Buits Verds / Green voids
by Anna Fontanet Castillo
portfolio special mention call 'Urbanautica Institute Awards 2023', 2023
Category: Nature, Environment and Perspectives
Buits Verds /Green Voids
Green voids are those spaces that the urbanisation of the city has left bare, where nature is once again sprouting thanks to the involvement of neighbours, turning them into urban allotments and gardens. Small lungs that open up between party walls, forgotten plots of land, to invite us to make peace with nature, as the natural beings that we are.
Green voids documents these spaces since 2020 through a photographic project, and is born from the need to highlight the idea that cities have to make a change towards a more habitable, green model, closer to the people we live in. This project aims to highlight people's interest in a greener and more habitable city model, and how, in short, the residents have taken the initiative to recover these plots in order to humanise them, to create social links between people and the environment.
Green voids compiles photographs of 15 plots of land in different neighbourhoods of the city that are currently used as allotments and urban gardens as a result of neighbourhood work.
Here we try to transmit the essence, the idiosyncrasy of the place and its people, the activities that coexist and the common points between all these small urban lungs.
The ownership of the land occupied and the type of management is in all of them different and singular (from spaces ceded by the City Council to spaces squatted by the neighbours). This gives us an insight into the variety of situations, the background and history of each of these unique spaces, and the need for people to create places of coexistence that encourage a relationship with nature.
Green Voids can also be a visual and practical guide for all those neighbours interested in generating a similar community initiative, whether public or private.
I thank all these people who have opened the door to these realities so that we can bear witness to them and make clear the need to make a radical change in the design of urban planning in cities.
Review by URBANAUTICA
There is a certain relief in seeing these images of green spaces in Barcelona, like so many small, enchanting oases, where organic life—the life of plants, the green life—returns to perfume the air, to sprout, to color, to breathe among the concrete blocks of the Spanish city. And it is certainly interesting to photograph them, and we must give credit to Anna Fontanet Castillo for that, because when we look at these photos, we intuitively grasp a perspective that can take shape within us, creating new images onto which we stitch feelings, and perhaps even desires. A Catalan response to the climate crisis, which we mistakenly call "change." Change, in fact, is what the citizens of every city can demand from politicians and leaders, or what they can attempt to build through small, numerous, widespread actions. These photos, then, have a design-driven vocation because they project us forward, showing us a possible present, not an abstract future. We must ensure that these photographs become our new way of seeing the city—not only to imagine it as welcoming, biodiverse, vibrant, sensual, and healthy, but to expect it to be so. Perhaps in these modest gardens, we can cultivate connection; perhaps here, the avant-garde finds space—a space no longer available elsewhere, where everyone is drifting in their own self-direction, without roots.
also from Urbanautica Institute Awards 2023