"A house is not always a shelter," - says Javier Peña Ibáñez, architect and initiator of the Concéntrico Festival in Logroño, Spain, an urban innovation laboratory organized since 2015 that builds dialogue between residents and the city through interventions in public space.
Javier Peña Ibáñez - architect, researcher, teacher and consultant in architecture, design and the city. Director of Concéntrico, the International Festival of Design and Architecture organized since 2015 in Logroño, Spain. Curator of numerous exhibitions, including "A vision from Spain" as part of the New European Bauhaus in Brussels (2022) and the spatial intervention "La hoja" at Madrid's Matadero art center (2021-2023). Artistic director of the urban architecture festival TAC! in Granada (2022).
It's impossible not to give him credit. Those first places, which should be a safe haven, are sometimes spaces where we don't feel like staying, much less inviting friends, as Magdalena Milert vividly demonstrated in her article on housing shame ("My dream was a house without a fungus"). So where to spend time between home and work/school? Can third places be the answer to the human need for a sense of belonging? How do we create places that each and every one of us can use on an equal basis, places where we feel safe and at ease?
Javier Peña Ibáñez is interviewed by Ola Kloc
Poster of the 1st edition of Concéntrico in Logroño
Photo: Javier Peña Ibáñez | Illustrations courtesy of Concéntrico festival organizers
Ola Kloc: What do you think is the role of third places in the city?
Javier Peña Ibáñez:Third places are extremely important, with their function, a certain cohesion that allows us to improve ourselves - from the individual to the group and the collective. After the pandemic, it was recognized that third places, both public and private, allow us to restore economic and social balance. Home is not for everyone and not always a refuge. Therefore, it is important to understand these places as spaces that can restore balance. They are where the need for community building is created, so they are fundamental to community well-being.
Ola Kloc: So how do you create such spaces in capitalist cities when social inequality is so great?
Javier Peña Ibáñez:They have to be flexible spaces that allow us to generate well-being. Residents are increasingly aware of the need to achieve well-being in their immediate environment. It's no longer about going to the countryside or taking a trip out of town, but about finding ergonomics in daily life, finding a pleasant place. It could be the design of a public space, a tree growing in the street, a store. We begin to understand that these ordinary things affect our well-being. And since we have this awareness, we begin to have higher and higher expectations of public spaces or green spaces. These expectations, in turn, require a response from politicians, space managers. Of course, tensions arise over where money is invested, and politics is sometimes introduced into topics that should be left only to professionals, but these demands cannot be ignored.
100 chairs for Logroño - design: Izaskin Chinchilla; various locations, 2023
Photo: Josema Cutillas | Illustrations provided courtesy of the organizers of the Concéntrico festival
I recently saw a presentation of Elon Musk's new Robotaxi, and it was awful! In the marketing vision, all the huge parking lots around the big stadiums and shopping malls in the United States were green, in a society where everyone moves around in cars, as here. Yet the sales strategy for the new robot car was to say that it would make the whole environment green. This shows that even from the most capitalist point of view, this "claim" is being recognized. This is an unstoppable change, representatives of all extremes - both those who really believe in this change and those who don't - recognize that this is something that people are demanding.
Ola Kloc: So from whom should the initiative for change, for creating third places, come? Top-down or bottom-up?
Javier Peña Ibáñez:It's complex. Institutions need to create strategies that allow communities to organize themselves autonomously and open third places in a communal way. Putting all the responsibilities on the public administration can be very taxing, including economically. It is probably possible to open them up as small spaces, small plots of land for use by the community and managed by them. An attempt can be made to innovate in the formats for managing these spaces through the shared responsibility of the communities, associations or environments that expect them. On this basis, one can try to come up with other management strategies. Third places should be multiple, very diverse, because we as a community are like that. So we need to respond to all kinds of needs that may exist, from the youngest to the oldest, from professionals to people coming from other countries. And it has to be very consistent.
Topographical-painted landscape - proj.: 44 Flavours; location: La Villanueva, Logroño, 2021
Photo: Josema Cutillas | Illustrations provided courtesy of Concéntrico Festival organizers
Ola Kloc: How do you make people want to stay in these places and feel that they are part of a community responsible for the space, that they want to take care of it, not destroy it? Do you know of soft tools that can help solve this problem?
Javier Peña Ibáñez:The philosophy of the Concéntrico festival and the projects I do revolves around generating a different view of public space, showing that it belongs to all of us, sensitizing us to care for these places, different from the general norm. These can involve making small interventions that introduce vegetation. Small strategies that from the point of view of maintenance are easier, or require a different kind of care. If we always install granite curbs, iron railings, hard elements to make care easy, we will not educate the public. But if we try to introduce pots and other elements, we may find that it works. It probably won't work the first time, but maybe over time we'll develop some policies for the project. If we don't educate, we won't produce this different approach.
Leaf (La hoja) - proj.: FAHR 012.3; location: Plaza San Bartolomé, Logroño, 2019
Photo: Josema Cutillas | Illustrations provided courtesy of Concéntrico Festival organizers
Ola Kloc: Who should be in charge of education?
Javier Peña Ibáñez:It would be good if we all took responsibility for it. After all, politics is the image and likeness of society. We need to work together so that in the end it brings good results for everyone.
Ola Kloc: Since 2015, for the Concéntrico festival in Logroño, you've been inviting both designers and residents to reflect on the city, reinvent it and strengthen the idea of community in public space. Tell us about the effects you observe during this event.
Javier Peña Ibáñez:First of all, it allows people to meet who probably wouldn't have met if not for the event. It's a way to rediscover other communities in your surroundings, other ways of looking. We use the city somewhat automatically, we repeat the routes, the tastes, the bars we go to. So we create a situation of positive change to open up our space of perception and reflection. Subsequently , we also change the nature of these places, proposing a different way of using them, so we begin to understand that the function of a place can be as it has always been, but it can also be different. In this way, we try to show possible new ways of being, looking and perceiving the city.
El Ciempies - design: Picado de Blas; location: Plaza San Bartolomé, Logroño, 2017
Photo: Josema Cutillas | Illustrations provided courtesy of the organizers of the Concéntrico festival
Over the years, the project has become very processual, we are opening up much more inclusive processes, where the outcome of the intervention itself is part of an open process with participants. So it's not about the result, but about the sense of influence on what is created, making the community feel part of the change. In this way, we tried to show that architecture, design and public space can be tools for creating new relationships. In the end, it's not so much about the permanence of the object, but the permanence of the strategy, the gaze, the education that we built in this dialogue.
Ola Kloc: Do ephemeral solutions like those proposed during the festival have the potential to become third places?
Javier Peña Ibáñez:I think so, the festival itself was created as a temporary strategy, repeated every year, which connects it to many other rituals that take place in the city, that bind people emotionally to a place. These can be intangible - memories, fleeting moments, such as a concert, or an experience that we don't recall as fleeting, but is recorded in our memory as another layer of our way of life. And it is from this perspective that we work at Concéntrico, understanding that we are all the result of many tangible and intangible elements.
Horse statue - design: Iza Rutkowska; location: Paseo del Espolón, Logroño, 2020
Photo: Javier Antón | Illustrations provided courtesy of the organizers of the Concéntrico Festival
Ola Kloc: What type of space or installation do audiences respond most strongly to? In which spaces do they feel comfortable? Which ones encourage them to interact?
Javier Peña Ibáñez:In hindsight, I think the strategy of domesticating public spaces evokes the most emotion, the most satisfaction. That's because it enhances the sense of belonging, creates elements that connect a space to an ergonomic place for people. The ability to touch, to open our hands, to feel safe generate something in our brains that allows us to feel a certain comfort in a public space. This appeared in projects that did not change the scale of places, but created a series of connected spaces, introducing elements that interact with the senses. Or projects that allowed us to sit back, relax, notice how a particular space was "embraced."
Concentric Pavilion - design: sauermartins - Mauricio Méndez; location: Plaza Escuelas Trevijan, Logroño, 2021
Photo: Josema Cutillas | Illustrations provided courtesy of Concéntrico festival organizers
What we are primarily looking for at Concéntrico is a sense of well-being, a stronger connection to the public space, a feeling of greater attachment. We are looking for projects that also connect us to the city, but from a different perspective, inviting people from a variety of places. It can be a variety of images, because that's what the city is like - you might be watching a great play, when suddenly you're sitting on a bench to enjoy the sunshine. We try to capture both of these situations that can happen every day. All this richness that works at different scales and on different emotions that we can experience as people, as city dwellers, is what we are looking for in a project. That sum of things that creates multi-scales, various emotions and situations.
Ola Kloc: Thank you for the interview.
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