Tea - upcycling the railway station of Oaxaca: evaluation of a co-creation workshop

Abstract

Urban protests in the twentieth century marked a social and political change that altered the way we transform our cities, or at least should have, so that we design urban spaces for people, but mostly with people. Today, it seems clear that participation and bottom-up processes are central to the urban project. In this context, our current research focuses on creating a methodology with new strategies (information and communication technologies, fun tools such as urban sketching and tactical planning). In this research, we analyse recent case studies, in which the final recipients of urban planning, its users, co-design the project. The main purpose of this paper is to evaluate the method we use in TEA / OSW (Taller Espacios Abiertos / Open spaces Workshop). This method follows the idea of urban action or urban DIY and has been studied at two levels: first, as a mechanism of participation and second as a new way of teaching architecture, with urban actions at a scale of 1:1. This case study examines the transformation of the old railway station into a cultural centre, which took place through co-creation workshops, assemblies, evolutive models and, above all, self-build workshops. To obtain the results, we used quantitative and qualitative evaluation. The results show that the workshop was successful not only as a participative tool, but also as a social process and a way of learning in design and architecture.