El Correo Gallego 29/12/2022                                                                                                         

Twenty-one boys and girls from Vimianzo are actively participating this week in the program The town of tomorrow, which makes them protagonists and architects of the transformation and future of their locality so that it is more sustainable, safer and, above all, for the people.

This is an initiative promoted in 2016 by the architect Sandra González, coordinated and sponsored by Apatrigal, which aims for the youngest “to be the owners of towns and cities and exercise their right to transform them, with prior knowledge of them”. To do this, the little Vimians are deepening their knowledge of their town, making the streets their own (to the extent that the rain allows) based on a conception of the urban space as a huge game board in three dimensions so that they “explore, recognize and are able to modify it”, says the promoter.

On the first day they were asked to draw the element or space of Vimianzo that is most meaningful to them, and “the answer was unanimous: the castle”. From there, the participating girls and boys built a similar structure in 3D.

Last Tuesday, taking advantage of the fact that it wasn’t raining, they developed a tactical urbanism proposal, appropriating the central Candil street, which connects the Church square with one of the children’s parks, leaving it empty of cars for a few hours. At that time they gave color to the street by painting lines of different colors. “What we intend to convey is that towns and cities belong to the people”, says González Álvarez.

In this regard, he emphasizes that “most towns are walkable in less than 15 minutes and are surrounded by green areas”. This project seeks to promote an awareness of society to recover for people the urban spaces, which have been colonized by motorized vehicles.

Sandra González considers that this is also an opportunity for the councils to rethink a different future for our towns, but for that it is necessary to “generate links of identity with the places where we live”.

That is one of the purposes of this program, made up of activities that revolve around seven fundamental concepts: language, perception, space, landscape, scale, sustainability and the city, and which has as necessary tools the point, the line , the plane and the three-dimensional element.

It is about the place being transformed into something dynamic, “which is no longer apprehended, but can be modified by themselves, giving them a leading role that is not normally given to them in the creation of spaces or is reduced to an area of more controlled play, such as the school yard or the children’s area of the parks”.

The town of tomorrow was born after the economic crisis resulting from the real estate boom. Far from serving as a learning experience, “it was forgotten and the same thing was done again, so I thought this was an opportunity to rethink and rethink what we are doing”, points out Sandra González. After traveling through most of the municipalities of the Ría de Arousa, and also passing through Malpica de Bergantiños and Carballo, the program “is in a continuous process of evolution” and is available to all those municipalities that wish to take advantage of an opportunity to reformulate their future.