deconcrete

Global is the power of economy, and so are spreading the protests against its tyranny. The Funambulist posted today about the protest camp settled in Downtown Manhattan. In the same line with the protests of the 15-M movement of Spanish indignados, a new micro-society has recently begun at New York’s Zucotti Park. Being a private plot handed over to public use makes it easier to camp on, when compared to the troublesome evictions experienced in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol by the authorities (as long as the owner of the plot do not change his mind). Lambert denounces the incredible general silence of the media towards this grassroots movement that is growing bigger and bigger.

Like in Madrid, Occupy Wall Street protest camp has also renamed its site to Liberty Square, and its structure and usage of public space as a popular parliament reminds me to the Spanish ones: assemblies, commissions, support, actions… Current representative democracy can no longer be accepted as the least bad option for political systems. Global citizens seem to feel less and less identified with official leaders and they are claiming for more participation in politics and a change that is quite unexpected to come from within the establishment.

The Funambulist links to a very recommendable article by Gaston Gordillo [CriticalLegalThinking], featuring the resonance expansion of contemporary protests against corrupted systems of governance. As Gordillo refers to, The Revolution Will Not be Televised [Gill-Scott Heron, 1970s].

[all images> Occupy Wall Street via The Funambulist]

The emblematic Central Madrid has turned into a vibrating site of proactive politics again.

2 August 2011, a few minutes before sunrise. It was the second day in the national holiday period for the masses and the city was almost empty. Everyone wants to scape the scorching summer temperatures, but some 15M “indignant” protesters remained still camped. They had marched from all over the country to bring their voice to the capital city. After 2,5 months of pacifist protests since the movement began, riot policemen decided to take action. They evicted the grass-roots information booth and the few tents from the protest camp with premeditation and nocturnality.

This Governmental shift has boosted the general outrage of a movement that was getting ready to hibernate for the summer; it has resurged now instead of September. For the past three days, policemen were told to block Plaza del Sol, emblematic public space for the demonstrators, and where the 15 May movement for real democracy was born. If the whole public square was turned into a massive protest camp since May, now it is an over-controlled empty void, a sort of Bastille-fortress. The same policemen that used to prevent anyone from camping outside the square are now preventing anyone from entering. No civil person has been allowed in the square: the absurdity of controlling a political symbol. The subway nodal station has even already been closed down for a total of 24 hours; trains do not stop at Sol.

Counterproductive as it has proved, blocking public space from people to express their ideas has only strengthened them. Even the policemen trade union (SUP) have publicly considered today Sol’s blockade as a political mistake. Madrid Central has turned from a consumption and commerce hub into a space for debate and consensus. Several surrounding squares (not sieged by police forces yet) like Jacinto Benavente, Mayor, Callao, Cibeles, Pontejos, Atocha have been spontaneously taken over to celebrate bottom-up meetings. Critical issues are being discussed, proposed and questioned: financial crisis, citizen participation, politicians’ corruption and abuse of power… The politics of public space are more active than ever and back to the very origins of Greek agoras: open places of assembly. In Valencia, Tenerife or Madrid, squares that have housed these protests are now commonly referred to as the 15M Square. Even main streets like Madrid’s Gran Vía have been turned into people’s parliaments after stopping car traffic at night. There is an urgent need for real debate; power structures need to listen.

Only 10 days left for the Pope’s bombastic visit to Madrid and the global Catholic Youth Encounter (JMJ). They are to be largely funded by the Government of our secular country in one of the worst moments for national economy. Madrid authorities start to take action in order to show global pilgrims that there is no trouble among its citizens, but tension is heavily felt everywhere. During the Papal visit, the same streets that now function as sites for political expression and debate will house hundreds of temporary confession booths, where Catholic pilgrims will be able to confess their sins in every language.

Meanwhile, 15M “indignados” claim that this square is not the Pope’s (“esta plaza, no es del Papa”). Yesterday, riot policemen started to brutally attack for the first time, beating pacific protesters: 20 injured. Today there will be gatherings and demonstrations claiming again for Real Democracy NOW in most Spanish cities around 7 pm.

[images> August protests in Madrid by Carlos Rosillo (Mayor, Preciados, Alcalá & Cibeles), Alberto Martín (Gran Vía), Samuel Sánchez (Preciados, injured & Jacinto Benavente), Kiko Huesca (Parliament), Dani Pozo (Preciados), Emilio Naranjo (Sol), Uly Martín (Sol)]

One topic, two points of view:

Protest by Rachel Engler and Deconcrete at The Bi Blog

[image> Milk Farmers Protests by Axel Schmidt via caminootoñal]

Today is the fifth day at what some have started to call the 15M_Sun Republic. In Madrid’s very central Plaza del Sol, demonstrators for a true democracy are camped out. They express general disgust and weariness with the current crisis that has led to 21% of unemployment and extremely precarious jobs. Never before had Spanish democracy (since dictator Franco’s death in 1975) experienced such a grass-roots movement, without being affiliated to any political party and coming from different ideologies. The general miserable condition is what has joined the people together and facebook and twitter have simply done the rest. Hundreds of thousands have gone out to the street in Madrid, but also in Barcelona, Granada, Seville, Valencia, almost every Spanish city and even some demonstrations at Spanish embassies and consulates in several foreign cities, such as Berlin, London, Dublin, Montpellier, Mexico…

But not only is it about being outraged at the decadent economic situation. Another reason for such a pacific fury is the very long list of politicians charged with corruption – to be found in every party’s list – that repeat as candidates for the regional elections on Sunday 22nd May. The first protest camp was banned two days ago, which made a second edition reemerge with even more energy and popular support. Yesterday, the Electoral Board banned the camp again, since it would not respect the official last day without propaganda before the election. The spokesmen of the movement have accepted the decision from an official position. However, they assume that citizens will probably express their discontent on the street anyway after this governmental counterproductive decision. The civic movement does not consider their protest as propaganda for a certain party, but quite on the contrary, they rather question the whole established system.

The Plaza itself has been turned into an incredibly well-organised political expression site, almost like an informal revolutionary parliament. At Madrid’s Acampadasol, eleven commissions have been set up; six of which have a fix spot in the plaza as shown in the map below: Action, Communication, Food, Legal Support, Infrastructure/Logistics and Information. The other five move their location according to the circumstances: Cleaning, Internal Coordination, Media, University and Neighbourhoods. The epicentre is based around the sculpture of King Carlos III (aka. “the best mayor of Madrid”) with fabrics and plastics hanging from his horse legs and tied up to the nearby lampposts for rain and sun shelter. Protesters sleep on cardboard surfaces and blankets have been brought by spontaneous supporters. Mobile chemical toilets have been donated by a private company and neighbours bring extra food to the crowd. Every piece of wall serves for public expression: large advertising scaffoldings wrapping emblematic buildings have been appropriated as a display platform for complaints, dreams and wishes. Meanwhile, assemblies, talks and discussions are continuously held among the assistants to think of collaborative proposals for the future.

The people no more believes in any of their politicians.

democracia real ya

toma la calle

toma la plaza

spanish revolution

acampada bcn

…

[1>Spanish Revolution Camp via elpais][2>Diagram of Madrid's protest camp by Heber Longás via elpais][3>protesters at dawn via elpais][4>collective expression by Andrés Jaque][5>Madrid's Puerta del Sol protests by BroccoLee][6>Madrid's Puerta del Sol protests by Pablo Talamanca][7>collective expression via ][8>Barcelona Protest Camp by albertmartnez]

Learning from concocting informal uses of the formal city, legal loopholes, speculative visions and appropriations of public space, Berlin-based Ilka and Andreas Ruby launched Urban Transformation in 2008. Their cookbook for real action aims ideal cooperation and alliances between urban authorities and citizens towards a more socially sustainable future. As they point out: <the term “urban” […] represents a cosmos of extremely varied notions determined by geographical, cultural, and individual preferences. If we want to get a grip on what is “urban” today, we have to capture it in all its disguises, gradations, and transformations occurring simultaneously on a global scale.> The edition was initiated and extended after the Holcim Foundation Forum for sustainable construction held in Shanghai in 2007.

“Transformation” is emphasized here as estate in-between unfinished realities: visualising urban failures and their implementation. In this ever-changing panorama, we are guided through a world of possibilities that deal with the role of consumption in configuring our current cities, and its perversion by means of witty tactics. The spatial and legal transformations compiled in the book are structured in 6 chapters of in-between contexts: Between ecology & economy, global & local, public & private, sanctioned & shadow order, permanent & transitory, standard & appropriation.  These confronted dualities determine a zone imaginaire with an incredibly high potential for spatial practices.

The right to urban mobility is one of the main challenges described. A wide-range series of thinkers, pioneers and visionaries, narrate the adventures and misfortunes of almost every megalopolis in its struggle with overpopulation; however, even if Urban Transformation does not try to cover city by city in a methodical analysis, it unveils an astonishing X-ray of the urban fractures that every society shares. Some of the highlights of  this “urbanism on the move” are RV practitioners in Arizona (Simpson), 21^st century Mongolian nomads (Lippe), homeless men’s temporal houses in Seoul (Cho), refugees’ spatial negotiations in their temporary camps (Herz), trans-border flows (Cruz), the impact of gondola lift transportation systems in the slums of Caracas (U-TT) or even cycling initiatives in Quito and Bogotá (Ganchala).

Another relevant issue questioning conventional modes of urban planning is the invented typologies resulting from speculation and politics that are superseding past modes of real-estate housing. This new sort of hyper-real estates, where popular imagination and eager for fast profits make unexpected urban hybrids appear, include: Serbian turbo typologies (Jovanović Weiss), super-dense urban villages in Shenzhen (Du), Caribbean floating cities (Zapata & Supersudaca), model showroom houses with fake windows in Korea (Shin), restricted International Aid walled cities in Kabul for foreigners (Karakat & Hannurkar) or Singapore’s schizophrenic social mix (Zhang & Tan).

Urban Transformation also provides a series of informal spatial appropriations of the public realm such as the fantasy world Underneath a Highway in Guangzhou (Gutierrez & Portefaix). Furthermore, it also compiles projects that have enhanced users’ participation and supported civil disobedience in otherwise over-controlled environments: United Bottle (Hebel & Stollmann) and Elemental (Iacobelli & Aravena) are good examples. As Philippe Cabanne states in his essay, <The democratically constituted state, according to Habermas […], cannot be infallible. Neither can it demand from its citizens an unconditional obedience and remain, at the same time, open to development.>

Urban Transformation. Edited by Ilka & Andreas Ruby, Ruby Press, Berlin 2008 (pp. 400, s.i.p.)

[1> Family Home in UlaanBaatar_Mongolia_Florian Lippe][2> Ciclopaseo in Quito_Cycling Citizenship in the City_Ximena Ganchala][3> How To Buy an Apartment in Korea_Haewon Shin][4> Underneath the Highway_Gutierrez & Portefaix]

*Post commissioned by Nicola Twilley (edible geography /foodprintproject / GOOD Magazine) as part of FOOD FOR THINKERS – An online festival on Food and Writing (18-23/01/2011)

Courses are served on a table. Dishes are set on a rigorous manner. But does the subsequent experience of eating leave place for interaction among the companions? Each culture places cutlery in such a way that the subsequent freedom of movement is already predetermined. It is mostly remarkable between Western and Asian cultures; if the former pleads for a hierarchical untouchable order, the latter prefers a higher degree of spontaneity and unplannedness. The fact of using generic chopsticks instead of specific tools for each meal is directly translated into how guests relate themselves to space through their eating choreography. One dish surrounded by dozens of additional cutlery pieces Vs. dozens of dishes surrounding a pair of chopsticks.

In Korea, a meal consists of dozens of atomised courses scattered all along the table, letting each guest choose the actual order, rhythm and combinations of the meal. Sweet, cold, calm, sour, Kimchi, warm, roasting, Kimchi, cold, chilling, faster, tea, sweet… Every item – and every rest – plays the main character on stage. In the same line, Chinese table setting introduces a new component. Courses are decomposed in fewer dishes and are laid on a revolving surface, which guests decide when – and how fast – to turn around to pick the desired piece for their following bite. A constant negotiation with your sitting neighbours. Far beyond, Japanese sushi conveyor belts impersonate the paradigm of this choreography of freedom, where courses are on a constant move. Same food, countless different meals.

On the other hand, Western culture inherited Bourbon and Versailles customs, and still needs to deal with this burden. Having only evolved to a slight simplicity of their past lavish versions, banquets nowadays still consist of appetizer, main course, second course and dessert. And don’t even dare to alter the order, for God’s sake! Once every course is placed on the table, food is served among guests. Always following the cutlery and glass hierarchy. Once a course is finished, dirty plates, forks, knives and spoons need to be replaced by clean ones. And next course, of course. Clean cup, Clean cup, move down!

There have been some reactions against established codes of dining orders (leaving snobbish experimental cuisine restaurants aside). In the 1930s, Marinetti already proposed a Manifesto of Futurist Cooking, where “the perfect meal demands:  general harmony among setting (glassware, dishes, decoration), flavours and colours of the food, […] the abolition of knife and fork, […] the rapid presentation, between courses, under the eyes and nostrils of the guests, of some dishes they will eat and others they will not, to increase their curiosity, surprise and imagination.”

If the rules are to be broken, why not creating a colourful week diet and table setting out of one Paul Auster’s character? Mixing reality with fiction, and back to reality reinventing fiction, Narrative Artist Sophie Calle ventured into The chromatic diet in 1997. [In SORIANO, F.: Fisuras Magazine N.9. 2001]

But if dishes are to follow a strict composition of order, then Junya Ishigami’s  Table, makes dishes stay still at their most accurate coordinates in the immensity of the eating surface. Only four legs support a magic span, with a scarce 3 mm thick, almost flying, panel. The objects layout must remain untouched, static to death, so that the structure of the table stays in the most pure horizontal.

Radical poetic experiences can teach us that a general demand for a more relational space seems to be needed at our obsolete everyday eating site. This space should rather be exclusively composed of relations between viewers and objects, participants and events. Like in Martí Guixé’s Mealing, a meal-in-motion prompting guests to interact. If not, this space is not even invisible; it almost does not exist.

[1> Korean table setting via visitkorea][2> Chinese table setting via corbisimages][3> Japanese sushi conveyor belt via WN][4> European table setting via dw-studio][5> Sophie Calle's The Chromatic Diet via harpreetkhara][6-8> Junya Ishigami's Table via east-asia-architecture & flickr][9,10> Martí Guixé's relational Mealing for Performa09 via eat me daily]

Cities are built from wishes and through wishes also experienced. All kinds of wishes, spectacular, phantastic, idealistic and economic, local and global: they link the architectural with the social and the utopic space.

The exhibition REALSTADT (RealCity) – wishes knocking on Reality’s doors are a collection of over 300 models of German cities and the potential of their everyday normality. It is not about exotic metropolis, but about the beliefs of the majority of the German population. The show takes place inside a 1960s abandoned power station of Eastern Berlin, as astonishing as derelict, as marvelous as huge.

Among many of the too conventional and standard examples on display, there are a few outstanding ones, such as the perceptive walkingscape models by Larissa Fassler. Her models of the underground station of AlexanderPlatz or the walking areas of KottbusserTor make one see the invisible city surrounding us, hidden either by car-traffic or simply by earth.

Another highlight of the exhibition is the Public Parliament by Hütten und Paläste (Huts and Palaces). A concept for an utopic public space consisting of overlapping parliament tribunes, open for debate and discussion; a complex amplified version of a Greek agora, for everyday politics.

[images1&2> Alexanderplatz and Kottbusser Tor by Larissa Fassler] [image3> Parlament der Öffentlichkeit by Hüttenundpaläste]

Augmented (hyper)reality is Keiichi Matsuda’s reconsideration on everyday urbanisms through virtual tools. What would happen if we liberate Internet and digital media from screens out into open public space? His interface allows pedestrians to have a multi-layered home/city surrounding them 24 hours. One could select the pattern of the street we walk along, its advertising billboards, or even special weather warnings. Cities could then be physically built as random as possible, using either green Chroma background style or trashed materials. Like shooting special (d)effects, each person could adjust his daily way to work into a promenade along a Caribbean beach… But also the Augmented City would also be a paradise for censored and controlled spaces.

Augmented City 3D from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

“The architecture of the contemporary city is no longer simply about the physical space of buildings and landscape, more and more it is about the synthetic spaces created by the digital information that we collect, consume and organise; an immersive interface may become as much part of the world we inhabit as the buildings around us. Augmented Reality (AR) is an emerging technology defined by its ability to overlay physical space with information. [...] It may lead to a world where media is indistinguishable from ‘reality’. The spatial organisation of data has important implications for architecture, as we re-evaluate the city as an immersive human-computer interface.”

[source, image & video>Augmented (hyper)reality  by Keiichi Matsuda via supercolossal]

Arqueología del Futuro (Archaelogy of the future: architectural future visions of the past) is Carmelo Rodríguez Cedillo’s blog/archive. As part of his meticulous PhD research, he documents every of these punctual visions of former decades. Since they were mostly not continued in the urban discourse for their infeasibility, he is developing this new discipline of study.

In a recent post, he talks about Do-It-Yourself Domes, often published in Popular Science Magazine; a publication started in 1872, with large number of readers during the 1960s-70s in suburban America. Thanks to many Buckminster Fuller’s projects shown in its pages, every dweller could generate himself a structure covering the swimming-pool, a sun dome, a greenhouse or a countryside shelter.

The Magazine itself, would provide paper cutouts for mock-ups, or even the actual construction drawings delivered to your home for an extra $5 fee.

[images1&2> Popular Science Magazine 1966 via arqueología del futuro] [images3&4> Popular Science Magazine 1972 via arqueología del futuro]

An Oasis makes water accessible in an extremely dry desert area. Oases also have historically been decisive tools for political, economic and military control of an area, which trading routes should depend on. But an oasis can also be created to go beyond military barriers.

The US/Mexican border has experienced over 1,000 deaths of migrants between 2000-2007 venturing themselves into the desert in a life-or-death flight to a dreamt future. [map below] In a season where Spain suffers from a similar drama of Subsaharians dying in sea waters while fleeing into Spain, ElPaís brings the example of Humane Borders volunteering association to its pages. They take care of 100 drinking water stations in Arizona to help migrants survive, once they have crossed the border.

While some extreme right radicals Minutemen have been recently reported to being patrolling the same area but with fire weapons, some other ranches agree on having free water tanks on their plots, and the organization will check the water quality and filling on weekly or even daily basis. By providing information of walking distances in the desert, as well as signaling where these water points are located, they aim to reduce the everyday tragedy of nomadic migration and imposed boundaries.

As Teddy Cruz stated in his SanDiego/Tijuana Borderwall: Urbanism of Transgression:

“The border’s transformation from light to solid is exactly opposite the trend in recent architecture, which has moved from solid to light.

Contemporary architecture is searching once more for nomadic strategies of lightness and freedom, less interested in objects of imposition and more interested in territorial strategies. It is engaging the boundaries that simultaneously delimit and blur the diverse socio-cultural geographies of contemporary life.

Maybe this suggests, once more, that the dreams of architecture are at odds with the actual socio-political and economic realities in which they exist.”

[images 1-4> volunteering and water stations via Humane Borders] [image5> Urbanism of Transgression by Teddy Cruz]

Cities out of slabs or pre-fab dormitory towns: the Plattenbauten in former Eastern Germany. Conceived to house the masses in a collective way, Soviet-style Urbanism produced worker colonies, whose monotonous built form we are obliged to inherit today.

Honey Neustadt (Oct 2006) by Höfner & Sachs is a reinterpretation of the DDR shrinking city of Halle-Neustadt. Questioning the concept of worker community, they proposed to house 1 million bees in mock-up Plattenbauten to work in a 250 kg. honey production.

As part of Berlin’s general reuse of vacant urban lots, the Skulpturen Park has been a bottom-up initiative running since 2006. Under a rotating curatorial team, several project,s such as Honey Neustadt, have been dealing with neighbourhood and urban voids. Former private subdivisions for lots shaping the block have given place to a common space for residents.

This newly achieved communal wasteland for the city awaits speculative fulfillment by developers. But until then, private boundaries scrupulously delimited on paper are blurring in reality. Philip Horst proposed for the site in 2006 a collective lighting hanging 20 metres above the empty block: Blur. Its remote control would be passed on every 2-3 days to a local resident surrounding the Skulpturen Park, so that the power to light the area would stay at residents’ wish.

[all images> Skulpturen Park]

Madrid is dismantling its chabola-settlements (Spanish favelas).

Although having only an average of 50-200 dwellers, each settlement struggles to survive on the urban-rural fringe. Based on recycling, food & retail informal sales, or drug-dealing activities, their dwellers are being relocated into new social housing blocks, as part of the official plan for eradication of chabolas.

With an eye on the Olympics candidate city, madrid’s social workers are giving protocol lessons about how to live and behave in a vertical formal housing community:

*do not dance and hand-clap during flamenco-singing at home, in the early morning.

*do not tear down structural walls.

*do not trick electricity meters.

*do not set up any laundry hangers or A/C in the façade

*do not throw away buckets of water from the window to the street

*do not use collective space to storage personal items

…The social working therapy should rather start by the architect himself, when planning their homes…

[image1> dismantling Las Mimbreras via el mundo] [image2>map of chabola-settlements in madrid by espormadrid] [images3&4> dismantling El Cañaveral via espormadrid] [image5> dismantling Santa Catalina by alvaro garcia via el pais]

Thread-like sky is to be seen inside Urban Villages in Southern China, among their hyper-compact mini-towers.

These former farmer villages did not go to the city, but the City came suddenly to them. Keeping the field property structure and minimal 1-2 metres narrow paths, rice crops were turned into 5-7 storey housing blocks, since the 1980s. And informally, peasants became real estate developers.

Despite this urban agglomeration, some villages (Shuping Village in Guangdong Province) learned how to convert themselves into a shareholding company, which helped restructure the power relationship between the administrative village and villagers’ teams.

This self-organized shareholding system strengthened villagers’ collective identity; unlike agricultural collectivism under Mao, which focused on production, real estate-centered collectivism in the village shareholding system emphasizes the distribution of collective wealth, as well as provide health care and education facilities for their members (a kind of danwei-ization of villages, as former planned economy had done).

As You-tien Hsing concludes in The Great Urban Transformation, village corporatism highlights the active role of society in urban social transformation through a bottom-up approach; a self-initiated strategy against state expropriations. [Source> You-tien Hsing: The Great Urban Transformation - Politics of Land and Property in China. Oxford University Press 2010]

[Image 1> thread-like sky in a Guandong Urban Village by Houhong] [Image 2> aerial view of a Shenzhen Urban Village from googlemaps] [Image 3> informality in Urban Villages by Peter Herrle] [Image 4> Wuuf Village proposal by Aberrant Architecture for an ironic redevelopment of Shenzhen Urban Village]

In ONE WEEK (1920), Buster Keaton accidentally re-composed a house, creating an exaggerated version of an architecture that could accommodate diverse spatial uses in close proximity.

One could also dream of an IKEA really providing such magic spaces for a playful way of life: inaccessible main door, revolving walls, handrails as ladders, textile floorslabs, houses turned into a trailer, into a carousel…

…almost Fairytale Houses, for Little Red Riding Hood, for Cinderella,…as Izaskun Chinchilla would visualize them.

Far beyond the aesthetics of the amazing resulting piece, even compared to Gehry’s house, 83 years later the Office of Socially Engaged Architecture (offsea) proposed a DIY-ed system based on Keaton’s follies; in a cocktail together with Neufert’s most boring standards, Tessenow’s most logic construction and Debord’s most poetic dérives.

By criticizing and rethinking the suburban detached house, they urged architecture to devise new methodologies and design strategies to meet contemporary needs. While reinterpreting participatory models of the 1960s and 1970s, offsea keeps on researching how everyday situations, habits and rituals inform and redefine domestic architecture and how space could be more responsive to these.

“The postponed meeting of Neufert, Tessenow and Buster Keaton; Situationism 2003″ by OFFSEA.

[Image> europan 7 graz] [Source> CRD brighton] [watch One Week in youtube]

“Chen Jiayi, a 72-year-old retired worker, is Mr. Fixit & Mr. Manners for one Yangpu District community in Shanghai. He keeps the environment clean, fixes broken street lamps, replaces manhole covers, helps direct traffic and reminds residents not to toss their garbage just anywhere. He is also on the lookout for bad public behaviour and bad manners, such as spitting and littering. For the past 8 years, chen has led two volunteer teams, mostly retired workers who care about the environment. They show up in parks, open areas and lanes, checking infrastructure and reporting sewer system problems to city work crews. They even repair street lights, or report light problems. They consider the park a second home and know each tree and what it needs.”

However, which are the implications of controlling dwellers by dwellers themselves?

For the sake of an Image of the city, informal social activism may also lead to destroy spontaneous behaviours. This group of volunteers, aims to improve their park  in a more efficient way that the authorities could never achieve themselves, but also limit somehow urban interaction from others. After noticing that citizens where used to pound nails into trees to hang up their clothes while they practised sport, and transform trees into closets, the volunteering team decided to remove them, so that people would not be accidentally hurt.

Image> volunteers ending with the natural bike parking chaos.

[source>shanghai daily 13/02/2010]