Meet the couple travelling the world in search of the human city

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/mar/27/meet-couple-travelling-world-human-city

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Children in Hanoi can’t play in the street. The overcrowded population of motorbikes doesn’t allow them to have their own safe place, so a group of local artists and architects decided to act: they got together at weekends and started to build parks using recycled materials in low-income neighbourhoods.

This is just one of the 101 transformative urban initiatives that Fernando Casado and Paula García are aiming to document before the end of the year. The Spanish husband and wife duo are the founders of the Towards the Human City project, travelling the world to find how cities are trying to be more people-oriented.

“These parks in Vietnam are really small places but incredibly full of life,” Fernando explains when I meet the couple between trips in Barcelona. “They have created a community, a sense of belonging. And not only because now you can hear children laughing in the streets but also because they have appointed grandmothers as community leaders so they have a task to do. A perfect example of community empowerment.”

Fernando and Paula are both from Barcelona but spend very little time here. In fact, the project was born when they were both living in Washington DC about a year ago. Paula tells me that they’ve always loved to travel in a non-conventional way: by approaching locals and gauging the pulse of the city.

“States used to be the ones taking decisions, meeting with each other, orchestrating the agenda in global development. But locally generated solutions in cities are increasingly addressing shared global issues,” she explains.

Trends like smart cities make us believe that large structures are needed to change urban spaces, yet there are countless examples of transformative bottom-up initiatives that have come from a simple idea and flourished without public money.

It is this citizen-led type of urbanism that they hope to highlight and champion. “Future cities need to be designed by and for citizens,” Paula explains. “The best thing about these bottom-up initiatives is that they don’t require large budgets,” Fernando adds; “just spontaneity, cooperation and a willingness to change – and they are also replicable and contagious.”

The couple have documented 33 initiatives so far, and they both agree on the common challenges facing cities around the world: housing, safety, education, sustainability, climate, food, health, mobility, equality and governance.

Even though each region’s problems and challenges are different, the participative process to come up with solutions is quite similar in every city. “You can have a traffic problem, a safety issue or a growing community challenge, but people will always try to gather so they can find a solution,” Fernando explains. What’s more, local authorities are realising that they can no longer govern for years without citizen participation. They need neighbourhood committees.

“You do see differences depending on the region, though,” adds Paula. “It depends on the political system, if there is censorship and if people have time to participate.”

“The people we have interviewed so far are obviously concerned about the future of their cities ,” Fernando says. “They are aware that one person can make very little change in the face of uncontrolled growth and the short-term economic interests at work – but they are determined to keep on working through citizen participation to improve their local neighbourhoods.”

In Latin America, many initiatives are focused on improving pedestrian experience. There are very few car-free streets for walking and public transport is sometimes non-existent – or a mess. “It’s a citizen’s struggle against the car for public space,” says Fernando. “And those are cities created for vehicles that only 20% of the population actually own.”

In Indonesia, the couple saw that urban waste management was a significant issue. In some places like Bandung, Indonesia, there is no comprehensive waste collection system, so many people simply burn their own rubbish. Fernando and Paula met local groups that were actively responding to the problem – whether it involved working on a waste management master plan, promoting a new law or trying to avoid the creation of an incinerator that would generate even more waste.

Paula and Fernando have barely unpacked from their last trip to Mexico and are already planning for the next stop on their world tour: China. After that they will go to the United States, Canada and Africa. They have been travelling for half a year now – and their plan is to keep going until December.

They are also working on a documentary that will tell the story of the project which they plan to present in October 2016 at the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development, Habitat III.

But they don’t want the project to finish with the end of their travels. It all began with the aim of creating a global database of successful urban case studies and now they want it to continue to become an open source platform that everyone can update with their own urban experiences and initiatives. For now though, it’s off to China.

Fernando Casado and Paula García are founders of the Towards the Human City project