Hypertube

#HYPERTUBE is one of the actions that was included on the Tetuán District CityScape Quality Improvement Program, a pilot program that has been developed by an open work group including local cultural agents, politic representatives and neighbourhood representatives and agents through a series of periodical meetings carried out throughout 2013 and managed by the work group itself. #HYPERTUBE bets on: #01 The search for alternative solutions facing the homogenisation of public space by working on intermediate situations, between the public bench and the public playground. #02 The generation of urban infrastructures that are able to include implementations and changes. Against the idea of closed construction or immovable work, the project explores which are the possibilities for becoming evolutionary, changeable, improved or even removed. #03 The inclusion of users and aesthetics that lack representation on public spaces in order to allow the project to become a gatherer and condenser of heterogeneous urban situations in opposition to stereotyped urban design and preventive urbanism and with the intention to amplify the range of elements that configure the collective imagination associated to public spaces. #04 The establishment of a starting point on the refurbishment of a municipal empty plot that owns all the characteristics to become a new public meeting area on the neighbourhood: there is a magnificent tree on one of its sides, it is a crossing point from the interior areas of the district towards the crowded Bravo Murillo street, it has a municipal swimming pool situated across the road and several public equipments nearby… Is there a better offer? #05 The testing and monitoring of the project by the designers and managers themselves, which are, at the same time neighbours and that believe on participation beyond direct questioning and surveys. The process has just begun. #06 The exploration of the possibilities of an habitable monumentalisation. Someone criticised the Tetuán CityScape Improvement Project by comparing it to a lipstick for the neighbourhood meanwhile some days after this opinion was answered by someone else’s opinion on a blog: “… maybe what we are requiring from art is something different from what it can offer us. Maybe the landscape that has to be improved is a mental landscape. Maybe the destiny of art is to become detached from its origins, to revolt, to take over the weaknesses of the system, to make visible what has been hidden, to incite reflection, to educate and to be used as agitator, showing what are its own contradictions.”