Fonda, city, and future

Panama City, the initial stage of the project, is the most populated city in Central America (4303 inhabitants / km² according to the last census), described by many businessmen as the "Dubai of the Americas", has an intense financial activity and a huge banking center constituted mainly by private banking, which, during the last two decades of the Twentieth century has been strengthened as one of the most important financial centers of Latin America. 

The public space, space of transit, and habitat of the citizenship have been conceived by them as a hostile space, without movement, abstracted from any possible enjoyment or leisure. Living from one point to another is subordinate to the urban order tax and on which it has to "fight" to find a common space. 

The Fonda, city, and future project, consists of a series of interventions that reconsider our interactions with existing structures in the urban context. From fiction, satire, and humor, the project proposes the design and reinterpretation of four types of furniture that seek to respond to the need to generate experience from the public space; which are accompanied by texts that generate the possibility of a narrative and story for each of the four drawings, making the viewer imagine/relate/speculate about the furniture and its possible interactions with it and with public space.  

The name Fonda makes a direct reference to the “fonda” in the Panamanian context (a trail left by a street vendor on the sidewalk) since this is a kind of self-managed urbanism that reactivates certain spaces in the city with a service. The 4 furnishings were conceived to consider our most basic needs. The project proposes different types of experiences that we could have as inhabitants of a Latin American city and it pushes us to want to be participants in the revitalization of our surroundings from a daily urban planning approach.

Fonda, city, and future, proposed during a  month a series of walks/dérivés with the collaboration of a collective of Panamanian architects and urban planners, Pulmón del barrio; with whom, hand by hand with the citizenship that was visiting the Fonda display in the public space, "designed" and proposed a series of walks surrounding the city.