Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ReARQ.IB (Built Environment Knowledge for Resilient, Sustainable Communities: Understanding Everyday Modern Architecture and Urban Design in the Iberian Peninsula (1939-1985))
Reporting period: 2022-11-01 to 2024-04-30
We all reside, work, study, convalesce and enjoy ourselves in buildings we know little about. If we have better knowledge, and if this is collectively built – by those who research the buildings’ history and architecture together with those who created and experience them – we might contribute to better informed decisions on which structures to maintain, reuse and replace. Today, as dwindling available resources, material and economic, must be rationally employed, repurposing and revalorising existing buildings is a priority over new built. These largely sturdy structures were the outcome of collective, community efforts across decades, expressing essential needs, and deserve to be better known to continue to serve all, with quality and dignity.
“Arquitectura Aqui. Community, Proximity, Action: Collective-use Facilities in Portugal and Spain 1939-1985” supports sustainable, resilient local communities with solid knowledge about the buildings and ensembles where our daily life unfolds. We follow the parallel, shared history of the Iberian countries from dictatorship to democratic transition and European integration, specifically looking at proximity structures devoted to welfare and medical care (health centres, homes), general and social services (council facilities, community centres, market halls), minimum-rent housing, security (fire and police stations), education (schools, creches), culture and leisure (museums, libraries, sports halls) and cooperative farming facilities. Originating in local and central initiatives, launched and supported by public and private entities with state technical support and funding, these structures often drew on non-governmental, philanthropic aid from foundations, groups and individuals with strong community links.
“Arquitectura Aqui” integrates detailed information and critical thinking on such objects, key in potential management and transformation initiatives, while advancing scientific and historical knowledge on the architecture and urban design of Portugal and Spain and reinforcing the social relevance and pertinence of these fields. Our platform (https://arquitecturaaqui.eu) combines knowledge drawn from the archives with the memories and experiences of stakeholders, creators and users, testimony to generations of living histories, co-creating a new narrative, plural and shared, to empower appreciation, maintenance and change. This is applied science for community participation enabling a more sustainable and resilient built environment.
“Arquitectura Aqui. Community, Proximity, Action: Collective-use Facilities in Portugal and Spain 1939-1985” supports sustainable, resilient local communities with solid knowledge about the buildings and ensembles where our daily life unfolds. We follow the parallel, shared history of the Iberian countries from dictatorship to democratic transition and European integration, specifically looking at proximity structures devoted to welfare and medical care (health centres, homes), general and social services (council facilities, community centres, market halls), minimum-rent housing, security (fire and police stations), education (schools, creches), culture and leisure (museums, libraries, sports halls) and cooperative farming facilities. Originating in local and central initiatives, launched and supported by public and private entities with state technical support and funding, these structures often drew on non-governmental, philanthropic aid from foundations, groups and individuals with strong community links.
“Arquitectura Aqui” integrates detailed information and critical thinking on such objects, key in potential management and transformation initiatives, while advancing scientific and historical knowledge on the architecture and urban design of Portugal and Spain and reinforcing the social relevance and pertinence of these fields. Our platform (https://arquitecturaaqui.eu) combines knowledge drawn from the archives with the memories and experiences of stakeholders, creators and users, testimony to generations of living histories, co-creating a new narrative, plural and shared, to empower appreciation, maintenance and change. This is applied science for community participation enabling a more sustainable and resilient built environment.
The project research team in “Arquitectura Aqui” has been hard at work, performing the tasks foreseen in the initial work plan, addressing occasional obstacles and exploring all the possibilities offered by the premises of the initiative. We have set up a collective work environment, with shared tools, documents and repositories; researched, benchmarked, tendered and commissioned a new online platform, its supporting database and visual, public identity; designed strategies and mechanisms of eliciting community participation in built environment information collection, and engaged in transdisciplinary workshops, hosted by the project, to hone its proposed approaches; devised information- and experience-recording tools; researched the context where the production and use of collective-use facilities in the Iberian peninsula took place, within the proposed time frame 1939-1985 (national and regional development plans; regions’ and municipalities’ geography, demography and culture; local, regional and central administrations; public works funding and execution modes, within broader government policies; social assistance policies and institutions; building regulations, building types, publication discourse); defined criteria for community sample selection (geography, peripherality, income, demography, economy, diversity of collective-use facilities, availability of sources, grassroots movements, participation potential); surveyed available primary and secondary sources; pursued exploratory fieldwork; selected the first batch of 16 sample communities in central and northern Portugal and in Andalusia, Extremadura and Castilla-la-Mancha, Spain (Alijó, Arganil, Bragança, Cáceres, Castelo Branco, Ciudad Real, Covilhã, Écija, Figueiró dos Vinhos, Jerez de la Frontera, Miranda do Douro, Montalegre, Montoro, Olivenza, Penamacor and Pinhel); pursued fieldwork missions disseminating the project premises, connecting with communities, researching local and regional archives and collections, dialoguing and collecting testimonies on building use history; organised local events with community stakeholders; incorporated grassroots contributions; wrote up around 1420 database records (on works, actions, individuals and organisations, bibliography and legislation, files, oral testimonies and photographic surveys), preparing website publication (due January 2024); participated in international conferences and domestic events, prepared paper submissions and published work in multiple forms.
“Arquitectura Aqui. Community, Proximity, Action: Collective-use Facilities in Portugal and Spain 1939-1985”, the new, user-friendly identity of the ERC Starting Grant project ReARQ.IB is the first-ever attempt at writing a history of collective-use facilities built in the Iberian countries between the end of the Spanish Civil War and European accession to enable and encourage their creators and users to maintain, reuse and valorise this building stock, by acknowledging this shared heritage and its collective values (material and emotional). Based on a sample of communities across both countries that exemplify socio-economic hardship and limitations (current or historical), depopulation processes, remoteness and distance from richer coastal areas, as well as a rich array of basic facilities for collective use, our work innovatively explores the potential of integrating thorough historical research (mostly from previously unseen archival documents) and the contribution of community members: a co-created narrative that turns the users into contributors to this information-collecting effort and thereby seeks to empower them to participate in decision-making processes about the fortune of such facilities.
The upcoming publication of the “Arquitectura Aqui” platform (https://arquitecturaaqui.eu) from January 2024 onwards, will make visible all our effort so far and finally embody one essential premise of the project: this tool will allow us to devolve to the communities all the information collected, integrated and digested: not only the hard data drawn from archives, literature, visual material and photographic surveys, but also the contributions of community members, weaved into our accounts (yet duly acknowledged). Beyond the duration of the project and its on-the-ground engagement actions, the online platform in the lasting repository of a trove of factual and experiential information about this building stock, which will remain alive and ready to be used in the future, outside the confines of academia, whenever new interventions in these facilities are considered. Lastly, our contribution will also be methodological, as we provide new answers, applicable elsewhere, to the questions that prompted our study: How can architectural and urban history be put at the service of more sustainable and resilient communities? How can a novel kind of built environment history be collectively created, together with the communities and not only for them?
The upcoming publication of the “Arquitectura Aqui” platform (https://arquitecturaaqui.eu) from January 2024 onwards, will make visible all our effort so far and finally embody one essential premise of the project: this tool will allow us to devolve to the communities all the information collected, integrated and digested: not only the hard data drawn from archives, literature, visual material and photographic surveys, but also the contributions of community members, weaved into our accounts (yet duly acknowledged). Beyond the duration of the project and its on-the-ground engagement actions, the online platform in the lasting repository of a trove of factual and experiential information about this building stock, which will remain alive and ready to be used in the future, outside the confines of academia, whenever new interventions in these facilities are considered. Lastly, our contribution will also be methodological, as we provide new answers, applicable elsewhere, to the questions that prompted our study: How can architectural and urban history be put at the service of more sustainable and resilient communities? How can a novel kind of built environment history be collectively created, together with the communities and not only for them?