As part of my thesis at the Department of Urban and Territorial Planning (DUyOT) of the Technical University of Madrid (UPM), I arranged, together with the leaders of the center, Inés Eléxpuru and Yolanda Guardione, and the head of research at FUNCI, Sergio Isabel, a workshop to be held with the students of the center.
The objective of the workshop was the realization of minor interventions in the spaces that make up the daily life of each student.
Rabat, located south of the Bouregreg River, is a city with much greater purchasing power than Salé, on the north bank of the river.
One only has to look at the sister cities of Rabat and Salé from the air to understand the reason for the proposal. Rabat, located south of the Bouregreg River, is a city with much greater purchasing power than Salé, on the north bank of the river. Looking at the distribution of green spaces, it is not surprising that they are all concentrated in Rabat – including city parks as well as landscaped single-family housing communities.
The students of the School are mostly boys and girls at risk of social exclusion, coming from poor areas of the city or the country. It is therefore paradoxical that these boys and girls are trained in a discipline that they seem to be able to practice only in areas to which, due to their social context, they cannot have access.
The objective of the workshop was the realization of minor interventions in the spaces that make up the daily life of each student.
In an attempt to guarantee this access to nature in all areas of the city, regardless of socioeconomic level, intervening from and with the daily life of the students appears to be the best starting point.
Image 1. Satellite view of the cities of Rabat and Salé.
With the help of the ex School’s pedagogical coordinator, Mounir Noubahi, we finished the design and started working with the third year students, the last of the training.
Phase 1 Body expression workshop
The first phase consisted of a body expression workshop with the Moroccan dancer Nezha Rhondali, with the objective of helping the students understand their capacity for action within their daily lives and the constructed space.
To achieve the emergence of spatial interventions with the capacity of transformation, it was necessary to make the students understand that the body and space are a continuum. A continuum in which the connection that the body (man) has with the ecosystems, regardless of being in a built space, allows transforming the social and spatial reality in which this body moves.
The best way to make this reflection, which starts from a phenomenological oikosophia, was through the experience itself – the focus of the work with Nezha, which was divided into two sessions. In the first session of body expression the focus was on understanding the effects on the movement of the body’s contact with space and with other bodies within that space. In the second session the emphasis was on transmitting how the body itself, from its connection with nature and the free movement generated there, can expand the possibilities of movement within the space.
Phase 2 Brief introduction to Land Art
Image 2. Examples of Land Art interventions shown to students.
Before launching into the process of intervention in the students’ daily lives, in order to stimulate their creativity, a talk on Land Art interventions was given to them. Artistic interventions were selected in which the focus was on natural elements, in a manner similar to the work proposal that they would be asked to develop in the coming weeks.
Phase 3 Sensory mapping process
In the third phase of the process, the students were asked to draw their daily spaces, or the spaces in which they would like to intervene. They were asked to draw from a perceptive point of view, from that sensitivity they gained awareness of through the body expression workshops.
Image 3. Examples of the sensory cartographies drawn by the students.
During this phase, Moroccan artist Salma Ahddad was invited to give a talk about her work. Salma comes from one of Rabat’s neighborhoods with little and increasingly reduced access to nature. In her work she reflects on the notions of memory and movement, so it seemed appropriate for her to talk to the students to inspire them in the last phase of the intervention.
Finally, in this phase, to encourage the students to make their own interventions, a collective performancewith flowers on a bus was organized. The bus connecting the different spaces where the students live with the school appeared in several of the cartographies. One student expressed her interest in including more nature in this linear route, and that is what we did one of the mornings before the workshop.
Image 4. Performance with flowers on a bus.
Phase 4 Design and implementation of interventions
In this last phase, the students presented the results of their interventions. Although all the students designed an intervention proposal, not all of them carried it out. The following is a summary of the three interventions that were implemented, at least in the first phase.
(Re)vegetation of the built space
One of the students, coming from one of these neighborhoods of Salé with very little presence of nature, carried out an intervention with the objective of introducing more vegetation in her neighborhood. She asked a neighbor to lend her some pots in which she placed different plants and, with the help of the neighborhood children, distributed them doorway by doorway.
Image 5. (Re)vegetation intervention in Salé.
Making the infrastructure habitable
Two students decided to intervene on the underside of a bridge linking the cities of Rabat and Salé. They realized that, due to delocalized engineering, which focuses on connecting points on the ground, the spaces resulting from engineering interventions are disconnected from life in the city.
They therefore designed a revegetation intervention and playground on the underside of a bridge and were encouraged to make a first minimal intervention to symbolize the work they want to develop in the future.
Image 6. First intervention under the bridge linking the cities of Rabat and Salé.
Gardening, a welcoming process
One of the students, a sub-Saharan migrant in the process of obtaining papers in Morocco, demonstrated his extensive knowledge of agroecology in the design of an intervention in the School of Gardening itself.
This student started with a sensory mapping in which he explained the difficult process of migration from his country of origin to Spain, a journey in which abuse and mistreatment at the border had become a constant.
Image 7. Sensory mapping of the migration process from Guinea Conakry to Spain.
In his speech he explained an agroecology system in which, from local species, it is possible to create an ecosystem conducive to the introduction of foreign species – tropical in this case.
Image 8. Agroecological intervention proposal.
This intervention will be carried out at the School of Gardening together with the installation of a tent (khaima) designed from boat sails. The result of my own process of sensory exploration of the city and the understanding of the importance of water as a core of mobility in Islamic cities, with origins in the nomadic tradition of the Amazighs coming from the southern desert that connect Morocco with sub-Saharan countries.
Image 9. Khaima model for the School of Gardening.
Utilizamos cookies propias y de terceros para fines analíticos y para mostrarle publicidad personalizada en base a un perfil elaborado a partir de sus hábitos de navegación (por ejemplo, páginas visitadas).
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Estadísticas
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
