Artistic experiments for small-scale actions and widespread purposes

Abstract

In 1986, Ignasi de Solà Morales opened the debate concerning innovative project approaches for Barcelona. He claimed the need to analyze the town toward its details instead of considering only its planar view. Adopting the neighbors point of view means to observe the town from inside: streets, public and private spaces, people behavior; everything influencing the relationship between the human and the environment, defines the town identity. Some year later, in 2008, Manuel de Solà Morales, in his book a matter of things, talks about a new kind of intervention, called urban agopuncture. A different design view paves the way for new urban actions developing on multidisciplinary fields. Not only urbanists can play a role in social dynamics framework, but other different issues interact each other to improve urban life: for example art and design can promote bottom-up actions. The time of top down planning, with its generic view, is ended, turning in an opened debate where, first of all, people can express their needs, hopes, habits, discomforts. After analyzing usefulness and power of the artistic tool for planning, in conclusion, we’ll show a project example for a suburban situation.