The Spontaneous City: Manifesto

Recently published, the book “The Spontaneous City” (Urhahn Urban Design, BIS Publishers) is a strong statement about the future of Urbanism. Though I am still going trough its pages, I think the interesting manifesto that opens the publication deserves a post, since in it I have found many ideas related to an open source urban design.

In the manifesto, the authors propose a change in the traditional urban planning, a new starting point by taking the city as a “marketplace” in which supply and demand from users sculpts urban form.

Why the lack of faith in the discipline of Urbanism?

A few days ago, Oriol Bohigas, architect and urban planner, spoke in an interview for the newspaper El País about the lack of political commitment of the the current generation of architects. I would add the term “social” to the word commitment and “urbanists” together with architects.

Nowadays politics are outrageously dominated by economy and markets, I strongly believe there is an urgent need of a type of professional able to make decisions about the city, decisions that will come undoubtedly linked to the field of politics. I am not talking about technocracy applied to politics, but the other way around, introduce politics as part of the urban practice.