Concéntrico opens its 2026 season by expanding its work as an Urban Innovation Laboratory—a platform that tests how architecture, design, and art can activate new forms of urban life. Over the years, the festival has grown from a series of temporary interventions in Logroño into a broader ecosystem of research, production, and collaboration that engages with contemporary questions around climate, identity, and the social life of public space.
This season strengthens that evolution through initiatives that extend the laboratory beyond the festival itself, establishing a continuous cycle of inquiry across the year. It culminates with the twelfth edition of the Festival in Logroño, from June 18 to 23, 2026.
Book & international tour
The book Concéntrico: Urban Innovation Laboratory (Park Books, 2025) reflects on the festival’s trajectory and the questions its public-space interventions pose for contemporary cities. Conceived as a living laboratory, the publication examines themes central to Concéntrico’s practice—identity and fiction, heritage and symbolism, temporality and the social, collective practices, ecological strategies, play, and forms of critical domesticity.
Through a selection of projects and a conversation between editors Javier Peña Ibáñez and Nick Axel, the book outlines the insights generated through the laboratory’s ongoing experimentation and positions temporary intervention as a tool for rethinking the contemporary city. An international book tour accompanies the publication, activating dialogues that extend this approach into new contexts.
Open calls—from the book to action
Building on the frameworks articulated in the book, Concéntrico launches three international open calls that translate research into practice. Each programme advances one of the publication’s core strands—the social and temporal, the material and environmental, and the symbolic and narrative—through new forms of urban experimentation.
(1) Ephemeral Agents
Developed in collaboration with Distigmo, Ephemeral Agents explores how temporary interventions can operate as agents of urban transformation. The programme includes a symposium in Zurich on 11 December 2025, integrating exhibition, debate, and publication, and unfolds through two phases:
Call A—Exhibition & Publication: selection of existing projects with demonstrated urban impact.
Call B—Speculative Proposal & Materialization: an anonymous call for new strategies of ephemeral intervention to be built during the 2026 Festival.
(2) Urban Ecologies
A call for adaptive, lightweight, ecological structures responding to climate stress. Proposals should activate community-based micro-ecologies in public space. One selected project will be built during the 2026 Festival.
(3) Identity and Fiction
Participants are invited to reinterpret the Paseo del Espolón, Logroño’s central civic space, through narrative and contemporary scenography, proposing urban fictions and symbolic interventions that reframe its collective identity.
Deadline for all programmes: January 13, 2026
Ephemeral Agents—Call A closes on November 28, 2025
New alliances and climate infrastructures
Concéntrico expands its network of collaborations while reinforcing its focus on climate-responsive design. Central to this work is the Urban Climate Island—the project’s first permanent installation—now entering construction. Based on Al agua patos by K37 LAB and developed by the City Council of Logroño throughout 2026, the structure uses vegetation, water, and permeable latticework to improve climatic comfort and rethink social uses of public space.
The installation also informs Urban Ecologies, the open call that extends its principles—shade, microclimates, reversibility, ecological strategies—into temporary and experimental formats. This alignment between permanent and temporary interventions strengthens Concéntrico’s approach to climate-responsive design within the urban realm.
