Project purpose and Description
From 2020 the Municipality of Barcelona has set the project “Protegim les escoles” as a high-priority strategy to provide Barcelona’s schools with safe, comfortable, and healthy public spaces, that act as meeting places for children, their families, and neighbours. By 2030, it is expected that all the 585 schools in Barcelona will offer safe and comfortable surroundings. In line with this, FURNISH emerges as an opportunity to help in this pacification but going beyond. The project objective is to provide interesting and instigating interactive prototypes to stimulate permanence in these areas. These places have the potential to work as transitional spaces, connecting the urban and school environments in a creative way, promoting longer stays before and after school hours, and enabling their use as extensions of classrooms and playgrounds, engaging children to play, be active and learn.
Objectives and Outcomes
This project aims to improve cohesion in the public realm through new urban design elements resulting from a co-creation process with schooling environments involving several stakeholders. The urban elements are prototypes designed and constructed within the project, implemented in the public space and tested to ensure their replicability. Two mobile urban elements were placed in two sites in front of schools. In both situations, their main goal is to increase safety and to promote new urban spaces, creating possibilities for school activities to expand to the outdoor public environment. The two prototypes were tested by citizens (especially children). The outcomes were the online documentation to reproduce the prototypes and the testing results gathered during their implementation.
