2019 Series.

Innovation Is a Win is a series of interviews to showcase what we believe are great examples of outstanding practices in the Social Innovation, Startups and Organizations fields.
The 2019 selection is rooted in the Creative and Cultural industries with practices from Latinamerica, Europe and Africa. Our 1st interview is with Incursiones, a laboratory of ideas and projects aimed at the transformation of city experiences and dynamics headquartered in Caracas, Venezuela.
Sharing our academic background formation, at the Simon Bolivar University, we have seen the process of their formation closely, the impact of their projects and the relevance of their work.
Awarded by XIII National Architecture Biennial, US State Department, V Competition for Urban Development and Social Inclusion, CAF, Meridian International. Project, BID + Impact Hub Fellowship, and the Architecture Installation for the SCC2016 with projects like EL PUNTO and PARADISO is a great pleasure for us to share their interview with us at brAIMS.
The INNOVATION IS A WIN 2019 Series was developed in partnership with belgium based organization S-COM as part of our exchange during Erasmus for Young Entrepreneurs funded by the European Union.

What is your practice main goal and vision? Present and future. Has it transformed
over the years?
As a laboratory for ideas and projects aiming at the transformation of the city’s shared spaces and dynamics, the main goal of INCURSIONES is to create a platform for dialogue and complicity between INSTITUTIONS, COMMUNITIES & ACADEMIA to create and implement solutions to some of the most pressing challenges of our cities. Our work brings together agents and parties with different backgrounds, with the shared goal of creating innovative projects and actions that improve the spaces and human relations in our cities.
Our vision can best be summarized as follows: Engages users not as passive beneficiaries but as active, critically-minded and demanding citizens, make visible hidden possibilities and ways of relating to our urban environment, raise awareness of problems while remaining positive and optimistic, understand that good design matters and can add value to public space, give value to economy of means and make effective use of limited resources, engages stakeholders and seek partnership across fields and sectors.
When have you started to work on this goals and vision?
In 2015, Ciudades Transformadoras published a study on the perception of our cities. The study revealed that 96% of Venezuelans do not trust people they come across in the public realm. In Caracas, the city we live in and work for, public spaces ceased to be meeting and collaboration scenarios and have become inhospitable territories without incentives for coexistence.
That same year we founded INCURSIONES; we decided to put our efforts towards the transformation of public spaces with the aim to conteract the degradation process of our city and society. We saw, in the strong crisis in which Venezuela is immersed, an extraordinary opportunity precisely because the “conditions were not ideal”, because it was necessary to experiment and innovate to, as architects, propose solutions for the common spaces of our cities.

Do you have a project statement or manifesto?
INCURSIONES is to enter unknown territories in a responsible and humble way and with others, moved by curiosity and motivated by the need to recover and conquer those common spaces occupied by fear with the certainty that, although it’s not obvious, it is important.
It is trusting others so that others can trust us and not allowing fear to paralyze, distract or stop us. It is always to remember that a barrier is a variable and, therefore, an opportunity.
On a community scale: One in which social relationships are still based on collaboration and trust: the family, the neighborhood and the community.
Incorporating the virtues of design: Because it is proven that good design encourages us to be the best version of ourselves. We feel and behave like very different people depending on what is in front of our eyes, and we can use that variable in our favor.
Working from the theory of scarcity: how to cause the greatest effect with limited resources? More with less. Inspired by Bruce Lee’s ONE-INCH PUNCH: Articulating with precision and wisdom what you have available.
Allowing speculation and experimentation: Causing phenomena, analyzing their effects,
verifying hypotheses, principles and initial speculations.
It is figuring out how to displace fears, regain confidence and build citizenship today.
What are the main challenges you face as a professional, developer and creator in the construction: design & creatives industries?
Because our work takes place in a volatile context, in which economic, social and political variables change every time, we face challenges and barriers that make our processes much more complex, but also incredibly enriching because, we have managed to assume these barriers as variables and, therefore, as opportunities.
At a citizen level, one of the challenges we face is making people realize the importance of being in the street, of occupying spaces, even more when the conditions are not given, when insecurity makes oneself secluded and isolated. As citizens, we need to be able to share ideas and opinions with others out loud without being scared. Right now, people in Venezuela are more worried about covering basic needs and have forgotten the power that we have when we take action as an organized group.
Being vulnerable and unprotected from fear, the average Venezuelan refers to the illusion of shelter: deployment of urban devices for separation such as walls, bars, electric fences in exacerbated quantities. They seem to have assumed that danger is inevitable and there was nothing left but to privatize the wealth of urban life. Fear has slowly but effectively broken our social fabric, which has represented unavoidable challenges in our daily work as a social organization that is committed to the transformation of the spaces we share within our city.
Regarding the institutional field, the daily panorama is quite discouraging: The institutions in charge of managing these spaces face a very strong budgetary crisis and there is a general crisis at national level with economical, educational, political reprecusions; with a direct effect on everything that does not represent urgency. It is one of the biggest challenges because it condemns them to delay which, in the case of public space, can be see in the absence of investment in maintenance and new proposals, in their physical and civic deterioration.
What are your projects developed and overall practice success factors? How do you find innovation?
Since Incursiones began, and during more than four years of adventures, we managed to overthrow some fears:
-Fear of walking Caracas. With Dispatchwork, a treasure hunt for millennials in which to explore, discover and record colorful repairs of street furniture would bring rewards.
-Fear of the unknown. With Caracas out loud, a read out loud flashmob, in which hundreds of strangers gave in to the provocative charm of an anonymous invitation that allowed them, for a few minutes, to transform the perception of a well-known Caracas square and surprise others in the process.
-Fear of the night. With La Toma, a spatial and temporal occupation, in which a new exchange parameter is established: only the accumulation of minutes (in the place) and not of money, would allow passers-by to acquire the refreshments of the evening.
And in 2016, Paradiso arrived: an itinerant garden whose care and maintenance would be in charge of Caracas; A temporary installation that in its interior promotes citizen values
through dynamics associated with the care of plants and in their contact with the outside, offers tools to institutions and neighbors for the consolidation of their presence in the public space.
By its nature, to aim at closing the obvious gap between spontaneous settlements and formal Caracas — one of the biggest challenges facing our city every day — through this intervention, was completely unavoidable; placing it in the Plaza Sucre de Petare, often exclude because it is associated with violence, abandonment and crime, was essential.
Even when bombarded with overwhelming questions and uncertainties, Paradiso was successful: more than 500 people entered daily, the average time spent in the square quadrupled and, consequently, the informal commerce that was in the surroundings moved to its vicinity.
This intervention marked a precedent in Incursiones because it confronted us with our inescapable condition of interdependence: we depend on each other to share the space of the city. Since then, we are looking for vulnerable communities where we can decipher how we move their fears, regain confidence and build citizenship.





And from that search, SpOT emerged, a tool of occupation and claim to intervene disused public spaces; a mobile, compact and lightweight device that expands and allows multiple scenarios to be created, from targeted activities to plays and musical events. To be deployed and operated, it requires the active participation of its users and, from this, it seeks to involve the community in the generation of a jointly constructed space and opens the door to citizen participation dynamics.
Together with Caracas Mi Convive, an organization that promotes violence reduction initiatives in the Libertador Municipality, we detect different agglomerations of fear associated with violence and select Plaza Bolívar de La Vega as the setting for our next Incursion: a territory avoided and even forbidden by the schools, institutions and communities that surrounded it, a space that generated this feeling of fear that works as a vicious circle: the more insecure, the more neglected and avoided. This is how Incursiones assumed the position of becoming data collectors (fears, interests, victories, people, stories), interpreters of it, and conquest facilitators. We assume our posture, highlighting the importance of the role of the community.



In addition, Incursiones is carrying out an ideas laboratory — which we decided to call ÑAPA — where university students and young professionals have the opportunity to generate innovative ideas that improve the quality of life of three communities in Petare, one of the largest informal settlements in Latin America. Twelve multidisciplinary teams, five college students each, were selected and granted the necessary resources to test and implement their ideas. ÑAPA is an stimulating and safe environment where students can freely develop their interests, gain experience and the opportunity to present their projects and ideas to different investors, the winning teams will be rewarded with capital that will allow them to execute their project.
What better way to impact even more the places that need it the most than multiplying the actors that can make it possible? ÑAPA is the space that allows young people who still want to believe, find motivation and inspiration to grow by making progress, adding and contributing to building city and citizenship.



How do you make your practice and projects financially sustainable?
Our main asset is our creative capital, always in growth and anxious to produce new ideas. This eager for creation, and at the same time, to make a positive impact in our society give us the will to always generate new projects able to connect our social venture with the interests of our benefactors.
Our greatest source of revenue are the creative work and actions we have develop for the cultural program of the Goethe-Institut, the United States Embassy in Venezuela and cultural departments of the municipalities of our city, these are the promoters of the actions we built in public space. This model is sustainable as long as we keep working in the development of public space action but we also make products (related to the public space interventions) and ensure a regular income from the sale of those.
All the actions we develop and build can be catalogued as a creative service. The investment is in intellectual capital; the more creative the people we get to work with us, the better the ideas we can transform into actions. Being a social initiative and architecture studio at the same time, we have a full-time team of six people who work on both types of projects.
Since 2014 we have been financing our social ventures with the income from architecture projects, so we have been able to invest in our initiative. Since the middle of 2014 we have worked with many allies that have financially supported all of our social work, making the initiative sustainable and independent from the incomes of the projects from the architecture studio.
