Urban Negotiations in Experimental Governance Exercises for the Right to the City: Notes on the Experience of the Arquitectura Expandida Collective

Abstract

This article presents three types of experimental urban governance projects (Cano Blandón, 2021) led by the Arquitectura Expandida Collective in collaboration with various grassroots urban movements. These projects are characterized by the principles of the right to the city (Lefebvre, 1969) and radical and insurgent territorial planning (Miraftab, 2009). (1) Collaborative self-construction projects explore organizational forms for the self-construction and self-management of cultural spaces. (2) They engage in tactical provocation seeking to dynamize urban negotiations with different urban agents in situations of high conflict in public space through the use of furniture. (3) Collective cartographies play a significant role, as diverse urban languages — including hip-hop, agriculture, urban sports, or community cinema, among many others — are used to analyze the contradictions between urban culture and urban planning culture.

Keywords

• grassroots urban movements
• right to the city
• experimental governance
• bottom-up urbanism