Hábitat_Meeting place for urban pedagogy
by Ad Urbis
Vedado, La Habana, Cuba
Project details
Year
2024
Project year
2022
Land area
2612 m²
project website
Location
Team credits
collective
- Ad Urbis arquitectos -
Kiovet Sánchez Álvarez,
Samuel Puente Fernandez,
Celia García Acosta,
Karla Ramos Mulet,
Bruno García Sosa,
Daniela Oropesa Soroa,
Rocio Flores Días,
Amanda Alonso,
Alejandro López.
contributing partners
- Hábitat -
Oscar Medina Veliz
The ‘Meeting Place for Urban Pedagogy’, known as the Hábitat project, is located in Vedado, a central business district and urban neighbourhood in Havana, Cuba, recognized as one of the city’s most modern and upscale areas. Amid Cuba’s challenging conditions, where material and economic limitations are common, innovation and hyper-reuse have become vital community responses.
Once a deteriorating children’s play area, this space has transformed into a model of social responsibility through successful public-private partnerships. The project activates public space while enhancing safety and accessibility. Engaging local stakeholders, it follows a co-design process structured in three phases: Activation, Planning, and Implementation, demonstrating how architects can foster economic and social development within restrictive conditions.
The project focuses on revitalizing public space to enhance safety, accessibility, and vitality. By collaborating with local actors, including entrepreneurs and community leaders, the initiative effectively incorporates diverse perspectives and needs.
To revitalize the meeting space, the design team partnered with over 30 local enterprises focused on early childhood, recycling, theatre and music. Workshops are held in the weekends to strengthen public engagement, with some projects ongoing and others rotating to maintain community involvement. These workshops, intensified during summer and school breaks, target children and adolescents, promoting cultural exchange and community participation.
One of the first actions taken in the Hábitat project was to ensure user safety, particularly for children. This involved carefully dismantling a 1.80-m-high perimeter wall, recycling the concrete blocks for new water management constructions.
To foster economic activity in public spaces, two out-of-service containers were acquired for a temporary, flexible infrastructure. One container provides cold storage and food options, while the other houses hot food and restroom facilities. To reduce thermal gains in the tropical climate, custom metal covers with an adequate slope were designed to channel rainwater and support native climbing plants for insulation.
A wetland system was designed to treat wastewater generated by the facility, incorporating grease traps, a double-chamber septic tank made from dismantled wall blocks and a horizontal bio-garden for phytosanitary treatment of water. As a result, Hábitat became the first public space in the city to manage both solid and liquid waste and the first to implement a double green roof.
Ad Urbis operates in a unique context where independent architectural practice is not yet formalized, transcending traditional notions of a studio. It functions as a time management process that integrates public, academic, and private practices to address various architectural and urban challenges through collective learning and knowledge preservation. As an open innovation collective, Ad Urbis fosters dynamic collaboration and a curiosity to learn from popular knowledge, enhancing the flow of ideas essential for effective urban implementation.
Ad Urbis believes that tackling social, ecological and economic inequalities begins with its own team, prioritizing gender equality and empowering professional women by aligning activities with individual strengths. The multidisciplinary team includes activists, sociologists and psychologists who implement inclusive tools and co-design workshops that ensure equitable participation.
The team’s approach emphasizes a counter-adult-centric perspective, prioritizing user demands over professional viewpoints, and adopting low-cost solutions like tactical urbanism to enable alternative space uses. This garners strong support from the local community through citizen participation.
The design philosophy embraces synthesis, simplicity and aesthetic clarity, focusing on functionality and efficiency while minimizing complexity. The principle of ‘Ethics vs. Aesthetics’ underscores the importance of creating visually appealing designs that are environmentally respectful and resilient. Prioritizing high-intensity reuse and collaborating with local artisans enhance the project’s character and economic impact, promoting a holistic design approach that harmonizes with the community and environment.
The Hábitat project offers children a diverse array of educational and recreational experiences, fostering creativity, community participation and environmental awareness. It transforms the park into a collective meeting space, enriching the individual experiences of all who visit.
The prize money will be used to fund a new structure for the play area with living shade, to complete the purified water storage for the bio-garden and to install a rainwater collection system.
- Information for the project text was provided by Ad Urbis -
Image gallery
Advisory Committee Statement
‘Hábitat_Meeting Place for Urban Pedagogy’ receives the award for Local Scale as it is a grassroots architectural intervention that reimagines the urban environment in Cuba and creatively navigates the challenges of its local context. The project prioritizes the creation of urban space, and the plans support this mission with a very well-designed and realistic shading structure. It serves as an advocate for architecture, a catalyst for more innovative solutions and stands out as a model within its local context.