This project imagines a more open society, in which the micro-societies and the intimate circles that make it up tend to a greater awareness of each other. Urban design and architecture have a special ability to influence the way in which citizens relate to each other, since the projected physical limits can consolidate gradients of inequality and these discontinuities, in turn, can fossilise the borders.
In the face of the daily “dictatorship”, the most privileged citizens are forced not to constantly realise the notorious differences surrounding them. There seems to be no other way to deal with the daily routine. The body itself and the micro-societies that surround it form their own limit, in a form of voluntary isolation in which the border towards poverty, when moving with us, does not need to be crossed. We need to simplify our reality and therefore inhabit a biased section of the world.
Through these same processes, the least favoured layers of society are caught in a spiral of marginality. The less fortunate – including migrants – drag their border and the society receiving them becomes waterproof. In their flight, thousands of people have been trapped in an eternal transit with no destination and are forced to survive as they can.
Migrants who spend the day at traffic lights find themselves immersed in a limitation of pseudo-citizenship, objectified, almost like street furniture. Green traffic light: they wait standing. Red traffic light: they wander among the cars offering tissues, rosaries, air fresheners. This proposal seeks to improve their working conditions – recognising them as such, and equipping their long waiting hours.
A society of bubbles observes them from the car and finally internalises them as part of the urban landscape, dehumanising their condition and opting for a reality in which they do not have to confront this injustice every few meters.
A seat for migrants seeks to subvert this dynamic and generate routes of acceptance in the stronghold of well- being. Making these areas of inequality visible removes the isolation cyst that contains them and initiates a path towards awareness.