Ideas, strategies and projects that give rise to pilot projects. They tackle the challenges raised by the stakeholders involved and which are found in particular places in Barcelona or Medellín.
The loss of the notion of collectiveness in Medellin has converted housing projects as individual pieces within a network of roads and little fences that doesn´t allow the construction of a city for people.
The working method is to provoke the interest of children related with the house and their urban habitat, from which the children gathered at the workshop, progressively express their perceptions about topical issues such as My House, My Street, My Neighborhood, My City, both in terms of presence and of absence.
Casa Vida is a shelter for children and teenagers who have been subjected to sexual abuse or exploitation. Its aims are to ensure that their rights and those of their families are restored over the course of various phases (shelter, long-term residence, empowerment, independence and follow-up) and to facilitate a process of integrated interaction that will enable them to join society thanks to a range of strategies and programmes implemented by educators, mediators and other professionals.
The ‘artivist’ collective Left Hand Rotation has explored in-depth the subject of gentrification as a global phenomenon typical of contemporary times. The workshop Gentrification Is Not a Lady’s Name, run in several cities around the world, has resulted in the creation of new platforms for raising the visibility of this problem, the documentary Luz and the Museo de los desplazados (Museum of the Displaced) web platform.
Maps drawn up by collectives that have been directly affected by urban transformations because their practices need the street to express themselves. Social cartographers, designers, photographers, skaters, among others, have organised themselves to keep a lookout for the problems associated with the gentrification process in the centre of Medellín on three fronts: the street, the internet and the exhibition gallery.
This space recreates the room of a tenant in Medellín and brings together in its interior most of the uses of a home. It is a symbolic creation with objects, materials and colours that transports us, in a physical and subjective way, to a way of inhabiting the city.
Faced with the uncertainty of finding housing in the centre of Medellín and the peculiar fact that some of its citizens merely inhabit and exist… we have recreated small models of the city’s urban and human ecosystem, some of them representing the real situation and others a possible solution to current problems.
Every city has its own particular form of inhabiting that manifests itself in architectural spaces which, in turn, build its fabric and texture. This research project presents a series of architectural spaces that seek to understand how architecture can host the rituals of individual and collective daily life that characterises a place, and, consequently, its texture.
ARCHmedium organises an international architecture competition for students and young architects. The objective is to look at different approaches to architecture in social housing in Medellín that will provide a two-pronged response to two of the city’s deep-seated problems: the gentrification of the historic centre and self-build housing on the outskirts, caused by the influx of people from the countryside to the city.