Eat-Scape in San Salvador: United Nations Plaza.

By: Miguel Sandoval/Aura Soriano/Maritza Umaña/David Vides

When you decide to “eat out” here in El Salvador, you often think of going to one of the many, very closely located, shopping malls in the metropolitan area. But we rarely think of grabbing our lunch and eating it in a park, plaza or any similar space, given to the culture of “fear” that we Salvadorians have.

So we decided to take back the public space, which in theory, we as public citizen own. We choose the plaza located in between the three largest, most important shopping malls in the area, one of which we would have normally chosen. It’s called “United Nations plaza”.

We met at Multiplaza Shopping Mall at 12 o’clock on a Friday, and we grabbed a pepperoni pizza, 4 canned sodas and 4 chocolate bars as dessert. We should mention that we picked a nowhere near healthy meal, because we thought: “hey! If we’re going to die runned over by a car, we should at least have a decent last meal!”

Choosing the meal was the easy part, crossing the street to get to the plaza however was a different story. The pedestrian access to the plaza was nonexistent. No wonder why the plaza is always empty, even though it has many benches and a pleasant nature filled environment that should attract many hard working people looking for a nice place to sit down and enjoy a meal in their lunch break, like us in this experience.

So after battling five car lanes, we made it to the acclaimed bench that awaited for us. As we seated down and thanked God for being alive, we started to realize that the plaza we had dreaded so much wasn’t half as bad. We acknowledge all of our surroundings: the warm breeze brought by the big trees, the really helpful shadow that the branches gave us, the somewhat unexplainable bench, the lack of tables to put our food on, and the overwhelming noises and smoke from the cars that passed us by at 70 km per hour or more… But whether they were positive or negative elements around us, the truth was we were having a good time!

Socially speaking, we were almost stranded in a deserted urban island surrounded by asphalt waters with cars circling us like sharks, only that we weren’t acting as prey. After finishing our meal, we noticed that neither pedestrians nor drivers paid attention to, what we thought was and “strange activity” we were doing. So we made a little experiment and decided to greet everyone we saw.

When people started to react to our greets, some good some bad, we realized this aspect of the intervention we’re about to embark is the most important for us: the social interaction that comes with the public spaces. If we hadn’t been there at that hour of the day, having our pizza and greeting everyone like crazy people, all these characters that greeted us back with a smile, wouldn’t have had that interaction with anyone. And for us that simple act of changing for better, the routinary drive back to the office for someone is meaningful enough to focus our project in the social interaction we can generate in the public spaces we create.