TIAGO MOTA SARAIVA

Architect and urban planner Tiago Moto Saraiva holds a degree in architecture and a postgraduate diploma in Architecture, Territory and Memory. Since 1995, he has worked in several offices in Lisbon, Rome and Vicenza. He has been an effective member of the National Board of the Association of Architects since 2001, and was a member of the Executive Board of the Portuguese Association of Architects from 2003 to 2007 and National Treasurer from 2005 to 2007. He was an invited assistant professor at the Universidade Modern, Lisbon in 2007, and at FAUTL (Faculty of Architecture at the University of Lisbon) from 2007 to 2008. In addition, Tiago Moto Saraiva was a member of the Organising Committee of the Portuguese National Architecture Year in 2003. He has curated, among other projects, the International Celebration of Cities Competition, organised by the UIA, and was the Portuguese delegate to the 2005 International Union of Architects Congress in Istanbul, Turkey. Currently managing partner at the ateliermob office, he also writes a weekly opinion column in the daily national newspaper “I”, and is on the board of Largo Residências, a cultural/social co-operative.

Since the beginning of the history of capitalism, people have been encouraged to remain isolated as they travel from living space to working space. Travel time between home and work is often too long, so that the traditional notion of a working day divided into three—8 hours of work, leisure and rest—is now a forgotten dream in nearly every region of the world. Increasingly, public space is the place for rebooting democracies and the trigger for social transformation processes. Despite all the new and advanced systems of social control—from total surveillance to terrorism—they are less effective where people can gather together.