Workshop Atelier 3X in Paris

Is it possible to be a tourist in your own city?

Cities of tourists are not real cities. They are turning in scenes that they recognize the advertising images that the own city uses to claim the tourist masses, finishing for consuming fragments of the city. Packagings for the tourism of masses, the tourist destinations have homogenized considerably in the last years, up to the point the visitors arrive to a destination attracted by an alone local image to visiting, and these spaces try to adapt to this image, which finishes for getting worn out.

Where is the personality of each city? Every time fewer destinations exist that attract tourists to discover the hidden magic of these places, it is not the packages of trips sell, but it needs an a bit major effort, of knowing the idiosyncrasy of this place, to submerge in the own culture and to discover the places most estimated by the own residents.

The tourism of masses, so present in these times, it has supposed a danger for the destinations, since it puts in danger on the own identity of the places and of the residents. The tourist current model empties the cities of residents and turns them into a theme park for the tourist consumption.

Having walked along our cities often we are not conscious of the magic that they contain, we associate them with our places of work, residence or leisure, but rarely we get lost by our cities in order that they show us his less known face, finding to our step magic places that it surprise us for his beauty and tranquility. They are spaces that always have been there but we have not strained in discovering and enjoying.

The aim of this workshop is to look for, discover and to enable these magic and hidden spaces, places removed from the flows of the tourist masses, and to put them within reach of the citizens, of the residents, and possibly of some visitors who go in search of scenes that us are those who appear in all the guides of trips, and that they do not do but to turn the experience of travelling in an effect déja vu for all the tourists.

Is it possible to be a tourist in your own city?

Workshop Ecole Speciale d´architecture in Paris

September 2010