The Universal Declaration of Urban Rights (UDUR) is a pro bono project developed by the Zuloark collective with a broad network of collaborators.
Zuloark is listed as a cooperative of self-employed workers and is, therefore, a for-profit organization that falls under the category of Social Economy Entities in Spain. While we develop some profit-generating work, most of our projects seek to generate social impact. They are non-profit in their financial structure and nature. In addition, its structure as a cooperative implies that any “profit” generated is infused back into projects and the collective itself in order to support our members and projects on a long-term sustainable basis.
The UDUR project has been developed for over ten years through different editions, which have been developed by obtaining the funds and resources it has needed, which have been used entirely for the development and implementation of the specific edition. That means production costs, collaborators fees and, on a few occasions, also fees for our work (not proud of this because we try not to get into precarity cycles, but this is how it have worked). It has a specific non-commercial character because it has ever generated economic benefits for the cooperative and never will, since all the capital it obtains is invested in the development of activities for the project’s growth. Further, the nature of the work itself is non-profit in its objectives and intended impact.
The UDUR project aims to configure ourselves as a learning community that works together to find out how to expand urban rights and boost regions’ solidarity. So we understand it as a valuable tool for the commons, and therefore, we relate to “project authorship” through a Creative Commons license: “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)”
This license allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format for non-commercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given and the intellectual and industrial property or content generated to each collaborator is respected. As we want to spread the impact of the tool, we encourage spin-offs, versions, editions in any terms like remixing, adapting, or building upon the UDUR material, but you must license the modified material under identical terms.
To make this possible, we have developed a UR_KIT in a WIKI format (wiki.urbanrights.org), sharing the tools (ex. this wordpress theme code) and know-how of the project, and we spend some of our working hours per year on mentorships and onboarding people who want to use the tool or launch an edition.
Over the years, the Universal Declaration of Urban Rights has generated a broad and diverse network of collaborators through UR_Embassadors, UR_Observers and UR_Supporters. And also funders of different range, from small neighbourhood associations and contra-culture events (UrbanBat, EME3, Solar Corona-Valencia) to cultural institutions as ADK Akademie der Künste (Berlin), La Casa Encendida (Madrid), ISELP (Institut Supérieur pour l’Etude du Langage Plastique), Future Everything Festival, Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Goethe-Institut Madrid.
For the past six years, our principal working collaborator is Montera34, a collective that centres its activities around using whenever-possible free open source data tools to analyze and visualize data to try to understand urban, social and cultural transformations. Montera34 also develops software and builds digital infrastructures to enhance collaboration by the creation and production of meeting spaces, both temporary and permanent, in order to share technological learning, needs, doubts, data, and analysis. Montera34 has supported Urban Rights with previous editions and built the project’s current webpage. However, the current iteration of the project —as it contains such a strong digital component— has led to a very close collaboration, and we now work hand-in-hand to conceptualize, design, and build the components of the Urban Rights “digital embassy”.
Even so, this project is built on the efforts of many people who, to a greater or lesser extent, have left their efforts, opinions and learnings in the project’s legacy. All this network of collaborators is recognized on our web as part of the UR_NET.
For our partners and us, the project is a means, not an end. In each context, with each agent, we establish specific criteria for collaboration because, as it is a tool, the use made of it in each territory depends on what it is intended to solve with it. In this way, what each territory, each association, each partner obtains is not predetermined by the objectives of the parent project, if we can call it that, but by the local objectives of the partners, and this logically varies in each case.