From Third to Fourth Place
Rethinking Social Infrastructure in the Hybrid Society
J. Wouda (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
J.P.M. van Lierop – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
R. Cavallo – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
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Abstract
Madrid’s Programas de Actuación Urbanística (PAU) were designed for the car-centric, 20th-century commuter workforce that no longer exists. We now live in a hybrid society where the daily live of our home and work ar blending. The result is a repopulation of these neighborhoods, while the urban grid is still dominated by massive, isolated blocks and overscaled infrastructure, focused on vehicles and pedestrian transience. This research argues that these overdimensioned layouts create a socio-spatial mismatch, generating non-places where a localized population is physically contained by an inward-looking architecture built for temporary daytime absence. While prioritizing car efficiency and absolute privacy, this closed morphology eliminates the intermediate human-scale street life required for community building.Utilizing a Research-by-Design methodology focused on Sanchinarro, the study deconstructs these defensive, car-dominated boundaries through Actor-Network Theory. Now our lives are hyperconnected, this research argues we should be looking differently at Third Places. It proposes the vital social infrastructure as a Fourth Place: a system of porous thresholds inhabiting the sidewalk edge. Proposing a network of architectural micro-interventions, this project reclaims the oversized urban voids, shifting the PAU from isolated architecture towards a series of open, collaborative urban commons.