Viviendo en la ciudad

Abstract

This is the first issue that we have dedicated to collective housing and, in part, to the city resulting from these buildings. The articles demonstrate the benefits and the capacity for renovation of collective housing when it is undertaken with the intention of overcoming the individual limits of the dwelling, and not submitting to the financial and speculative control of the construction market.The different architectures analysed, which respond to different ways of living in the city, hint at the social ideology that protects them. As applied ideology, collective housing was very instrumental in bringing social change, and the sum of all these experiences reflects the events that marked the entire twentieth century. It could be described as extensive collective research that attempted not to draw limiting boundaries and which was determined to concernedly relate apparently opposed aspects: the private and the public, the home and the city, the city and the land, or the traditional and the technological.Currently, the reduction of public versus private space also means that the way the city lives is changed: collective housing is torn between protecting what is individual, making every effort to keep all that holds a relationship to others at the margin, and life in the community as the best means of ensuring the common good. It seeks balance, reshaping the private space as public, moving to the home and its buildings what was always, or pertained to, the city space. These architectures capable of relating the private to the collective, the dwelling to the building, to the city, to its construction ..., suppose a constant change of ideas and concepts with those that come to recognize the different scales that are handled by collective housing. The articles in this issue are dedicated to this broad pursuit.

Este es el primer número que dedicamos a la producción de ciudad desde la vivienda colecti-va, recordando que esta ha sido una constante preocupación para la arquitectura residencial, al menos, desde la aparición de los primeros ensayos precursores al Movimiento Moderno. La posibilidad de transformar la ciudad, o de trasmitir valores de convivencia hasta ejercer predominio o fuerza moral sobre una sociedad, han sido y siguen siendo hechos que demuestran el beneficio y la capacidad renovadora y regeneradora que tiene la vivienda colectiva. Como ocurre con casi todo lo que hoy condiciona y dirige nuestras vidas, la vivienda ve también contaminado su natural objetivo de la renovación urbana y la mejora de vida de los ciudadanos, y se ve utilizada como mecanismo para el control y especulación de la producción de ciudad. Quizá siempre haya sido así y tan sólo determi-nadas épocas o ejemplos aislados hayan sabido equilibrar las fuerzas positivas con las meramente productivas o especulativas.