Streetlife. Urban Research Laboratory

Data: 2017- in progress

Design team: Adriana Aguirre, Angelo Stenek y Charles Roitel

Tutor: Miriam García

Landlab will launch an urban design laboratory aimed at young people and adolescents, in which they can express the way they understand their city and how they imagine their own neighborhoods future. If you dare to participate or just want to know more, please contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

 

 

The City

The city is the stage where life, yours, mine and others develop, weaving stories, relationships and dreams. It is also a cultural, physical and social palimpsest and, in the current context, an urban innovation laboratory. The current institutional and economic crisis, and global warming are an opportunity for cities to reinvent themselves. This will require new attitudes, new structures and infrastructures in which it is necessary to start working from multiple perspectives.

But, who makes your city?

Is there anything more public than the streets and squares in which we crossand live with each other? Is not the construction of the city (what some call urbanism), a public policy that influences our health, our work, communication, equality, environment and culture? In the squares of many cities, in recent years there have been citizen movements that have generated a shock wave that have had the effect of converting a multitude of problems considered "technical" in public affairs, of everyone. However, we cannot be satisfied with counting only on the mobilized voices, it is necessary to open to the maximum the range of citizen involvement in the creation of new imaginaries for the city.

 

Comic & City

The relationship between the city and the comic is intense and dilated. The comic is a tool of mediation and creative construction. Their stories are not limited only to the description of the present, but they offer possibilities, visions and transformative designs. It is therefore a means of urban research that combines ludic experience with information and innovation. There is no city more beautiful than the one that supports a story and, in that sense, the comic is an effective laboratory that has influenced our vision of the city in the past, present and future. And is that comics interpret, reinvent and even anticipate new urban realities. They advance future scenarios, allow us to imagine how we adapt to phenomena such as climate change, tourism, the disappearance of the car, urban agriculture, streets-schools and many others that are yet to come.

 

Methodology for cities of the future

In this context it is proposed a look at the city through the comic as a meeting point. As a format and as a mediation process itself. Streetlife is a workshop open to urban creativity: It is aimed at young people and adolescents: a group whose voices have not been widely heard despite being called to transform our cities into more livable and supportive places. Throughout different sessions, basic concepts of sequential art, characters and language in the comic are developed, resulting in urban scenes where the story will be developed, the psychological portrait of the characters and their relationships. All of them fundamental elements when it comes to being able to tell and draw a story.