100 chairs and 3 urban lounges for Logroño

Izaskun Chinchilla

Concéntrico 08

The100 chairs and 3 urban lounges is a proposal that arises from a new alliance between the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation, Izaskun Chinchilla and Concéntrico.

An open process that we will develop in 2022 together with its author, Izaskun Chinchilla. We believe that a city like Logroño would benefit enormously from having, in some of its spaces, folding chairs that would allow citizens to rest wherever they want and decide the best use of municipal furniture: which way they look, if they sit under a tree, how many people they want to have a conversation with. This custom of sitting on individual chairs in public spaces has existed in Spain and in the towns of La Rioja since ancient times. We want our public spaces to once again have free seating areas, where people can meet without having a drink or paying.

The project 100 chairs and 3 urban lounges has the support and accompaniment of the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation, through its call Componer saberes para imaginar y construir futuros sostenibles 2021 (Composing knowledge to imagine and build sustainable futures 2021). With this call the Foundation seeks to find projects that can be a lever for change in the field of Citizen Art.

ACTIVE GOVERNANCE.
CITIZENS INTERACTING WITH MUNICIPAL FURNITURE.

There are other cities in the world where this type of furniture has already been implemented: High Park or Green Park in London, Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. These cities are clear that it is important to move towards active governance: to give citizens the tools to decide on the current and future use of their resources and spaces; when we encourage citizens to decide where to sit or how to make use of a particular service, we increase their competence: they will learn where the sun shines and where not, perhaps stories about the square and about the reasons and rules that govern coexistence in it. But we also promote that the implementation, the act, rational and emotional, is reflexive.

LOGROÑO LOW EMISSION ZONE.

In compliance with the Paris Agreements, in 2023, 145 Spanish cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants must have a low-emission area proportional to their population. Logroño is a paradigmatic case. We propose, within Concéntrico 08, to involve citizens in the definition and promotion of this area. Through the movement of chairs and lounges, citizens will be able to contribute to the delimitation of the low emission area.

METHODOLOGY: Workshops, walks and participation.

We are now starting the planning of citizen participation workshops for the creation of 100 different chairs. We intend to involve several AMPAS and Senior Citizen Centres for the elaboration of the chairs produced in wood by means of numerical control. They will be able to work through an online survey or analogue notebooks that will allow them to personalise the chairs.

Both the online and analogue versions of the booklets will ask the workshop participant to start by selecting a starting chair from among several models. All of the initial models consist of versions of traditional or iconic 20th century chairs that have been converted into folding chairs and can be made in wood using numerical control. From the initial selection, the participant will be able to carry out various operations to transform the chair.

During the week of Concéntrico we will allow the chairs and urban lounges to change their destination by collecting requests through a web page and we will collect testimonies from citizens who alter the location of the furniture, generating a record of the requests for relocation and the reasons for it.