This book is available for purchase in bookstores or online in Catalan, Spanish, or English (RRP €20). You can also download it as a PDF in Catalan, Spanish (extended edition), or English.
Who designs our cities and their buildings? Architects? Politicians? Construction companies? That’s usually the case, but more and more people want to have a say in shaping the environments they live in.
We believe that cities should be built by their citizens. In recent years, there’s been a rise in architectural and urban planning projects that include participatory processes. These projects not only continue a historical tradition with a peak in the 1970s, but also serve as laboratories for new tools that have proven highly effective.
This book compiles participatory methodologies for shaping cities and their architecture.
“The contributors to this book share a common cultural milieu as a generation of Spanish, Catalan, and Basque architects and urbanists who emerged during a near decade of economic crisis. The crisis brought with it a collapse of the building industry, a recoiling of municipal budgets, and widespread unemployment among design professionals; it was also accompanied by signifi cant social unrest, most visibly in the 15M indignados movement.” “Building together has tremendous potential to create not only wonderful places but also technical capacities, sustaining organizational structures, and local knowledge production.” David de la Peña, doctorate in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning from the University of California, Berkeley
