Half a thousand architecture students from 22 countries meet in Benidorm to explore its eco-sustainable and innovative model

Around 500 architecture students from 22 countries will meet in Benidorm this Sunday to participate in the annual meeting of the European Assembly of Architecture Students (EASA), which will run from July 28 to August 11. The mayor of the city, Toni Pérez, announced this Thursday all the details of this international meeting, where “Benidorm will once again be in the spotlight as a model of an eco-sustainable and innovative city”, in a press conference in which he was accompanied by the EASA delegate in Benidorm, Álvaro Campos, and the representatives of the Assembly in Spain, Sara Delgado, Enrique Cilleruelo and Andrea Ortiz de Zárate.

Mestre Gaspar López Public School will be the headquarters for this EASA meeting, where the young participants will carry out short-lived constructions and explore the Benidorm model. In addition, during the two weeks that the meeting will last, they will carry out thirty workshops, organize audiovisual experiences and interact with the public, all of this, according to Toni Pérez, because “they come to learn about Benidorm and we are also going to learn from them and from their proposals and responses to the situations that they have previously seen, to offer us a fresh and objective perspective on the Benidorm context and its urban and social realities”. “They will show us other ways of understanding life and architecture” he added.

EASA has been holding its assemblies for 43 years and has its origins after the teachers' strike in Liverpool in 1981. At that time, a group of Architecture students organized themselves to begin developing activities outside the school, the idea took shape and grew and today it unites students from many European and Latin American countries until it has become the largest in Europe. This will be the second time in 43 years that this assembly is held in Spain and the first time in the Valencian Community.

During the presentation, the mayor stressed that the participants and organisers, through all the activities, “will show us where architecture is going in the world” and highlighted that the assembly “will be a space for reflection and appreciation”.

Today, the EASA has become “a decentralised non-profit network with more than 2,000 members”, according to one of its delegates in Spain, Sara Delgado, who also indicated that this event takes place every year in a different city.

Enrique Cilleruelo, delegate in Spain, has brought closer the spirit of the assembly “which aims to follow the example of those students who 50 years ago went to Las Vegas to learn about the American city”. Therefore, the intention is to “explore the landscape of Benidorm” and to delve into “its sustainability strategies and the various urban scenes it has”. In addition, he has advanced that “since Benidorm lacks a monument; its Eiffel Tower, in this assembly we will surprise with the appearance of the Eiffel Tower of Benidorm”. Cilleruelo also emphasised that one of the intentions of the students and participants in the EASA is to interact with the population, for which “we will be easily recognisable thanks to the pink vests that we will wear at all times”.

All the experiences that take place in Benidorm, the activities and the conclusions of the workshops “will be recorded to be presented at the next meeting next year. Everything we see and learn about Benidorm will be taken to the next assembly” said Andrea Ortiz de Zárate, EASA delegate in Spain, who also specified that the information collected in Benidorm “will be taken to the rest of Spain”.

Ortiz de Zárate highlighted “the constant multicultural outlook that Benidorm has and the friendliness it gives off” and revealed some reasons that made them choose the city. “After getting to know it and analysing the management of water resources, the commitment to sustainability or the way it occupies the territory, we realised that there was no better city in the world to hold this meeting” he said.

Finally, the mayor once again thanked “the city for choosing us” and expressed his wish that “they can get the most out of this experience”. In this sense, Toni Pérez has highlighted that “the initial forecasts for this assembly in Benidorm “have been exceeded in terms of the number of participants”.