Basket Color / Castillo Peraza

We created a design for the Basketcolor series that aims to the responsible return to public space, with a colorful intervention on one of the two courts inside the Castillo Peraza park in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico.

In the post-covid city, public spaces acquire a strategic role for sociocultural and economic recovery. Similarly, citizen activation becomes an essential tool for the consolidation of a new culture of co-responsibility. “The Responsible Return” is a tactical urban planning and placemaking strategy that seeks to influence the reactivation of the city through resilient, responsible and adaptable public spaces to gradual post-pandemic recovery processes.

The objective of this urban tactic was the creation of healthy occupation nodes through physical distance grids and stencils of culture/citizen care, taking advantage of the spaciousness and open space that the courts and the park provide. With these new configurations, flexible spaces are generated that represent a responsible recreation alternative within the new normality. Little by little we will take up public spaces and we will have to do it alongside a new urban-citizen culture.

For our design, we explored the physical interactions between all non-natural elements inside the park and created a pattern with a series of geometric forms of different shapes and sizes. It is intended for individuals to occupy any number of polygons according to the number of members that make up their confinement group. The small ones can be occupied by a single person, medium ones by couples, large by small families, and more polygons can be added for larger confinement groups. This method, based on proxemics is an abstract way of feeling and occupying a territory based on the amount of space that people feel is necessary to establish between themselves and others. Keeping a healthy distance from others during a pandemic is an act that requires everyone's participation and physical awareness.

We appreciate Nómada Laboratorio Urbano for inviting us to collaborate in this project, and to the Comité Vecinal de la Colonia Castillo Peraza who also helped select the bright colors.