BUILDING COMUMUNITIES REHABILITATION AND HOUSING BARCELONA

Building communities implies creating relationships that hold together people and things from different backgrounds and different times, a community between new and old neighbors, between new and old fragments of a built city in which, in the end, everyone, people and things, live in a new unity. When we talk about building communities we are thinking about the community that is built with the city that exists, adding to the as-found, inviting new neighbors to interact with those who already live there. The challenge of architecture today is to work in disarticulated or abandoned contexts within cities, valuing the social and physical structures that we find as the basis with which to work. We understand urban rehabilitation as the balance between the recovery of a physical fabric and a social fabric. Flores & Prats STUDIO EVA PRATS Visiting Professor: Eva Prats Adviser: Ricardo Flores Assistants: Guillaume Guisan, Àngel Solanellas To recover the social fabric of a neighborhood is to recover the memory of hundreds of civic, cultural or personal relationships that the neighborhood had built over time and still remain invisible but latent. But not only people contain the memory of a neighborhood, the buildings are also loaded with memories of the uses of the place: we are interested in the observation of the built fabric as the reflection of a social behavior. Although broken, it speaks of a way of using the ground, the sky, of a way of inhabiting, because it contains the gaps, the courtyards, the distances, the meeting spaces, the volumes... The rehabilitation of the physical fabric of the neighborhood will help the recovery of a social fabric, both complement each other and work at the same time. To read the memory contained in buildings and in people is to think about a future that counts on that past.