WE MAKE CITIES
Marta Morera
Pablo Sendra
Lugadero is a transdisciplinary practice based in Seville and London, working across architecture, urban strategy, territorial identity, public participation and cultural production.
We work with cities, institutions, communities and cultural organisations to turn complex urban questions into accessible public formats. Our practice moves between research, spatial design, collective processes, visual culture, exhibitions, publications and temporary interventions. We are interested in how cities are not only planned or represented, but continuously made through everyday negotiation, care, conflict, memory and collective imagination.
Our work includes collaborative territorial identity processes, urban strategies, public-space interventions, cultural programmes and research-led projects in Spain and UK. Rather than treating communication, participation and spatial transformation as separate fields, we use them together to create shared languages through which communities can read, discuss and rehearse their futures.
We Make Cities is Lugadero’s civic think tank for urban imagination, research and experimentation. It brings together workshops, walks, collective mapping, storytelling, visual research, public assemblies and spatial prototypes to explore how local knowledge can become a practical resource for urban transformation.
The platform is developed together with Pablo Sendra, architect, urban researcher and Lugadero partner. His research on public space, collective action and infrastructures for disorder informs our interest in open urban systems: spatial and civic conditions that enable appropriation, productive disagreement and unplanned forms of collective life.
Lugadero combines critical urban research with the capacity to produce tangible public outcomes: exhibitions, interventions, visual systems, publications, films and civic conversations.
We Make Cities is a travelling civic think tank for collective urban futures.
Cities are constantly asked to transform: to become greener, fairer, healthier, more resilient or more attractive. Yet the futures proposed for them are too often shaped through policy documents, expert frameworks or promotional narratives, with little room for the people who inhabit those cities to question, reshape or rehearse what is being promised.
We Make Cities creates that space.
Each edition begins with a local urban pressure: housing, climate, tourism, mobility, care, ecological change, public space, emptiness or conflict. Through walks, conversations, mapping, collective drawing, storytelling, temporary interventions and public assemblies, residents, students, institutions and cultural actors work together to read the city, surface hidden knowledge and test alternative ways of living together.
The project does not seek consensus or produce masterplans. It creates civic rehearsals: temporary but tangible situations in which competing urban desires can become visible, debatable and actionable.
Each host city contributes its own question, methods and contradictions. These are gathered into a growing archive of collective urban futures: a shared body of maps, voices, visual languages, prototypes and public tools that can travel, adapt and be challenged elsewhere.
We Make Cities is developed by Lugadero, a transdisciplinary practice working across architecture, urban strategy, participation, territorial identity and cultural programming, together with urban researcher Pablo Sendra. It combines public imagination with critical research on collective action, open urban systems and infrastructures for disorder.
Cities are not only planned, managed or represented. They are made, every day, through the ways people gather, care, contest and imagine together.