Save the City: Collective Mapping for an Urban Diagnosis of Barranquilla

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The CitYzens Collective and the Arkco-CUC research group at the Universidad de la Costa (CUC) conducted a collective mapping exercise in the Plaza de la Paz, located in the historic center of Barranquilla, Colombia. The event took place on June 1, 2018, at this emblematic public square.

The initiative not only involved collaboration with urban design collectives like Colectivo 016, but also drew the participation of dozens of citizens and passersby. They made symbolic contributions to "Save Barranquilla" by mapping their experiences, identities, appropriations, uses, and collective imaginaries of the city.

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"Salvad la ciudad" (Save the City) was a performance-style activity designed to identify Barranquilla's urban challenges through a proactive and positive lens—focusing not on criticism for its own sake, but on potential solutions to these issues.

Each participant not only identified and named an issue on the collective map, but also had the opportunity to intervene through a symbolic act of healing with a concrete solution. Grounded in the concepts of urban acupuncture, this performance-based activity aimed to collectively build a large-scale map. This map served as both a diagnostic tool and a repository of countless proposals for Barranquilla, evaluating its current state while looking ahead to the urban processes shaping the city's present and defining its near and long-term future.

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The intervention, grounded in the principles of urban acupuncture, aims to collectively construct a Great Map that serves as a diagnostic showcase of proposals for Barranquilla. This exercise not only reviews the city's current state but also projects its future in relation to the urban processes that define its present and will undoubtedly shape its near and long-term trajectory.

This collective mapping seeks to identify and connect the sensitive, potentially transformable points of Barranquilla's "urban skin," offering insight into the city's current state and development path. These sensitive points become opportunities to design transformations across infrastructure, behaviors, architecture, and private, collective, and public spaces. Ultimately, these interventions aim to catalyze a progressive transformation of the environment, strengthen a sense of place and community networks, empower residents in urban design and management, and improve the overall quality of urban life.

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This collective mapping is part of the project "Urban Acupuncture: Participatory Production of Public Space in Colombian Caribbean Cities," coordinated by Dr. Samuel Padilla-Llano in collaboration with Juan Tapias Martínez, both architects and researchers at the Universidad de la Costa. This participatory action research project critiques the city not just through theory (lexis) but through practice (praxis), utilizing ephemeral public space and public art installations to question the conditions in which urban environments are produced and designed.

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