For a couple of years now we keep on mapping alterantive practices among our neighbours – all sorts of “action-isms” which do not look like genuine architecture in the glorious meaning of achievements meant to last over centuries, but which are connected to dusting, clearing and painting things in deprived areas, as a part-time or voluntary work.
Brave architects and artists, instead of lamenting for not being involved in heroic projects any longer or those who get involved digitally in simulated utopias, expecting better times, adopt a positive attitude instead, socially benefic and practically relevant, not before pondering for a short while, before dusting or painting and talking openly about how to produce an urban culture and modernize in a moderated way: how to debate on it, built it and keep it going. For this is the great challenge in the public space: the construction of a sustainable urban culture before the interventions to celebrate it. This has to do with dusting and painting in the yard/parks, with “little projects for great cities”, with “urban acupuncture” instead of municipal operations under complete anaesthesia. The mighty protective fences, the trichromatic paintings, the intangible roundabouts with pansies, the luring musical water-fountains, the sponsored electronic screens and the retro benches or kiosks are but a short list to actually define our immature, infantile urban culture.
Let’s look in the yards of our neighbours and even further on, and remember a few examples to point to a different kind of architecture, made of practical gestures (cleaning, painting, minimal intervention) and a critical thinking on the modern urban culture: Estonoesunsolar in Spain (Zeppelin #90), Trafik Kör in Hungary (Zeppelin #101),Transformatori group in Bulgaria and Ivan Kucina in Serbia (Urban Report #3). In this very issue we have three new examples in the Urban Report section: a painting (“the green market” under the New Bridge in Bratislava), a cleaning model and environmental gardening on fields with abandoned sites in Slovenia, a kind of urban activism part of the Domografia project in Slovakia. Let’s remember that “Urban activations” exhibition showed, through its voluntary heroes, that one could also build an alternative culture in our place. And, finally, I am glad for my colleagues in Zeppelin, Point 4 and Archis Interventions who are among the runners up for the European Prize for Urban Public Space with the Magic Blocks project, which connects, at the city scale, the reflections and the proposals with minimal interventions.
