La obsolescencia como oportunidad para una infraestructura social: Torre david

Abstract

he occupation of the Cofinanzas Financial centre, better known as the Tower of David, has been praised as well as criticised. Perhaps because beyond the illegality, the appropriation of a symbol of a time of inequality threatened certain fundamental pillars on the production of urban. On one hand, the economic and social policies, that with some exceptions only fuelled the inequality, poverty, and social exclusion. On the other, the academia, the profession, and the urban policies legacies from a modern urban planning, which had proven to foment the spatial segregation, cancel out diversity and destroy the public area. But this complex of 45 floors and 110.000 m2 was a vertical and empty hybrid entity, in the core of the city whose obsolescence as a physical, political and economic object, was a target of social pressure that was by that point uncontrollable. For its scale and diversity as well as its unfinished state, its inhabitants found an exceptional urban condition to rebuild a new identity as citizens. A set of 5 open systems that transformed that obsolescence into an alternative part of the city; a social infrastructure. As did other masters in the past, the process of the Tower of David reconsiders, now anonymously, under what conditions the open systems allow for the elaboration of strategies of urban and social regeneration, systems that dilute the complicated internal borders created in the contemporary city.