Saturated with future promises, the Master Plan has become an unquestionable dogma of Twentieth-century Urbanism, offering answers to urban problems through top-down planning. However, the sense of urban development revealed the inadequacy of these processes, and new directions appear in the form of bottom-up methodologies. Participatory, collaborative, empowerment begin to appear in the lexicon of urban policies.
Masterplan Maia is an experience to think of a city as diverse as the life projects of its inhabitants, fostering the change, through which citizens get involved, watch, inhabit and thus shape their city. It is a play tool of urban planning where each player contributes to the collective destiny of their town, while developing social and territorial cohesion.
From Lefebvre’s Right to the City, Cedric Price’s Non-Plan and Saskia Sassen’s Polycentric City, we launched a dress rehearsal to draw the collective dimension of the city of Maia. With a twenty-second century planning tool, with the objective of inviting Maiatos (the inhabitants of Maia) to participate by activating citizenship.
Masterplan Maia was produced for the exhibition MAM’19- Fast Forward, integrated in the second edition of Maia Architecture Month, with a preview of the future 100 years from now.