[OAS] Occupy Any Street

“Temporary uses are symptoms of an alternative understanding to urban planning: rather than leaving development to government and the economy alone, they explore an appropriation of the city.”

“Whereas long-lasting interventions necessarily have a certain degree of affirmation, temporary projects have more latitude: the motive force is more likely to be activism than politics.”

Contributions to the conference ‘temporar: Temporaere Nutzungen im Stadtraum’ in Vienna, May 2003.

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The street is for everybody

Representative for many cities on the Latin American continent, Costa Rica’s contemporary urban development is suffering from a vicious circle of spatial fragmentation and social segregation. The public domain mostly appears as a left over space in between private capsular developments; a zone in denial reigned by individualism instead of the collective, by an aggressive motorized traffic at daytime and raised insecurity levels at night.

Bringing together different actors of civil society as well as the private, the public and the academic sector, we initiated and supported a series of awareness raising collaborations. Advertised through social networks and transmitted through communication media, the cities of the country are now starting to rediscover and strengthen a lost resource of democratic interaction and urban fun-time.


Temporary turns permanent

The activities vary in scale and location, ranging from classic or rock concerts to public lectures and readings, sit-ins or flash mobs to bicycle and gardening guerillas. They can last 5 minutes or a whole day. One of the first permanent results from our temporarily intended installations is the construction of a bicycle path crossing the capital San Jose; a piece of missing infrastructure claimed throughout several on-bike manifestations that were supported by several thousand citizens throughout 2010 and 2011.