourhood, the spaces lacked activity and propose new uses for them. It thus reverses the idea of unused spaces towards the concept of potential space. The objective of this first phase was therefore to generate a collective cartography and a catalogue of underused spaces in the neighbourhood that collected the needs and proposed uses.
Thus, the results obtained in the first phase of #EgiaMap, tell us that we needed to work on strategies for the implementation of the initiatives it outlines. For this, we chose to design an activation protocol adapted to the needs of the neighbourhood that would facilitate the implementation of identified use of space, both public and private.
For the second phase, Paisaje transversal, with the cooperation of Manu Fernández, we had the task of carefully analyzing the different regulations and red tape affecting the development of activities in the public space and commercial premises. Once this study we developed the activation protocols under public or private sources of them.
For all we know, these protocols are already being used for development activities in the public space, as in the case of activities performed by Txiringailu -mobile for activating the public space designed by M-Etxea in collaboration with the mediation team Tabakalera-, it seems that the design of such tools for activating spaces may be a route of the most effective revitalization of the activities of our cities.
