Our cities, neighborhoods and the areas where we live are too often hostile and lonely places with despair, poverty, and bitterness, and where life is complicated. They are places that wear us out, make us live faster than how we want to live, where children don’t play, the elderly feel abandoned, and such places make us disinterested, impolite and unsupportive.
I wonder if we have learned something after living in cities over thousands of years, and if we have lost the capacity to outrage ourselves by these things because we form part of the landscape that produces them.
I also wonder if we have lost the ability to dream, to see things clearly, and if we take enough into consideration on how we want to live. I don’t think so. I think we often get carried away, and we don’t make the most of what we can do.
It is said that cities in the future will be greener, healthier and fairer. It is also said that the cities must make a change towards sustainability. I’m sure that there are many technicians and politicians working to achieve this, but I think that too many things have been made under this term that we are all ashamed of, by building dehumanised, artificial and superficial districts and residential areas.
This is why I believe cities don’t just need to make a change towards sustainability; they also need to make a change towards reality. I think that there are many of us who don’t like many things about our cities and neighborhoods, and I wonder what we can do, and how we can contribute to change things.
That is why I consider the project of, La Pinada, mainly as an invitation; an invitation with which we answer that faint voice that interrogates us from time to time whispering: do you want to change your life?
Yes, I do; and I think that La Pinada may be the right place. That’s why I would like La Pinada to be the Good Life district. Like that, in capital letters.
A district where you can be happy over the long-term. A district to respect and to be respected. A district that is safe for my children, and welcoming for the elderly. A fair and cultured district. A district in which you can love and be loved, where you can be listened to, and be understood, and where there is more care and respect for others and the surroundings. A district where you can peacefully spend a decent life.
I know that life is a continual choice: to love or hate, walk or run, talk or keep quiet, look or observe, eat or fast, give or receive, wait or leave, fight or get along… live or survive. There always comes a time when you have to choose between contemplation or action. To choose action isn’t the easy way because it almost always means entering into an unknown reality, but here we have the possibility to take part in building that reality.
I appreciate the opportunity given to me to face this challenge, and to feel the excitement of carrying out this ambition facing the subdued tranquillity of the utopia. The men and women who have hope will build the cities of the future.
If you are reading this, it’s because you are already building La Pinada, and if you’re taking part in this dream, I encourage you to be ambitious because it’s not worth having wings if they are only used to fly around like hens, just hopping around to and fro.
Sometimes I wonder if something can be made based on a dream. This dream of La Pinada shows me that it’s possible.
I imagine La Pinada as the Good Life district. This is my dream.
David Forés, collaborator of La Pinada District.