Architects read the city like a book and look inside its inhabitants. It reveals secrets that can not be heard. What are we like?, What do we aspire to?, What sense of usefulness and beauty do we have?, Are we clean and careful, or simply we pretend to be?, Do we love the place we live in?, What future awaits us? An architect friend of mine confessed to me that today our cities cry out for all to hear their pain.
The Central Park or old square where the town was founded; the old cinema or old colonial prison or perhaps that architectural oddity of the nineteenth century; the old abandoned factory ... The truth is that many cities suffer deterioration and neglect. The center of some villas has gradually become a marginal and rural periphery, full of indiscipline and contraventions ...
The abandonment begins on the stone and ends in the soul. First; the leak, the mosaic that sank, the hole on the wall...then, buildings’ destruction. Not only social property is damaged, but many family houses. They are Cinderellas waiting for a fairy godmother, who usually lives or works within them or is responsible for each.
Thus, the history book loses page after page. The city takes an air of neglect and spiritual poverty, more destructive than the economic poverty. Indolence is worse than poverty. Many of these spaces are filled with debris and trash. We lose: economy, culture, history, city and society. And all of us must repair it, especially the official institutions. As Ruben Martinez Villena said: "serve in silence and from the bottom’’.