Postcards from my neighborhood - This exercise exists since 2015, as a transverse and ambulatory exercise of intervention whose objective has been to visualize, through postcards, unknown spaces for those who have participated in the places and workshops proposed by the team and the laboratory and at the same time people, children and adults, have shaped an image of their environment, through postcards, to make known to others who do not know their contexts. Therefore, sectors such as those bordering the Cañaveralejo River, have been intervened through participatory design dynamics to visualize the manners and the ways in which they have been modified. The postcards are become in useful tools to tell stories from the neighborhoods of our city, showing the present and contributing to future scenarios and collective imaginaries of the neighbors of our city.

I design my city - The I World Forum on Low Carbon Cities, held in October 2016, was the ideal place to implement several of the inputs and ideas comented and discussed in previous exercises, class workshops and laboratory meetings. Although the script and objectives of what was to be achieved were clear, the activity itself would only take shape as the minutes and hours passed, the purpose, beyond any research or academic content, was to Proves one point: the imaginative capacity of children to create and design spaces and the city dreamed by them. In a two-day task, the full team of the "Urbaniños" proposal focused on the work of generating alongside several children, citizens of Medellín, and their parents, experiences of community participation, design of Ideal and fantastic spaces, colorful buildings, futuristic vehicles and fantasy parks. As the days passed, they went from shy faces to smiles and jokes, the children found a space for two days not only to play, but also to unleash their imagination, materialize their desires and feelings, for a few hours, that what they dreamed and thought had once come true and was heard by someone else. At the end of both days, fantasies materialized in blocks, cartons, tiles, textures, colors and so on, transformed into a city: The Naturambiental Megacity, which illustrated both the creative and innovative capacity of children and the level of detail and Perception that they have not only of the city that they live in, but of the problems and difficulties of the same, which expressed, without greater fear, hobbies, fears, experiences and desires. The conclusion of the day was more than satisfactory, because that activity was the demonstration that the theme of urban design and participation is not only an issue for adults and experts, children also have things to say and to teach.

Guardians of the mangrove swamp - TierraBaja is a village located next to the Cienaga de la Virgen and more than half an hour from Cartagena, an arid and dry site which, over several days, would work alongside a group of children with the task not only to develop ideas and instruments of urban development, the Urbaniños team would seek to strengthen the dialogue and know an unknown context for those who traveled to these lands. Under the Co-Design and Collaborative Construction Workshop executed by organizations such as the Foundation for Multidimensional Education FEM, Architecture Without Borders, UN HABITAT and the Association of Community Councils of Cartagena, a series of activities were carried out with the purpose of investigating the ways of inhabiting and co-inhabiting children and the community in general alongside a context as particular as it offers living alongside the mangrove. In this sense, the exercises with the children explored the sensations and experiences of their environment, they remembered places and episodes of their immediate past and allowed them to materialize spaces and places existing only in their imagination. After four arduous and hot days of work, the conclusion that other exercises had already demonstrated would be evidenced once again: The ability of children to question their environment in a critical and purposeful way, to bring their eyes on things and everyday life That surrounds them and to propose novel and interesting alternatives on the problems of its locality.

"Urban Explorers", is part of the Urbaniños project, which is developed through a series of playful pedagogical workshops that aim to stimulate citizen participation of children in urban intervention processes. The "Urban Explorers" program seeks to understand the relationship between children and their ability to intervene in the environment, which allows us to understand how interactive elements can be used to learn urban concepts, in a simple language that motivates their participation in co-design and co-management processes in green infrastructure projects. The program is carried out with children from 4th to 5th grade of the Berchmans school, different exploratory workshops were carried out that allowed to develop team work and learn risk management topics, in which creative proposals for urban intervention were developed; It is an enriching experience that allowed us to know the ideas that children have under their knowledge and needs, and what ultimately became the result of a process built from the investigation, which is awakened through the exploration of the environment that was the initial phase of the diagnostic process in which the children spent an active part of observing their spaces, and where they could understand how they relate to the territory. The artistic manifestations and the game become the next level of the process, being a source of creativity, in which they faced the idea of thinking as co-designers of urban spaces, encouraging new forms of citizen participation, more inclusive and friendly with the environment. The prospective part of the project leads us to directly investigate the reasons why the respective knowledge has not been applied in their spaces, allowing us to understand with the vision of the children how to carry out the development of the intervention, where finally we apply the learned knowledge through praxis and experience from the error. The urban explorers decide to perform as a sample of the intervention process a didactic game applied to risk management and environmental knowledge, which we allow ourselves to develop together with them. This experience shows us the incredible possibilities of changing our perspective of the city from the curiosities and imaginations of children!

Living near a creek requires awareness of it, the risks involved, as well as the relevant actions in relation to a natural phenomenon that can not be ignored. The creek is there, with a course that can not be changed and the houses to be close face a risk, before which it is necessary to train, both in the conceptual part and in the relevant actions with respect to it. Diagnosis: This first stage tries to think and turn our eyes on the Isabel Pérez creek, the implications of living close to it, as a way of locating and raising awareness about this reality. The Urbaniños identify problems that affect our city / environment. These situations are transformed into opportunities to create solutions that improve our living conditions in community. Prospective: This second stage aims to collect the perceptions of the problem due to flooding of the Isabel Pérez creek and propose solutions from the perspective of children, taking into account Risk Management concepts. The Urbaniños let our imagination fly to propose solutions to the problems that affect our cities. Intervention: In this stage converge the results of the previous processes and the application of knowledge from the academy of the Universidad del Valle. The idea is to project in a tangible way the children's imaginary in relation to the flood problem of the Isabel Pérez creek and generate proposals that include their perspective. It also aims to measure the degree of participation of children in urban intervention processes related to the problems generated by floods. The Urbaniños take action in the construction of solutions to have a better city!

The main objective of this approach within the project was the elaboration of citizen participation and urban planning strategies, from the vulnerability and resilience capacity of the communities. The intervention, from a critical point of view, carried out training and appropriation work in the community in which there were identify routes of interventive design to follow with the people who do the leadership work in the area of San Francisco. Thus, by 2018, a joint plan to be executed called "Camino al Barrio" has been drawn up.

Through this exercise children were given an awareness of environmental care, giving them a voice from new strategies that promote their relationship with the environment, providing information about it. The children's community that is part of the Las Americas neighborhood was the study population which represents an important percentage within this sector, this gave relevance to the idea of ​​beginning to integrate and recognize them within intervention projects in their space, due that it can be shown that although community participation is contemplated; the participation of the child population is not included at all. One way to start involving the children's community in the processes of citizen participation is to relate them to the importance of the natural spaces they live with and the responsibility of their care, seeking to generate a profound impact and analyzing the place where the described dynamics are presented. If from childhood the child is shown that his context is made to live it and not to pass unnoticed, perhaps many aspects can change positively, not only in the responsibility of being part of a educated and respectful child community, but of being citizens that take care and think about their environment, because they feel part of it.

The workshop presented to the undersecretary of early childhood in Santiago de Cali, sought to connect children between 3 and 5 years with concepts of sustainable urban design and tactical urbanism, by encouraging active participation in the development of proposals for intervention of public space to involve children's perception in scenarios of conflict and opportunity in the city. A workshop activity was held in the NIDO Presbítero of the commune 4 of Santiago de Cali, where we worked exercises that take the child from the exploration of their immediate urban environment, to the active participation in the development of urban interventions as representation of their way of inhabiting and appropriating the place, fostering the spirit of citizen participation from the first years of life. Each child received a box called: "My little box of the city" in which he found small cardboard elements that represent the city (buses, houses, buildings, trees, among others), in the company of his workshop the children opened their boxes and they took out the elements that they found there to identify them and understand what they are and what they represent for them from the joint dialogue. From this exercise, we proceeded to establish a pattern of colors and representative elements of the city recognized by children and with higher values to generate an awareness of the urban and greater recognition of citizenship behavior in each of these places. After that, each group was given a box with materials available for the creation of spaces from their proposals, children accompanied by their workshop were free to form spaces with the material delivered (boxes, fabrics, tubes, among others). The purpose of this stage was to achieve the spatial representation of the selected place (related to the urban objects of the previous stage, those that they identified as problematic or with negative feelings) - The exercise focused on investigating the children about how it would transform the space with negative feelings? What should I have so that it would not be negative? What do you propose to add or remove to that object or place? The last activity had the purpose of to materializing the proposals of the children made in the previous stages from a sensorial path using natural and recycled materials. This design contemplated the spaces highlighted by the children evoking a miniature city where they will be able to return in the moments in which the teachers agree to carry out exploration exercises.

TUNEXPIA is the result of the degree project in graphic design of the student Maria Isabel Velez Bastidas who is part of the team of undergraduate students of the Urbaniños project of the Universidad del Valle. The main objective of Tunexpia, the tunnel of experiences was to provide an environmental care awareness experience to the children of Yumbo, Valle del Cauca, specifically the Las Americas neighborhood, through a creative platform, giving them a voice, from new experiences that allow them to promote their relationship with the environment, making possible the recognition of the territory, while providing information about it. The implementation of the game, design and interaction were the main activities when thinking about the realization of the design of experiences, which is the bridge between what happens in the environment and the child who lives in it. For the realization of the project, the children's community was taken as a management base of main ideas, these being the main inputs when it comes to the realization of the prototype. The construction of knowledge through experience was carried out through various types of techniques in workshops held in the same sector months ago, such as passive and active observation and participatory action, which were within a line of alternative ethnography. The concern of being able to include children in these processes of community participation, lies in the idea of promoting from an early age the proper use of the spaces that are inhabited and create more efficient ways for children to contribute to the environment.

The Urbaniños® - workshop proposed for Verdun (Montréal), is an international leadership activity funded by the IDRC (International Development Research Centre of Canada) as part of a strategy to spread an ongoing research project currently being develop in Colombia under the same name. This research focuses on how to relate children between 7 and 14 years old with concepts of sustainable urban design for local climate change adaptation and encourage active participation in the design of intervention proposals for public spaces to involve children's perception in decision-making scenarios in the city. The activities in the workshop aim to analyze the urban perception of the participating children for the identification of 1) places of conflict; 2) places of opportunity from children’s perspective of the city and 3) ideas/proposals from children to reduce vulnerability and enhance resilience in urban spaces, standing out their voices in urban planning. The workshop will be developed during a summer camp activity in Montreal (Canada), linking master and undergraduate students from two Universities (McGill/ Local University - Universidad del Valle/ International Partner). This proposal aims that both institutions links with the previous activities carried out by the ARCH514/URBP514 Community Design Workshop course at McGill University that involves the participation of children from the Suspicious Fish and Literacy Quebec in Verdun area.

Urban explorers is part of the Urbaniños project, which is developed in the Siloé neighborhood with children from the San Francisco and Canasteros sector. These workshops have allowed to know the environmental problems from the perspectives of children and how they affect the development of their daily life in the urban environment. In this way, it is possible to recognize the geographical context, the climate and the biodiversity of the space in which they live, and the connections they have with the spaces in their community. The participation of children has been oriented so that they recognize in their environment the knowledge of risk management (threat, vulnerability, risk, resilience) at a deeper level and citizen participation. The workshops began in September, but in previous months they had already been working with them in connection with the "Camino al barrio" program, which has allowed a rapprochement with the children's community through initiatives such as cinema in the neighborhood, with the purpose of creating a recreational space by categories and that each member of the household can enjoy a wide range of outdoor films, which has allowed generating nuclei of encounter between the inhabitants of the community. Other activities that have helped the approach with children was the event held on October 27 called "A costume for the planet" which consisted of a contest of disguises made with recycled material, stressing the importance of the 3R reduce - reuse - recycle Through an activity the children were able to explore their creativity and imagination, as well as having the presence of the parents, who we integrated so that they would know the themes of the workshops in the process with urban explorers that presents the objective of a design participatory to lead to a micro-intervention with children.

Un año lleno de muchos proyectos no puede terminar de una mejor manera que con una nota realizada por nuestros niños en NOTIREPORTERITOS

Intervención Cancha los Canasteros - 2019

Brigada Social 2019

Concurso Urbaniños (Virtual)

Talleres virtuales (Yumbo y Las Américas)

Exhibición Alerta Roca