Explore our vision of a more sustainable, inclusive and participatory city.
Childhood and adolescence: shaping the city and exercising critical citizenship.
We seek to create spaces where the voices of girls, boys and adolescents are heard and can have an influence on the environments they inhabit. We recognise their right to form their own views about the town or city where they live, to express them and to actively participate in its transformation.
Through play, architecture and experimentation in public space, we foster their meaningful participation and the development of active and critical citizenship. Because girls, boys and adolescents are not only the inhabitants of the towns and cities of the future: they are citizens of the present.
“At one time we were afraid of the mountain. It was the mountain of wolf, of the ogre, of darkness. It was the place where we could get lost. When elders told us tales, the mountain was the preferred place to hide from enemies, traps, anguish. […] At one time we felt safe between the houses, in the city, the neighborhood. This was the place where we were looking for teammates, where we found them to play together. There it was our place, the place where we hid, where we used to organize the gang, where we played moms, where we hid the treasure… […] But in a few decades, everything changed. There has been a tremendous, fast, total transformation, as our society has never seen before (at least as recorded in documented history). […] The mountain became beautiful, luminous, the object of dreams and desires. The city, on the other hand, has become something dirty, gray, monstrous. […] In the last decades, and in a totally evident way in the last fifty years, the city, born as a meeting and exchange place, discovered the commercial value of the space and altered all the concepts of balance, well-being and community to follow only programs of benefits, of interests. It sold itself, prostituted itself. […] The city is now like the mountain of our tales.”
Francesco Tonucci
Experiencing the City from Childhood
The relationship between girls, boys and adolescents and their habitat—the place where they grow up, interact with others and build their identity—has gradually weakened. Their everyday lives increasingly take place within spaces that are specialised and controlled by adults: the home, the car, the school, playgrounds or consumer spaces. In between, streets, squares and public spaces cease to be places to discover, explore and make their own, becoming primarily places to pass through.
This loss of autonomy limits opportunities to experience the town or city firsthand. For this reason, A Vila do Mañá proposes reclaiming public space as a place for children and adolescents: a place where they can move around, experiment, interact, make decisions and build connections with their surroundings.
Play is a fundamental tool for development, learning and engaging with the world. During childhood, we learn by playing, exploring and experimenting. For this reason, in A Vila do Mañá, play becomes a tool for approaching architecture, heritage, urban planning and landscape through direct experience.
We seek a form of learning that takes place within reality itself: walking through familiar places and rediscovering them from new perspectives, experimenting through the body and movement, occupying space and imagining other ways of inhabiting it. Playing in the city is also a way of getting to know it, questioning it and beginning to transform it.
HOW “A VILA DO MAÑA” WORKS”
Our aim is for girls, boys and adolescents to play an active role in the processes of shaping our shared spaces, providing them with tools to observe, explore, question and transform the environments they inhabit. Through ART, ARCHITECTURE and PLAY, we seek to inspire new ways of looking at the town or city and to build bonds of identity, belonging and responsibility with its spaces.
“I face the city with my body; my legs measure the length of the porches and the width of the square; my gaze unconsciously projects my body onto the facade of the cathedral, where it wanders through the mouldings and outlines, feeling the size of the entrances and exits… I feel in the city and the city exists through my embodied experience. The city and my body complement and define each other. I live in the city and the city lives in me.”
Juhani Pallasmaa
Their habitat becomes their PLAYGROUND and EXPERIMENTAL LABORATORY. Through meaningful participation, girls, boys and adolescents explore, occupy and transform streets, squares, buildings and other spaces in the town or city, using play, art and architecture as tools for action.
Throughout the process, they discover and reinterpret the architectural, heritage and landscape elements of their surroundings; they experiment with them, experience them and, above all, enjoy them. Direct experience allows them to build new bonds of identity and belonging with the place they inhabit. The town or city changes through their eyes: it ceases to be a setting through which they simply pass and becomes a place they recognise, experience and feel as their own.