The urban spaces, their design and the planning of their use, are subject to an intense public debate that affects both the new urban spaces in non-consolidated areas and the public spaces inserted in consolidated urban networks. This debate refers to the location and location of public spaces, such as the design, equipment and productivity of such spaces. Frequently, the planning of these spaces is done with strictly technical criteria without taking into account the social perception and the use that is made of public spaces. The result is that such spaces designed to be meeting places, crossroads and promoters of social interaction end up becoming unproductive scenarios (ghettos) when not on platforms where irresolvable social conflicts are expressed. The reasons for these imbalances are very varied, ranging from processes of refunctionalization of public spaces, to changes in the typology of users and their demands, including the fact that, in fact, there are inadequacies in the location, design and equipment of the spaces. This course aims to contribute to the debate on urban public spaces, emphasizing the presence of natural elements and the impact that these elements can have on human well-being. For this, it is intended to bring together specialists from different branches (architecture, urban planning, geography, gardening, environmental psychology, etc.) in order to evaluate and make proposals for the improvement of the quality of public spaces, which is a way of make the city more alive and friendly.
Anto Lloveras is an architect, artist and curator. Resident in Madrid. He is the director of LAPIEZA. Lloveras was trained as an architect at ETSAM Madrid and Delft University of Technology. Lloveras has taught at architecture studios and seminars at NTNU University of Norway Science and Technology and at the UCR3 Juan Carlos III University of Madrid. His current interests include the structure of philosophical hermeneutics in relation to SOCIOPLASTICS, the device he develops in epistemology and narratives to address the conceptual processes of relational art. JOSE ANTONIO CORRALIZA, environmental psychologist. "The relevance of public spaces and the impossibility of endowing them with meaning by how they are planned: Urban green beyond mere decoration, key in 'turning concrete into something that beats'." JOSEP SELGA, biologist. "We are so used to urban trees that we do not give them the importance they have, their structural character to make the essence of the city, citizen space, or do we want a city to sleep and then flee?" JAVIER RUIZ, architect. "'The public' in a city is the most attacked at this moment, we must defend the values of public space that are fundamentally communicative, public space is the only place where communication takes place in the most vivid sense, more Random and more dangerous, the city has to be imperfect in nature so that it can evolve over and over again, we must flee from unique solutions, the city is the best invention, the germ of problems to solve environmental problems. " PEDRO MOLINA, geographer "The inequalities of green treatment that exist in the city are significant, I am interested in untreated, marginal green spaces, small islands of naturalness, lots in many cases, which should be protected as a reservoir of landscapes." MARIANO SÁNCHEZ, Horticulture Madrid Botanical Garden "The fundamental environmental quality is respect for the genetic bearing of the plants and the use of native plants, emotional well-being depends on the quality of the plants and the acoustic contamination in a green space." ENRIC POL , environmental psychologist "We ask the citizen to behave in an environmentally friendly way and, nevertheless, the problem is that even if they want to perform the desirable behaviors, they can not." The dynamics of the city help or hinder this behavior. It is easy to anchor sustainable behaviors if the values of sustainability are characterized as the values of the community in which the citizen likes to identify, facilitating the appearance of a new identity is key in the public space. "ENRIQUE BARDAJÍ, architect" My proposal is to establish the elements of architecture in relation to public spaces, in that concatenation between type quirky and urban morphology that identifies the public space where coexistence, work, mobility ... develops, and deduce from it the project of the new cities or revitalize the old ones. "SALVADOR RUEDA, biologist and environmental psychologist" From the moment in which in the cities the center of the road to the car has been reserved and some lateral tapes to the citizen, this one stopped being it to happen to be pedestrian. We have designed a new cell that transcends the block, which multiplies three or four times, and which accommodates the traffic around it to liberate the interior spaces so that the citizen can return to have status as such. "AGUSTÍN HERNÁNDEZ AJA, architect "We have built spaces that lack elements of characterization for the citizen and have become complex spaces, are not considered as a structural part of the citizen's life or that are endowed with symbolic elements for participation, that there is the possibility of that 'someone does it or someone close to you has done it'. An example of appropriation of a park is the Dehesa de la Villa in Madrid. "
