16-06-23 // BETWEEN THE CITY AND THE FAMILY – INTERVIEW WITH IZASKUN CHINCHILLA

Cycle to School, gates
©Izaskun Chinchilla Architects

Bernd Upmeyer interviewed Izaskun Chinchilla, who is a Spanish architect who graduated from the Technical University of Madrid, where she has been running her own office ‘Izaskun Chinchilla Architects’ since 2001. Currently, she is Professor of Architectural Practice at the Bartlett School of Architecture. Her work has been exhibited at the 8th and 10th Venice Biennale of Architecture, among other places. In her projects she proposes multidisciplinary exercises in which, through ecology, sociology or science, architecture goes beyond stylistic distinctions and meets again the complexity of real life in our contemporary world. The conversation took place via Skype on June 16, 2023.

[…]

Bernd Upmeyer: Your recent project “100 Chairs for Logroño” focuses on public engagement and participation and relates to a certain extent to your idea of “Urbanism of Friendship” too. What is the project about and what role might public participation play in a “New Social Urbanisms”?
Izaskun Chinchilla: That is a project that we have been able to analyze already more than the “Urbanism of Friendship” project. It was very important to actually evaluate what was happening in the project in which we were distinguishing three different topics that have been very important as social purposes.
The first was public engagement, meaning that we provide people with chairs that are foldable, that they participate in their design, and that they need and want to move with them around the city. Our aim was to answer the question what the best participatory area in the city would be; what a possible area for pedestrization would be; and to what extent the chairs were working as an instrument for public engagement.
The second topic was related to “placemaking”. We considered that an important aspect too, as cities are gradually becoming more similar to each other and architecture ever more international, which makes it increasingly difficult for people to identify with places and to have a sense of belonging within a neighbourhood. So, with the 100 Chairs we were trying to create connections of people with buildings, especially heritage buildings, and the local culture. We were also proposing that the participants would look at the local features and the local landmarks of the city.
With the third topic we were trying to evaluate how the project can promote, and contribute to, social capital. Because in the project we were motivating people to come together, move chairs together, create associations, and to find places to meet, for example, to draw together on a Saturday afternoon. By doing this we discovered that all these activities were creating social capital and prosperity in a very objective way.
So, these were the three main objectives to actually enrol the community in the design and in the critical use of the chairs in the city of Logroño to increase participation and a sense of community in the city and to increase this idea of social capital.

BU: With your “Cycle to School” project from 2015 for the Camden Council in London you aimed to investigate the role that children play in the urban space, empower the urban and domestic legacy of this generation, and create social opportunities for them. What were the main objectives and questions of this project?
IC: When we started this project the original question concerned what we could advise children on how to go to school between Euston Station and King’s Cross. So, we asked ourselves at what age children were able to orient themselves in a neighbourhood so they are able to bike alone and without risk. Obviously, there is very traditional literature about the perception of cities. But when we started working, using this kind of literature, like Kevin Lynch’s “The Image of the City”, this was not very useful, because children do not perceive cities like Lynch was portraying it. This is when public engagement came into play to create our own knowledge. So, we organized workshops with children between 4 and 14. In two of them the children were coming alone, and in the other two they came with their families. In the workshops we were asking them whether they recognized actual buildings and whether they could recognize little doll houses representing Euston Station and St Mary’s Church, the buildings in the area. We were starting to understand when the children recognized buildings and the reasons for it and we discovered that children who are 4 years old were only able to distinguish and recognize certain buildings when they associate them with very personal experiences like: “This is the place I first sang a song in public with my aunt”. But they were not perceiving any differences in the mass, the material, or in the colour of buildings. This empirical knowledge that we were gathering by working with people in these workshops demonstrated that social engagement is not just social participation. In social participation you can ask people “what colour would you like for the top of this building”, and then they vote pink, and they go home. But what we were doing is a bit more complicated, because we were able to gather empirical knowledge that is obviously not universal, including local considerations, and which I think is a solid piece of research for other designers to use too. And families were provided with tools that they can use for an early independence of their children by showing them routes that are not based on street names or buildings, but identified by animals and activities that were fun and that were happening in front of the buildings…

… the complete interview was published in MONU #36 on the topic of New Social Urbanism on October 16, 2023.

Title: Between the City and the Family
Project: Interview with Izaskun Chinchilla
Date: June 2023
Type: Commissioned interview
Topic: New Social Urbanism
Organizer: MONU
Status: Published
Publications: MONU #36, P. 101-108
Interviewer: Bernd Upmeyer