Publications |

OSMproposals: Reproducible Datasets about OpenStreetMap's Tagging Proposals

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Eventful migration: Rethinking social media migration with help from Elon Musk’s sink

Sun, 29 Jun 2025 16:19:14 +0000

Digital tools for knowledge exchange and sustainable public food procurement in community kindergartens: A case study in Słupsk, Poland

Sun, 30 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Co-designing grounded visualisations of the Food-Water-Energy nexus to enable urban sustainability transformations

Tue, 09 Apr 2024 15:53:19 +0000

Visualisation tool for a grounded FEW Nexus

Fri, 20 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Ethical-political elements in research and intervention: reflections from social psychology

Mon, 09 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Towards an urban agenda of the commons: a case study of the political demands of the urban commons in Barcelona

Sun, 02 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Problematizing Urban Commons: Towards a “Provincialised” Approach

Fri, 18 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The Precariousness Of Urban Commons In The Face Of European Public Law

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

What's urgent vs what's important: a reflection from the urban geographies of the pandemic

Wed, 22 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Ivan Serrano^1,², Carlos Cámara¹, Hug March^1,³, Ramon Ribera-Fumaz¹, Isabel Ruiz-Mallén¹, Mar Satorras¹

¹Laboratorio de Transformación Urbana y Cambio Global, Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3), Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. ²Estudios de Derecho y Ciencia Política, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. ³Estudios de Economía y Empresa, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya s

There has arisen in our time a most singular fancy: the fancy that when things go very wrong we need a practical man. It would be far truer to say, that when things go very wrong we need an unpractical man. Certainly, at least, we need a theorist. A practical man means a man accustomed to mere daily practice, to the way things commonly work. When things will not work, you must have the thinker, the man who has some doctrine about why they work at all. It is wrong to fiddle while Rome is burning; but it is quite right to study the theory of hydraulics while Rome is burning.
G.K. Chesterton. ¹

The management of what started as a health crisis —but which is now becoming systemic— caused by the expansion of COVID-19 has focused all government attention and resources mainly on the following aspects: controlling the epidemic, regulating health systems to avoid their collapse and social behaviour strategies that create a less favourable environment for the spread of the virus.

Evoking the image that Chesterton recreated from the legend of Nero contemplating the fire in Rome, we have gone from a certain initial indolence regarding the path that the virus was going to take (‘it is only a flu’, ‘it is an outbreak concentrated in Asia like the previous viruses’, ’nothing needs to be done because group immunity will do the job’) to a state of emergency that tries to manage the immediate effects of the crisis on various scales, from local to global (social confinement, economic paralysis, exceptional political and fiscal measures), often without the expected success in the short term. This situation that we are experiencing indicates that things ‘are just not working’, that many implicit assumptions that we had about the gears of the contemporary world have confirmed some doubts that were raised from academia and other areas. When Rome burns, it is essential that we rethink aspects that will define the global future in the short, medium and long term, and that will interact with many other relevant factors that are now in danger of being overlooked, from the challenges derived from climate change, the resilience of our political and social systems or the effects of the intense technological development experienced in recent years.

All these factors have an undoubted geographical dimension, as wide, diverse and complex as those that make us speak of ‘geographies’. A short-term vision of the virus would make us mitigate its immediate effects without paying attention to the material conditions on which its circulation is based and reproduced, as well as (in a radically unequal way) the impacts of this pandemic and others that may come.

A short-sighted view would, for example, make us forget that in this pandemic there is an obvious urban and natural connection, where development models and growing urbanisation, apparently isolated from ’nature’, expose their vulnerability to zoonotic phenomena. The pandemic thus exposes the urban geographies of the disease, socio-environmental geographies which, as Harvey famously coined, reaffirm that “there is nothing unnatural about New York City”² or any other city. Understanding these processes is fundamental for the long-term management of this and other crises to come. The virus is not, therefore, an exogenous shock as a meteor would be, but it has particular geographies linked to key aspects of modern urbanism since the times of Haussman or Cerdà. The current urban model is closely related to the way in which the virus has spread, a model based on mobility, on the circulation of goods, services and people, in short. The development of capitalism under the paradigm of large urban concentrations as a solution or rather a key factor in capitalist development based on the intensive use of technology has led —perhaps not as paradoxically as we might think— to greater levels of mobility.

On the other hand, it has become dramatically clear how unequal development and urban segregation reflect the unequal impact of social, economic and public health crises. The combination of internationalised economies and large urban centres has played a fundamental role in accelerating the spread of the virus, which calls into question some over-optimistic views of the current development model, at least in terms of the dominant discourses on globalisation in the economic and political sphere. Even so, a hasty diagnosis could bring us back to debates such as the contrast between the dangers of urban density and the benefits of suburbanisation, which are still two sides of the same coin. What’s more, if anything exposes the virus, it’s precisely on the edges of cities, between urbanisation and suburbanisation, where outbreaks start and spread (in factory farms, airports, etc.) ³ And in relative terms, the negative impacts of the pandemic are greater in rural or low-density areas, Empty Spain, for example, where investment in health infrastructure is precarious ⁴

It is in the face of these processes of pandemic crisis when the temptation to adopt an excessively simplifying pragmatism is greater. However, as tempting as it may be, we must avoid this approach that self-deludes believing that the creation of ad-hoc solutions for any of its multiple effects can fix everything as a whole. But ff there is a fertile field for solutionism it is in the world of technology. As we have seen, in recent weeks a myriad of mobile applications designed to control the pandemic have appeared all over the world. These are designed and implemented very quickly. ⁵ A great example of the practical. The urgency to control the pandemic means that they are supported by regional, national and international administrations and institutions as well as accepted by society. Applications that have been explained in the media as examples of the power of digital technologies and the benefits of the Smart City. It may not be evident, but all of them imply profound changes in the control and monitoring of our lives —supported by legislative changes or suspensions— that affect our privacy under the discourse of security. Unfortunately, we don’t have to especulate that much: China has long been implementing facial recognition and good citizenship points card, and now a new step has been taken by developing infection cards classifying people according to their risk of infection, thread rating, etc. Urgency presents us with a false dichotomy between security and privacy as Nicky Case shows us. ⁶ Urgency, which without reflection can chronify dystopian urban models, since as Naomi Klein argues during moments of catastrophe, windows of opportunity open up for the masters of disaster to take advantage of apocalyptic reality and carry out their political agenda quickly and by avoiding public debate. ⁷

Instead, we must analyse the paradoxes that the current situation shows us, and take it as a global indication —in the sense that it has reached the heart of the developed societies of the global north— to confront the contradictions that we face, and to think towards which models of social, political and economic organisation we want, or rather should orient ourselves. We must revisit the tensions reflected in the current situation with regard to issues widely studied in our disciplines such as the relationship between high density and contagion, urban sprawl and lack of public resources. Or to also face the limitations and unexpected effects of paradigms such as the emergence of the ‘Smart Cities’ and the effects on the increase of social control, of surveillance, of the reduction of freedoms, of the growing role of private corporations on the public. We must address questions about public space, housing, segregation, the desirability of a model based on global cities or on sustainable urban models, perhaps of medium size, with better levels of habitability and self-sufficiency, but also with better infrastructure and health services.

If we do not critically revisit these and other issues, with their limits and paradoxes, if we do not consider in a normative way what kind of societies we want to develop, we may extinguish the fire that we are dealing with right now, but a false sense of ‘return to normality’ will make us more vulnerable to the challenges that will come in the immediate future. Given the urgency of what we are already facing, geography and the rest of the social sciences have more than ever the task of thinking with a perspective beyond immediacy or “practicality” and of elaborating a common agenda on which we can consider “what’s wrong with the world”. An agenda that is intrinsically geographical.

Chesterton, What’s wrong with the world (Auckland, NZ: The Floating Press, 2011 [1910], 16). ↩︎
D. Harvey, “The nature of environment: dialectics of social and environmental change”, en R. Miliband and L. Panitch, eds., Real Problems, False Solutions. A special issue of the Socialist Register (Londres: The Merlin Press, 1993, 31). ↩︎
R. Keil, C. Conolly y S. Harris Ali, Outbreaks like coronavirus start in and spread from the edges of cities, ↩︎
Ejerique, R., & Sánchez, R. ¿Por qué Canarias resiste al coronavirus y Soria no? eldiario.es. (Madrid: 2020) Recuperado 22 de abril de 2020, de ↩︎
It is not by chance that one of the methodologies currently used is called “agile”, which consists of making small and frequent developments that cover limited and specific aspects in an iterative and incremental way. As a result, the application development not just becomes faster but also resilient, allowing modifications and redefinitions. ↩︎
↩︎
N. Klein, No is not enough. Defeating the New Shock Politics(Londres: Allen Lane, 2017). ↩︎

Urban Commons and the Production of Alternatives to the Neoliberal City

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Warning

Due to copyright, it is prohibited to reproduce books’ content. This is just an excerpt of this chapter’s introduction. In order to get the book, please visit .

Introduction

At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, most of the Western world started to suffer from a structural crisis. What seemed to be merely a financial problem soon started to impregnate all facets and actors of a society that heavily relies on consumption and loans to maintain its consumerist thirst. As a result, a context of growing inequalities accentuated by austerity policies – supposedly¹ aimed to mitigate the negative consequences of the crisis – started to shape. Within this scenario, cities have played a key role in favouring so.² First, because current crises are rooted into the processes of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2004) resulting from recent urban governance policies more concerned by profit than social issues (Burkhalter and Castells 2009; Harvey 2012; Marcuse 2012; Marcuse et al. 2008; Sevilla-Buitrago 2015; Stiglitz 2011). As a result, cities (and everything that lies within – citizens and buildings included) have turned into trading goods aiming to attract foreign capital like investments or tourism.³ Second, because contemporary cities have slowly and imperceptibly turned to be socio-technological constructs aimed to reproduce a capitalist system that increases inequalities by means of domination and control, as argued by authors like Stavros Stavrides (2015) based on Foucault’s studies on biopolitics and disciplinary control (Foucault 1995; Foucault 2007; Foucault 2010).

If it was ever true, the ideal image of the city as the domestication of a world full of perils that provides shelter and protection with the adequate conditions for human reproduction and development is no longer valid. The following pages are inserted in the epistemological tradition that conceives the city as a synonym of conflict, mostly originated by class struggle (Aibar and Bijker 1997; Brenner, Marcuse, and Mayer 2012; Casellas 2006; Castells 1977; Harvey 1989; Lenin 1999; Sorando Ortín 2014). This conception implies that cities are much more than a sort of ideal scenario where life and class confrontation simply happen. On the contrary: cities are the physical dimension of a society (Castells 1983, 311) in which space is socially produced (Lipietz 1977; Marcuse 2011; Sevilla-Buitrago 2012, 39) in order to satisfy its interests and goals (Castells 1983, 312). Nevertheless, if cities have played such a key role in favouring crisis and inequalities, it can be argued that they can also be key in fighting their negative consequences. In other words: the solution should be found in the same place where the root of the problem lies. For this reason, the selection of cities as a context for studying social transformation is, hence, more than justified. Proof can be found in the notorious concentrations around the world that flourished following Arab Spring example, which shared similar patterns: the congregation of thousands of people around the main squares protesting against their governments and their unfair austerity measures. A notorious example was the Indignados Movement of 2011, a distributed movement that spread across the major cities of Spain⁴ against the political and financial model that originated the crisis, the social inequities, the privatisation of public services like health or education, and the political corruption that derived from it. This in turn sparked a series of debates, assemblies and discussions aimed to propose and demand new fairer alternatives.

15M Demonstration in Puerta del Sol, Madrid (May 15th, 2011). Credits: La información.

Despite the evidence that new city models for a new society are needed if we are to prevent repeating the same mistakes one and again, there is no consensus on how they should be in order to fight the scenario of austerity and economic recession previously described. Urban commons are one of the possible answers and models for producing such positive social transformation. In the following pages, we will develop what urban commons are from a theoretical standpoint.

Activists like Naomi Klein argue that crises have often been used by governments worldwide to justify highly unpopular measures that would have been fiercely opposed in other contexts (Klein 2008). ↩︎
For an interpretation of the imbrications between crises, cities and austerity policies, see Peck (2012) for the American context and Sevilla-Buitrago (2015a) for the European context. ↩︎
Check (González (2007), Griffiths (1998) for an explanation on this procedure, called urban marketing. ↩︎
Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Zaragoza and Sevilla were just a few of the main capitals that held demonstrations on 15 May 2011 and in the following weeks which congregated thousands of people (The Barcelona encampment was the longest, which lasted 45 days in a row). More information about the cities that held 15M demonstrations, as well as their numbers and other references, can be found in the wiki created by the Indignados Movement: . ↩︎

Zaragoza Accesible: un caso práctico de integración de SIG con fines sociales en el currículo educativo del grado de arquitectura

Sun, 01 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Urban Commons: Lessons from Barcelona at the Beginning of 21st Century. A characterization proposal from the praxis

Tue, 30 Jan 2018 17:13:02 +0100

Full text can be found in the following repositories: , , . An on-line and live version can be found in

Accessibility and collaborative information technologies. Cartographies for an inclusive city

Mon, 01 Jan 2018 17:00:00 +0100

El uso de una plataforma cartográfica libre, OpenStreetMap, para el mapeado colaborativo de la ciclabilidad de Zaragoza

Sun, 01 Jan 2017 17:00:00 +0100

Artículo de la comunicación llevada al XIV Congreso Ibérico “La Bicicleta y la Ciudad” celebrado en Zaragoza en abril de 2017 (La Ciudad de las Bicis: , cuya presentación final puede verse en el siguiente enlace: y aceptado para ser incluido en el libro que se va a editar con las aportaciones más interesantes del congreso.

Resumen

El desarrollo tecnológico y la proliferación de iniciativas colaborativas en Internet ha propiciado la aparición de OpenStreetMap, un proyecto de cartografía temática libre orientado a distribuir datos geográficos de forma abierta. Frente a otros servicios de cartografía en línea, OpenStreetMap se ha convertido en la plataforma de mapas usada en numerosas webs, se está empleando en áreas de asistencia humanitaria, ayuda al desarrollo, en la creación de cartografía alternativa - e. g. para personas con algún tipo de discapacidad - y en ella se está volcando información territorial procedente de servicios locales, regionales o europeos.

Las nuevas tecnologías también se han trasladado a los desplazamientos en bici, haciéndose imprescindible una información geográfica de calidad relativa a este medio de transporte. Cada vez son más habituales las aplicaciones móviles para calcular rutas o realizar el seguimiento de la actividad física. En este sentido es importante el origen, la fiabilidad y actualidad de la información que se maneja.

Esta comunicación pone de relieve el valor de OpenStreetMap como herramienta para la divulgación y difusión de vías ciclables e infraestructuras afines al desplazamiento en bicicleta tomando como ejemplo la ciudad de Zaragoza.

Metodológicamente se procedió en tres fases:

Durante la primera fase se recopiló información relevante para los ciclistas como el trazado de vías aptas para ir en bicicleta, los aparcabicis, las fuentes o las estaciones del servicio municipal de alquiler de bicicletas.

Para la segunda fase se contó con un sencillo editor implementado dentro de la propia web de OpenStreetMap y en ella se procedió; primero, a incluir y/o contrastar la información de ediciones anteriores y, después, a asignar etiquetas informativas: tipo de elemento, características, superficie, etc.

La última fase se realiza con la ayuda del la herramienta Umap que permite la creación de mapas personalizados realzando los elementos que se deseen desde OpenStreetMap y que permite visualizar el resultado del trabajo de la comunidad.

En Zaragoza no existe una plataforma de cartografía colaborativa y digital de la ciclabilidad abierta para todo el mundo y la edición en OSM representa una solución adecuada para este fin.

MRSZ 2018: Mapa de Riesgo Social de Zaragoza. De técnica de gestión de poblaciones a praxis de consolidación de los comunes

Fri, 04 Nov 2016 22:08:41 +0100

La arquitectura de la Seducción: Un análisis de las arquitecturas digitales en la sociedad de consumo

Wed, 09 Sep 2015 15:53:19 +0000

¿De qué hablamos cuando hablamos de urbanismo participativo? Un análisis de distintas formas de entender la participación ciudadana entorno al urbanismo

Sat, 30 Jun 2012 17:13:02 +0100

Citizen Participative Initiatives Within Urbanism. Participative Urbanism, A New Way Of Understanding City And Citizenship In The Configuration Of Public Spaces.

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 15:32:19 +0000

Transparency project: The observer, observed... or the gestation of the documentation, dissemination and transparency programme

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The following text is an excerpt from the material we produced for the book accompanying the —a collaborative effort by Ethel Baraona, Pablo García Bachiller, and myself as members of the documentation, dissemination, and web transparency team. The aim of these texts was to explain our work while offering a different, more intimate perspective on another viewpoint: the one presented by the BEAU through its selection of projects.

Since its inception, BEAU has been a snapshot of Spanish architecture and urbanism generated in the course of the previous two years, viewed through the lens of an independent jury with alternating members who bring with them their particular vision of the moment. What is perhaps not so obvious is that it is also a reflection of its own time. The observer is also the observed object.

In recent years we have seen how the Internet and ICT has entered the day to day existence of most people in developed countries. Even websites that have been part of our daily lives for a relatively long time have had to evolve to survive: it is no longer enough to have something to say; is not enough to be a mere shop window. There is such an excess of information on the Internet that we have to provide something more if we do not want thecdocumentary noise to drown out our message. No wonder, then, that Web 2.0, a web that allows user participation, has evolved, giving rise to many social networks (so fashionable lately), blogs, etc., and a change in the way we communicate with our friends, acquaintances and professional contacts. New interaction channels like Twitter have changed not only where we tell something but also what, how and when we tell it. Recent social events in the world have shown that although this is just the beginning, social networking can and will continue to play an exponentially significant role in many fields that they were not even designed for, proving their astonishing capability for adaptation and evolution.

Some say that the current crisis is a crisis of values, more than an economic crisis. We have lost faith in banks, businesses … which is why we are beginning to call them to account. It is increasingly common for us to ask where a product comes from, by whom and how it was manufactured, what is done with its waste, before we decide to buy… and we want to know who is funded by our money when we open a bank account or buy certain products or services. No wonder, then, that the companies which inform us about this information in a clear, transparent way are beginning to stand out from those that do not, and are starting to be more successful.

All of this may have helped to promote current concepts like coworking, crowdfunding, crowdthinking, citizen participation … i.e., different models of participation and collaboration based on perfectly familiar concepts like teamwork, knowledge society and collective intelligence to achieve optimal results that overcome individual limitations.

In this context, it is not surprising that this year’s BEAU has drawn on all these parameters and conditions. Actually, it could not have been otherwise. The documentation, dissemination and transparency team, formed by Ethel Baraona, Pablo García Bachiller and myself, has collated some of these parameters and included them in this Biennial, establishing for the purpose common goals and a teamwork and consensus-based methodology that gives us a degree of freedom of movement while at the same time allowing each of us to develop themes which, due to affinity or knowledge, we can best handle to achieve the best possible results. All of this is part of an integrated, unitary project focused on defining the known ingredients in a new, unitary and coherent way, and generating an optimal response to the Directors’ commission. At the end of the day, that is essentially our job as architects. The following pages explain the three major pillars of the project. To make it easier to understand our work, each text focuses on a specific issue and is signed by the person who was responsible for its development, although the real process was slightly different, as these three types of action never remain in their pure state and are continuously intermingled, along with the work done by each one of us.

Carlos Cámara Menoyo Documentation, dissemination and transparency team coordinator