In the last period the house had become a place where a small games room was installed and weapons were traded; therefor it was identified as an important place to work with in the processes of pacification and transformation of the area.
The first step is the transformation of the house for its later rehabilitation and recovery as a multipurpose community space. The whole intervention grounds on the basic need to construct a sports court for the area.
Therefor, a comprehensive project of rehabilitation of the self-built house is implemented, solving the pathologies of construction, carrying out works of sanitation and structural reinforcement.
To respond to the main demand, the second floor of the house is transformed into a basketball court and public outdoor space. The court, with 90m2, provides a grandstand and a recreational space where many leisure activities can be developed: cards, chess, dominoes, ping pong, etc. The court allows the development of events, a stage area or cinema projections.
The first level, or in other words the house itself, will address a broader program, which responds to other needs that were raised through the participatory process. The house, liberated from existing partitions of the floor, was segregated through light panels, establishing a configuration to accommodate the uses defined a priori: a recording studio, an info centre, dance and ceramic workshops, bathrooms, and a kitchen. This division allows its reversibility and transformation responding to new needs, as it is light and leaning on the structural reinforcement of the rehabilitation.
The enclosure of both the court and of the housing area allows to qualify and give meaning to the intervention. The enclosure consist of a wire mesh fence that perimetrically covers both the court and the lower facade, generating a surface that will allow the growth of vegetation and climbing plants, being the support of a future plant cover.
One of the key elements of the intervention was the solution of the connections between the different levels. Therefor, we started from the premise to supporting it in the pre-existent infrastructure and to realise parasitic interventions in it.
The entrance of the house is now an open space that functions as an area that enlarges the public space and coordinates the different connections. The court is connected with the community centre on the first floor by the pre-existent stairs and established a new reading of public space. The street and the staircase are redefined and merged to articulate the new space. The houe, an element of privative character, is transformed into a public space; The expression, the hybridisation, and the enhancement of given elements are the keys elements of this intervention.
This process, that started under the working premise of the methodology of participatory processes and collaborative learnings, had a time limit of only five weeks for its execution and activation. The first challenge was to bring the different agents involved in the process, the community of the area Y in the neighbourhood 5 de Julio, and the different participating collectives together.
For this purpose, four working groups was created that are connected transversally: communication, design, identity, and activities was considered as the basic strategy. The design group worked on the definition of the program, the strategy for the rehabilitation and the planning of the construction work. The identity group worked on defining a corporate image by finding a name and creating the symbolic elements associated with the project. The activity group proposed a program of events, which would take place during the course of the work, to activate the space and its future uses. The communication group developed a documentation of the work, which allowed to transmit the activity, both inside and outside the community, through a blog that collected the day to day of the work.
Together the analysis and diagnosis provided the basic needs and generated the consensus to work on common objectives. Decision-making was carried out through a process in which tactical and direct-action solutions were combined with strategic, project and program decisions in real time. An operating duality was established, enabling a flexible decision-making that adapted to the context, and responding to the circumstantial and logistic issues, and to all the changes or variations that were debugged in the process itself. This processual and dynamic methodology, under the maxim of "learn and do", made the execution of the project possible within the set deadline.
