They shall not pass! They shall not pass!

After the financial and urban tsunami happened in the Spanish state, the city’s speculative development model lead behind a trail in the territory. Empty plots, unfinished neighborhoods, buildings with social programs never leaving the drawing board. Behind the wave of construction that has affected the entire country, it can be perceive in the same way as if a hurricane would have gone through, the ruins of a sprawling system under the raising up of empty plots. We propose to think around these urban ruins and raise them up in terms of opportunity where we could collect the claims of the many existing citizen initiatives.

> Francesco Cinquini > Patrícia Cioffi de Mattos > Michelle D'Angelo Carvalho > Filippo Maria Doria > Giselle Reitz Giannattasio > Jolanta Kwarciak > Yee Pei (Thierry) Lye > Mond Qu > Lakmani Mihinda Rathnayake > Andréa Savard-Beaudoin > Koen Savelkoul

After the financial and urban tsunami happened in the Spanish state, city speculative model as oil slick appears that contracts and leaves behind a trail in the territory. A model that has been proved as a failure, and it has left behind countless urban ruins as a vacant buildings, unfinished skeletons, undeveloped urban operations and ghost settlements. The development model applied to the metropolis in Spain in the last ten years has failed because of its economic, social and environmental unsustainability. Behind the wave of construction that has affected the entire country, we can perceive in the same way as if a hurricane would have gone through, the ruins of a sprawling system under the raising up of empty plots. We propose to think around these urban ruins and raise them up in terms of opportunity where we could collect the claims of the many existing citizen initiatives. The purpose of the workshop is to analyze this phenomenon and propose tools that allow us to make them visible through urban actions. To do this, we will start from unconventional communication tools that pose a challenge to the normality and the alleged naturalness of cityscape, opening new spaces and posing questions to them. These actions are articulated in terms of proactive reviews which point out urban situations and make visible new areas of opportunity. Here a small sketch of the themes we will deal with. - Analysis of the different existing maps. - Urban drifts. - Defining a new taxonomy. - Determination of indicators. - Urban interventions and actions in different parts of the city Urban Action: They shall not pass! “They shall not pass!” is the slogan used to express determination to defend a position against the enemy. There are numerous historical references of this slogan in propaganda signs of the First World War. Perhaps the closest reference we found later was during the Spanish Civil War, as this slogan was used by the Spanish republic in the siege of Madrid, in the famous poster made by the artist Ramón Puyol. We propose to recover this slogan for actions in different parts of the city detected as places that are under the threat of speculative urban interests. The approach is to make a replica of the milestones or landmarks with the inscription “They shall not pass!” We incorporate this milestone into the landscape of the territory , being a disruptor element which invites to visualize and question these threatens.