10th anniversary!

We just turned ten!

We are delighted to announce that this month is our 10th anniversary at Colaborativa.eu! So much stuff had happened since we came back to our hometown and decided to shake things up in there! To celebrate during this month we will be sharing ten of our most beloved projects of the last decade, thanks for all your support!

El Espacio Creativo Independiente

Espacio Creativo Independiente

The Independent Creative Space was a research project for the rehabilitation of public buildings through the cultural industry. After the financial crash of 2008 there were a great amount of abandoned public owned buildings in Europe which could not find the economic funds required for their immediate maintenance. We started our research in 2008 –right after we came back to our hometown– looking for successful rehabilitation strategies while generating a collective return. At that time the creative industry was still not that well understood but it was showing a promising future as a tool for social, cultural and economic development. So we decided to combine both into an action plan called “10 ideas para un espacio creativo independiente en Córdoba” presented in 2010 which was put into practice with MODO, the first ever independent creative hub that rehabilitated a public building in Córdoba.

Arquia Becas 2011

Arquia Becas Exhibition

Every year Arquia Foundation offers professional internships. In 2011, the Foundation asked us to do the design and fabrication of the itinerant exhibition showing the winning proposals. Our proposal looked at how to combine immediate and tactile interaction of tangible exhibitions with the easiness for spreading out ideas of the digital media. The exhibition consisted of stretched-wood arcs joined together horizontally by a structural and data rib. The work was printed on elastic canvas and stretched out creating a continuous surface of double curvature. The design could adopt lineal, circular and L-shape configurations. We created a real time link between the physical exhibition and its online version with a custom hardware solution based on Arduino. Physical attendants and online viewers could vote on their preferred projects and results were showed instantly in each medium.

Paseos de Jane Cordoba

Since 2012 we are the organisers of Jane’s Walk in Cordoba together with our good friend Pedro Pérez. Jane’s Walk is a global event of citizen-led walking tours inspired by Jane Jacobs. The walks get people to tell stories about their communities, explore their cities, and connect with neighbours. On 2010 when visiting Toronto for our research on Espacio Creativo Independiente we had the privilege to learn about the event by Jacob’s friends of who organised the first walks in this city as a tribute to her memory and writings. We run the event slightly differently than other cities by creating a bottom-up process in which anyone can organise a walk on the topic they are passionate about, this opens up new possibilities on how collective events can happen on public space and proposes a new format for citizen debate and participations. Our unique approach was recognised in 2014 when we were shortlisted in the Arquia Proxima awards, one of the most renowned recognitions for young architects in Spain. Due to the health crisis we were unable to run Jane’s Walks in 2020 but we will be back in 2021 to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Paseos de Jane Córdoba!

Los paseos de Jane Cordoba

DisponibleEnCordoba

DisponibleEnCordoba was a visualization of vacant public buildings in our city. Córdoba, like in many other Spanish cities, has dozens of abandoned publicly owned buildings while numerous associations, collectives and organizations lacked adequate spaces for gathering. We started this research internally when looking for a location for the Espacio Creativo Independiente identifying dozens of vacant buildings in the city. Other local organizations showed great interest on the research so we decided to publish it online. We used a custom online map based on OpenStreetMap data and all the data was published under a ODCODbL Open Data license. Since its publication #DisponibleEnCordoba has been used by local NGOs, media and public administrations. The project was published in the 2014 Arquia Próxima catalog.

#UrbanismoDeBarrio Huerto Fuensanta

The vacant public plot of the former Fuensanta’s cinema was reactivated and transformed into an urban garden and community space after two years of working with neighbours. Colaborativa.eu acted as initiators, motivators, documentarists, gardeners, and crowdfunding campaign managers. The Fuensanta’s community space became a notable example of citizen driven reactivation of public spaces in Cordoba. Since then, the space has been managed by the neighbours and it is fully embedded in the civic life of the district.

Domenico.cc

Domenico.cc was a project aiming to enable everyone to self-build their own collective space using geodesic domes following the principles of low-cost and local digital fabrication. Until 2015 we developed several Domenico.cc prototypes: the first one was based in bamboo struts and 3D printed bio-plastic connectors and resulted in a 6,5 meters dome presented at Scarpia Art Festival. The latest iteration used waterproof cardboard tubes and plywood connectors allowing bigger domes. This prototype was showcased at Maker Faire Rome in October 2015 where it won two Blue Ribbon Awards.

Domenico.cc at Maker Faire Rome

Creativos.in

Creativos.in was a crowdsourcing research tool for surveying and visualising local creatives communities. The site allowed creatives themselves to upload their public info and group them using twelve categories proposed by the European Commission. In this way whole creative communities could be mapped and analysed; identifying activities with large presence, discovering opportunities for less represented activities and getting to know the initiatives you would like to collaborate with. The project started in Cordoba as part of our research on creative industries and was replicated in Limerick, Navarra, Pescara, Donegal and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

Fab lab Cordoba

Colaborativa.eu #10thanniversary #y2018 Fab Lab Córdoba is very special for us as it brings to our home town more than 8 years of experience in setting up and managing creative hubs focused on digital fabrication technologies. The lab is the first independent Fab Lab in Andalusia and part of the global Fab Lab Network which connects more than 1700 of these spaces in more than a 100 countries. The projects developed within the space are focused on searching local solutions for global challenges and bound up with the 17 sustainable development goals set by United Nations as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The first project that we have launched is ¡A sensorizar! in which we are exploring do-it-together sensing technologies to monitor air quality of our city in collaboration with other institutions such as Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía and Escuela de Arte Mateo Inurria. We have few exciting new projects in the pipeline!

Cityxchange

+CityxChange is a smart city project in which seven European cities –Trondheim, Limerick, Alba Iulia, Písek, Sestao, Smolyan and Võru– are experimenting on smart positive energy solutions and technologies where districts and city blocks produce more energy than is consumed. The production, distribution and consumption of energy in cities is becoming more and more complex with the appearance of new technologies, financial models and user roles. Colaborativa has developed a Citizen Participation Playbook to ensure that any of these technical solutions and innovations will have the citizen at the centre and will be appropriate to their needs. The Playbook defines a clear roadmap to ensure wide citizen participation and inclusiveness in the energy transition challenge. The project consortium consists of 32 partners including seven municipalities, two universities, and a variety of our partners from the fields of research, technology, community engagement and energy production/distribution.