Interview with Carles Baiges (CB) and Cristina Gamboa (CG)

In your practice, you use participatory processes as a central design strategy. How do they transform design thinking?

CB       Including the user and people who are going to inhabit the built space helps shape it in a way that better suits the needs and the aims of this people. It is a two-way relationship: the spaces are shaped because of that process, but at the same time people also transform their way of living, of using the space or understanding it.

CG       This idea of producing processes where people have a decision-making role is
also a way to make it a more inclusive project. In terms
of the design, these methodologies in which future users are involved from the beginning helps in understanding not only their real needs, but also their different perspectives and profiles. Thanks to that, the community has the opportunity to learn about others and to understand how they live and how they can interact during the conversations and
the discussions. Participatory tools are more inclusive, as are policies where the citizenry is consulted or has more influence.

CB       One of the most important things when including citizens in a project is to have their real needs and their main concerns in mind. There have been a
lot of participatory processes lately, but they are not always successful. And I think that
is because, many times, the question we put on the table is not the one people really want to talk about. Especially when the questions come from governments. They tend to be very basic and superficial, and they don’t get to the core of why we work with certain programs in certain places, and what the purpose of that is. It’s very discouraging for people, and it dissuades them from engaging in these participatory processes because they feel they don’t have a real say on what matters to them.

So, the first thing is to make sure we are addressing what really concerns them. The second important thing, which we tend to forget and which is also a very important question, is: Who are we including? Who are we not including? And who are the people with the power to decide or even attend these meetings and talk with confidence? It is key to make sure we are also including those with less power. When we talk about participation, the main goal would be to include the people who have less power in order to change the power balances and finally change the system that causes certain injustices. For us, that would be the larger goal of participation.

Your projects pay special attention to context. How can cooperative housing enrich the urban fabric?

CG       When we talk about housing, we understand it of course as a shelter, where individuals can have their own space, which provides security and privacy. But we also like to understand housing as a kind of infrastructure that lets us rethink the way we live and establish links and spaces of interaction.
It can even help to redefine certain routines, rituals and practices so we can introduce new protocols of care or reduce the environmental impact. That’s why we like
to understand housing as much more than its walls; for us, it’s an infrastructure for sustainable collective living.

CB       When cooperative housing is done properly,
it has the potential to improve the environment and not just be a building
or a community that could exist anywhere. It shouldn’t cause any damage to the environment because it is displacing people, or using too many resources,
or polluting. Deciding what to put on the ground floor of a housing building can also improve its context. The decision shouldn’t be based on economic values only, but also on what is needed in the neighborhood. We should try to introduce uses and spaces that can become useful not only to the people living
in the building but also to the community around it. Cooperative housing usually not only serves those who live there, which is already good, but also the neighbors. Furthermore, it also helps people to stay in their neighborhoods. Displacement is one of the main issues we have in cities around the globe today. It’s getting harder and harder for people to stay in their communities. So, when cooperative housing is done properly, it should also help people stay in their neighborhoods and grow roots there.

You took the students to visit La Balma, a cooperative housing project
in Poblenou, Barcelona. What were the main challenges when designing it? 

CG       La Balma was a great opportunity to work with what we learned from our first cooperative housing experience, which was La Borda in Sants, Barcelona. We were able to experiment a lot with that project, but we also took a lot of risks. When we started working on La Balma, one of the biggest challenges was how to introduce a housing typology that could enhance the interaction between the users on a more compact plot than the previous one. This idea of articulation through the corridors or the stairs as spaces of interaction was more challenging. As we mentioned before, it is a housing typology, but at the same time it’s an infrastructure for the neighborhood, so we focused on design strategies that allowed us to be more open to the surroundings in order to share this life with the area around it. La Balma is located in a singular place in the city, which is an axis of facilities. So, articulating the more invisible areas of a collective building to make them more public was very important. Another condition worth mentioning is that La Balma is a project that came from a competition, which made the participatory process more condensed. Having to go faster than for other processes was very stressful for the group, so it was very important to be very flexible as designers, so the group was able to shape the project.

The last challenge was to ensure that the building showed a sustainable performance for its specific context, where the orientation and the traffic in the surroundings were parameters that conditioned the design. All of that needed to be addressed without forgetting that it had to be affordable, so we needed to control the budget very carefully.

What impressed you the most about the results from the students?

CB       One thing that impressed me from the students was their social awareness. The first day already, when we were discussing and mentioning certain thinkers and references, students engaged very quickly. Their interventions in class were very thoughtful, which is something we are not always used to in architecture schools, because not all the students have the habit of reading thinkers and philosophers. That was a pleasant surprise, but it was also kind of a challenge because we had to level up a little bit to make it more challenging for the students.

CG       The sensibility of the topics they chose to develop shows the complexity of our disciplines. I think that the most challenging thing for architects is arriving at a successful design based on complex context that comes from research. This sensibility of understanding the complexity of our current realms and being able to carry out research that can be converted into a specific design shows a hopeful future for the discipline.