Habitabis Festival
Format Conference Festival Workshops
City Lisbon, Portugal
Colectivo Warehouse has been working regularly in public housing neighbourhoods and informal, self-built neighbourhoods with serious social housing shortages. Direct contact with these populations forced them to reflect on the programmes and tools currently available to overcome social and urban barriers and enact the rights of citizens. In this context, the challenge is how to co-design a rehousing process that does not repeat the flaws of other plans and eras, and does not replace an old error with a new error. Existing initiatives and projects are often incapable of creating visibility and accessibility of their results. Think of conferences and exhibitions by architects for architects, closed-door discussions of housing programmes, or even the creation of good political tools that never come to the knowledge of the people who need them. In response to this tendency, the aim is to inform and empower communities and not only create access to information but, above all, the capacity for citizens to contribute to the construction of their own future. The Habitabis Festival was born out of this idea of sharing experiences, projects, visions and tools in the same place among decision-making institutions, technicians and associations working in the field and the communities that live in these contexts.
Mobilization Find your stakeholders
Choose a region or neighbourhood with significant problems regarding social housing, slums, informal housing, or otherwise. After you define your area of interest, start to identify who the stakeholders in the following three groups are: institutions (governmental and local), technicians (investigators, architects, anthropologists and sociologists) and communities (inhabitants of social housing, slums and/or informal housing). Approach them, gain their trust and start mapping the topics and issues that they are concerned with.
Things you need A venue and a team
Find a venue to host the festival. Make sure that it provides a neutral space for all the participants involved. Set up a team of diverse, experienced and motivated people. This is the key to success.
Funding Financial Support
You will need sufficient financial support to cover logistical costs, pay your team, finance communication and documentation, and possibly rent the space for the festival. Research the different possibilities for sponsorship and funding.
Communication Promote in the right places
Communicate within the three target groups. Promote on public media, it will bring awareness and participants to your festival, as well as reach potential sponsors and partners.
Colectivo Warehouse is an architecture and art collective that was founded in 2013. Within the current socio-economic and political global context, the collective develops participatory architecture projects, emphasizing the role of the architect as mediator. They generate initiatives to activate urban space and promote social interventions among the most neglected communities. In the cultural field, the differentiating factor of Colectivo Warehouse is the ability to design and build their own projects. Their hands-on approach is transversal to their practice, and a great part of its identity. Experiment contaminates practice in an effort to avoid ordinary solutions. The group develops many collaborative projects springing from the belief that through co-creation and multi-disciplinarity, better results will be achieved.