Paper short abstract:

Dealing with water, air, plants, birds, or insects as material infrastructures, and therefore subject to our design tools, allows us to discover in their continuous and creative movement, their ability to mobilize our most human obsessions, interests, affections, routines, and expectations.

Paper long abstract:

Dealing with water, air, plants, birds, or insects as material infrastructures, allows us to discover in their continuous and creative movement, their ability to mobilize our most human obsessions, affections, routines, and expectations. From this perspective, the ongoing project to 'design a place’ in the historical center of Caravaca de la Cruz, a town in the interior of the southeastern Spain, becomes a creative investigation about the possibilities design practices opens up and the methodologies required by these 'minor issues' when called upon to contribute to the making of public infrastructures.

During successive meetings with the 4.000 m2 of the intervention, we observed some enclosed landscape to which the small surrounding18th-century palaces directed their sewage and waste, where certain plants survived and cats had built their habitats. However, the divergent stories of the neighbors told us about past splendor, the need for parking, flooding issues, unpleasant odors or people who had cared for the plot for years. All these stories spoke of fragile materials that, nonetheless, underpinned their desires for a better future. And then, we began to dig and remove rubble. And then, we began to uncover small irrigation channels, sewage systems, forgotten maps, and layers of stone that had once materially supported their histories, in contrast to a town in post-industrial transition. And then, we discovered that the intervention could consist of materializing the meeting point between these controversies, helping us to understand design as the collective making of the matter of things that now matter to us.