The Shared Ground Floor

salazarsequeromedina (Laura Salazar, Pablo Sequero, Juan Medina)

The Street in 10 Years

The “Shared Ground Floor” recognizes that the street is a cooperative space, a space of change, and that it should be used more. The street is everyone’s domestic space.

We approach this project through a scalable implementation schedule, which operates in phases at different levels and requires the participation of numerous constituents – especially neighbors – for its implementation. The proposed format is open and flexible, and clearly expresses that the strategy to be followed will be tailored to adapt to new urban rituals and citizens’ needs.  It is recommended that for a correct reading of our proposal, the four panels be studied at the same time, mounted horizontally, around the Timeline.

Our intention is that the proposal be understood as dense, fluid, accessible, integrative, changing and unexpected.

The ten-year strategy is articulated around five phases of implementation, through small-scale and progressive actions. The panels explain in more detail the actions included in each of them:

 Phase 1. Platform:

Collective infrastructures, events programming, Concentrico as Quarry.

Phase 2. Ephemeral Actions:

Re-use of first floor premises, and start of renaturalization of the ground.

Phase 3. Long-term actions:

Extensive renaturalization and new urban rituals.

Phase 4. Shapeshifting and third lives:

Transformation, response to resulting interactions, regeneration.

Phase 5. Re-evaluation:

Achievements and challenges.

Each phase assumes revision which can be prolonged, repeated, leaving room to react.

The next edition of Concéntrico will serve to launch Phase 1: a platform to publicize the 10-year project for the Glorieta – Beti Jai – Duquesa de la Victoria urban axis, and to invite the public of Logroño to participate even in an ongoing conversation, which Concéntrico has been generating for the last ten years, and which now aims to permeate this area of the city as a zone of action and change.

The street in ten years? It is an opportunity.

PHASE 1: PLATFORM
COLLECTIVE INFRASTRUCTURES, SUSTAINABLE MATERIALS

The project is divided into phases to ensure its viability. The first steps are based on the creation of a platform for community participation, through collective infrastructures (ephemeral and responsive artifacts). Citizen participation will serve to determine the objectives and implementation of the following phases. People will feel empowered as authors of their urban environment because they will operate as key agents in the process of transformation. Temporary and social in nature, collective infrastructures will be built progressively, based on the needs of the public.

The first step is to temporarily activate the space we call the Four Corners, where Beti Jai, Duquesa de la Victoria and the Glorieta are located. This point is of vital importance as it is on the diagonal that connects important public spaces, and can play a catalytic role in integrating the institutional buildings in the area. Inserting urban artifacts of a domestic scale, which invite participation, will generate a tension with the pre-existing and transform the scale of the public space. At the end of Phase 1: Platform, they may (or may not) be dismantled and reassembled differently as new urban artifacts based on future activities.

We propose two artifacts: one to create a visual landmark as a clock tower over one of the parking spaces, which sets the pace for the project and serves as a meeting point to attract the public, hang posters with public programming, illuminate the street in the middle of the night, and announce the transformations which are coming. The second artifact is a kiosk in the park as a temporary architecture that recalls the tradition of the kiosk as the center of gravity in an urban context, but can be used in multiple ways, now as an ephemeral and adaptable structure. Its purpose is to hold community assemblies, and spontaneous activities such as a pop-up flower shop or a ping-pong game. Both open infrastructures are constructed in a lightweight, economical, reused (if possible), dismountable, transportable, and reconfigurable material. We will use sustainable resources from Garnica and the Concentric initiative as a Quarry.

PROGRAM OF EVENTS

We accompany the proposal with a draft of one of the key pieces in the project La Calle a 10 Años de Concentrico, a program of events developed with the objective of making the street a meeting space at all hours of the day. We anticipate the program of activities and workshops that could be held, building on the rich popular culture of Logroño, its customs and traditions, and keeping in mind the accessibility to audiences of different generations. It is proposed that during Concéntrico 10 this calendar be developed together with groups of neighbors and small entrepreneurs of the neighborhood.

PHASE 2: EPHEMERAL ACTIONS (in depth)

RENATURALIZATION (coexistence)

Glorieta Park currently has a poorly defined scale, with few possibilities for different uses. In spite of having dense trees, it is a monotonous space, with hard pavements. Its current character is of unoriented circulation. The School of Design, important in La Rioja, and the city hall built by Rafael Moneo are separated from the Paseo de las 100 tiendas by this park and heavily trafficked streets. We want to recover these important threads in the urban fabric by introducing a secondary scale of outdoor spaces and promoting the renaturalization of the park.

Over the years, a series of artifacts will be designed and implemented to encourage more public life, which respond to the new uses demanded by an inclusive, transgenerational, and mobilized society. Many will appear only to disappear later. Others will be cyclical, assembled every year, for example, every spring during Concentrico. Their ensemble will reprogram the space and transform the park, turning it into a shared, multi-characterized space. One space, many rooms. The key to this project is to re-scale the urban area. Encouraging interaction and exchange is our tool for a city composed of its neighbors.

One cannot, however, propose an infinite succession of uses too close together, one cannot build borders to generate privacy, one cannot use a single pavement for a changing city. That is why this phase includes re-naturalizing. It is essential that plants, shrubs, trees, etc. help to organize the city. Deciduous plants speak of temporality. The aromatic ones are consumed and are ingredients for the neighbors, which are there before cooking. The perennials form boundaries, thicker, but that let you see through. Children can learn to coexist with plants and insects in urban farming classes. No more impermeable cities, no more houses with gardens on the outskirts.

During this phase, we will design together with a multidisciplinary team and local associations a specific plan for renaturalization, with local plant species and a detailed rezoning of the Glorieta Park. The city is our garden.

CONCÉNTRICO AS A QUARRY

Concentrico will become a quarry for our programmatic and material infrastructure, as a sustainable strategy which seeks to repurpose the embodied energy of the festival. We propose to reconfigure pavilions from past editions of Concéntrico into new artifacts that are relevant to the community, thus reducing the environmental impact of the festival and extending its material life. These artifacts will be designed to serve and supplement the program of activities defined by the community in Phase 1. Concentrico is a festival of architecture that resonates with the non-architectural population of Logrono. Let’s extend that impact to improve the public, daily lives of its citizens year-round.

Our aim is to reuse as much material as possible from Concentrico (and also remnants of repaving and so many other things) in this environment, with the collaboration of citizens. We propose furniture repair and Do-It-Yourself workshops as pop-up events on the street, in the kiosk, and in underutilized venues, in which pavilions from previous years will be transformed into new collective infrastructures. These workshops could take place in collaboration with ESDIR courses, encouraging opportunities for outdoor classrooms. A cyclical and progressive process of transformation, new urban artifacts will accumulate in the public realm as needed or be repurposed for other uses. Our role is to guide the process of assemblage as the design of a functional and aesthetic artifact.

RE-USE OF FIRST FLOOR PREMISES

When we describe a Shared Ground Floor, we also imagine that the limits of the street could be extended into the available vacant space on Beti Jai Street and Duquesa de la Victoria Street. We propose a progressive strategic plan that identifies available, unused vacant spaces in the ground floor, and activates them during various periods of time, for public and shared activities. This program of uses, events and activities in the vacant spaces could become permanent over time, and be implemented in other areas of the city.

For this part of the plan to work: urban, mobile and domestic artifacts will increasingly populate the exterior and interior, just like the plants that come out of the shop windows.

In the project we have identified abandoned, boarded up, rented, for sale, with public and concerted uses. We have developed our strategy of progressive insertion around them. Temporary, cyclical, ephemeral or permanent, disused premises will be inhabited by people, plants and animals. Workshops and associations -with public involvement of neighbors and local businesses- will organize events, pop-ups, exhibitions, meetings, festivals, beyond the bar and restaurant terraces, with an intention to embrace cultural life in this area of the city. Exhibitions of local artists will also give visibility to those who do not yet have access to museums or galleries. The ESDIR, the film library, the Gonzalo de Berceo, the English Academy, the Pioneers Foundation, the Sagasta Institute… all present in Concentrico over the years, will participate in these. The Hijazo bookstore used to be in Beti Jai street, but left after the street was perceived as a back of house over the years. New activities connected to cultural institutions in the area: extracurricular classes, book launches, small exhibitions, could make the street desirable again for this particular small business. Only one example of how the plan can happen.

We propose to start by activating Las Cuatro Esquinas, studying the possibility of inserting a public, shared use in the vacant space formerly used by the store Imaginée, which could become a rental-repair bike store or  an atelier for furniture repair. Both uses that engage the public and blur the boundaries between private and public, interior and exterior.

Phase 2 will be instrumental through negotiated agreements with small businesses and city council, which in the larger scheme will revitalize the 100 Shops area.

PHASE 3: LONG-TERM ACTIONS
EXTENSIVE RENATURALIZATION AND NEW RITUALS

During Phase 3, circulation and paving are definitively questioned. Calle Duquesa de la Victoria cannot cut the Beti Jai – Glorieta transition, with it´s heavy and noisy traffic. The study area has a clear problem of disuse, it is inhabited only at certain times, the rest of the time it is only transitional.

With the people and with Concentrico we must locate places for specific long term interventions. Perhaps some of the ground floor vacant spaces could become public for good and the windows could be removed and a blackboard could be hung up with the workshop schedules. By then, perhaps we can redefine Duquesa de la Victoria as a pedestrian street, and open up the Círculo Logroñés to the square and the streets, while weddings will continue to be held inside.

We begin to strategically re-pave the area, to create softer pavements and green areas, and discover a new urban option that fascinates us. The outdoors within the outdoors. We propose creating a new lightwright structure, such as tThe Patio, located in our scheme occupying the void in front of the entrance of Sagasta School. Also the idea of Playground as defined by Van Eyck, as an inseparable part of the street, becomes in this phase a real possibility – the whole park and the streets should be read as an urban playground of ever changing scale.

Perhaps a series of interventions with a long-term intention would allow us to define a reactive and inclusive city more precisely and successfully over time. Similar to an urban acupuncture, it will be led by the neighbors with the knowledge acquired from the initial phases.

Modes of mobility at this time must change. The urban space of the center of Logroño needs to be more open to the unexpected, and for that, transportation must be less dangerous for the pedestrian, slower, not obstructing the views and not closing space between parking. It must also be less contaminating and more inclusive to alternative and clean transportation methods. Less noisy. Bicycle lanes may need to stop being ordinary lanes and be more coherent with an environment in which they have more space. Beti Jai should also stop being the loading and unloading zone of the area. This is contributing to its urban failure. We will develop a part of the study dedicated to this intention. Pedestrianizing Duquesa and considering pedestrianizing the rest of the limits of the Glorieta would occur in this phase.

A continuous diagonal circulation would be generated at last linking the public spaces of Logroño.

PHASE 4: THIRD LIVES AND SHAPESHIFTING
THE STREET IS PUBLIC

As in a theater: without the public attendance, this will not work. We must have managed, at this phase, to believe that the street belongs to everyone and it is for everyone. It’s time to get our hopes up again and create more lives – an expanded lifespan- than we have so far laid the foundations for.

In Phase 4, the people of Logroño already know of their authorship and agency in defining the streets of Logroño and have the means and methods to carry out any change and event. The citizens will be able to nurture Logroño’s incredibly rich popular culture, appropriate it and transform it. Rituals evolve and are remade in a non-linear way that allows for and benefits from social interaction. We want  to think of the city as a laboratory where reactions take place.

During phase 4, if something (an artifact, a public infrastructure) does not work, it is not destroyed, it is reconfigured. Maybe we are just talking about a different use or maybe we should change the scale of that place, adding shade or other elements that facilitate the habitation of public space. In Phase 4 we learn from the above and add to it. Third lives mixed with second and first lives – to generate new meanings.

PHASE 5: RE-EVALUATION
A DOMESTIC URBAN LANDSCAPE

The street, as a great meeting place that would bring to the foreground a deep reflection on shared belonging. We would like to talk about sharing, about what is yours for a while and then mine. There is a negotiation in the urban space which we feel our agency for hours or minutes, also for years and generations.

Has it worked? Has The Shared Ground Floor been possible this way or do we have to try new things? Which parts have worked and which have not? Has the commonality, the momentary blurriness of the individual and the private, stopped being scary? It is time to look back. 10 years are the first step for the next 10. The tower clock reminds us that we have to keep defining an identity for the public space and ourselves. We also need to keep building a more open, greener and more generous society.

We believe that by re-scaling the city we can make it more generous and challenge extreme individuality. Also, when we prioritize the capacity to react, temporality, the ephemeral or cyclical condition, third and fourth lives, etc., it is because we know that we must be able to go back or change direction without a Tabula Rasa approach. We are confident that we will be able to evaluate the impact of the 10 year strategic plan and that hopefully it will have generated momentum to continue naturally. We hope to be able to continue contributing in whatever way we can, as expert citizens. Above all, we must have convinced citizens that urban life can be shaped and scaled.

In phase 6 and 7…