Students, neighbours and Zuloark build a shared infrastructure at Urban Outcast Festival
For three days, the courtyard of the former I.E.S. Luis Buñuel, in Zaragoza’s San Pablo neighbourhood, has become an open workshop for architecture, learning and collective construction.
As part of the Urban Outcast Festival, first- and second-year architecture students from the University of Zaragoza have worked together with local residents to recover the courtyard of the building and activate a new space for common use.
The result is a stand for performances, convertible into a popular meeting space, which will remain in the Luis Buñuel as an infrastructure available for future activities. The piece has been built in four modules, designed by mixed groups of students and neighbours, with the support of members of Zuloark.
The Heraldo article captures the meaning of the workshop: taking architecture out of the classroom, bringing it into contact with the people who will use it, and learning how to solve problems through materials, tools and the real needs of a place. Where at first there were wooden boards, toolboxes and many questions, there is now a small architecture capable of hosting concerts, debates, encounters and shared decisions.
From the perspective of Urban Rights, this experience can be read as a new form of urban parliament. Not an institutional parliament, but an everyday infrastructure for sitting, watching, listening and speaking. A simple device that transforms a courtyard into public space and turns the right to participate into a material practice: designing together, building together and leaving something in the neighbourhood that can continue to be used.
The festival closes with an open debate to share impressions and conclusions from these days of work, followed by concerts that will inaugurate the new stands. Architecture appears here not as a finished object, but as the beginning of a shared life: a piece that becomes active when people occupy it, adapt it and make it their own.