The exhibition Wellbeing in the City, at the Casa de la Arquitectura and curated by Izaskun Chinchilla, is conceived as a critical device that reconsiders the foundations upon which urban wellbeing has historically been constructed. Rather than defining wellbeing as a set of indicators (life expectancy, obesity or diabetes rates) or the provision of services, the exhibition approaches it as a relational condition, dependent on the quality of interactions between bodies, communities, and environments. At the core of its conceptual framework lies the Quechua term Sumak Kawsay — Buen Vivir or Good Living — which integrates material, biological, social, and ecological dimensions within a single plane.
The exhibition establishes a dialogue with other cultural genealogies — such as ikigai, dharma, or Gaki Pelzom — in order to challenge Western models centered on growth and quantification. The existence of these ancestral wisdoms led us to look toward Asia and Latin America, in addition to Europe, when selecting the exhibition's case studies. From this perspective, wellbeing is understood as the sustainability of the relationships that make everyday life possible. This shift allows the city to be reinterpreted not as a functional system, but as an infrastructure that supports vital cycles.
In contrast to the obsession of many exhibitions and publications on urbanity with anticipating the "city of the future," this exhibition proposes paying attention to the repetition of vital decisions — breathing, moving, eating, resting — that shape urban experience. The city is presented as the cumulative result of these practices, shifting the focus away from technical decisions toward a deeper understanding of the spatial conditions that enable these actions to be carried out with greater satisfaction.
