Diseñar el desorden

Haunted by privatization, obsessive urban planning, police surveillance, and speculation, the spaces we inhabit are becoming increasingly inhospitable, closed vessels that stifle action and limit the vibrant experience that constituted the human wealth of large cities. Fifty years after the publication of his classic The Uses of Disorder, in which Richard Sennett warned for the first time about the harmful effects that the projection of preconceived and rigid models on the urban environment had on those they intended to shelter, Sennett returns together with Pablo Sendra to the theses that guided this fundamental title: namely, that the idea of ??an orderly and planned urban space constituted a trap that carried within it the seed of corruption in the life of cities, and that the existence a certain form of disorder was an inescapable requirement for the gestation of a critical and emancipated citizenship. Through what their authors call «infrastructures for disorder», these pages pose the urgency of designing new ways of intervening in the urban fabric that, combining architecture, politics, urban planning and community activism, make possible the types of disorder that can generate an open city made up of autonomous, free and committed individuals. Spaces, in short, capable of gathering instead of dividing, of generating, instead of ossifying: spaces open to change and radical transformation.