West 104th Street Garden

I recently have moved to a new apartment in the city of New York, right next to Central Park, in 104^th St. I didn’t even realize when I was within the insanity involved in apartment hunting in Manhattan (something worth an entire investigation, not only for the prizes, but for the typologies), but right across the street there is a Community Garden.

Towards an Open Source Urbanism

This blog was created with the idea of trying to make a reflection on issues that are driving a change in the approach to urban planning and the relationship between city and citizen.

Although is part of a larger project that is step by step taking shape, the fact of starting writing had been driven by a number of influences, influences that I would like to explain and recommend in this post.

The Shared Space

Lately, citizens’ movements demanding a change in the system have been happening in different places and different times. The Arab spring, the Indignados movement in Spain, protests in Greece, Occupy Wall Street, they all share characteristics that put them in direct relationship to the public space of the city. They have led to the reunion between citizens and the space that most defines the city in a purely urban fact.

Tahir Square in Egypt, Sol in Spain, Syntagma in Greece, have become the formal container of the citizens’ claim of an area that belongs to them, in which they become capable of expressing a common strength that would not be the same intense without this space.