Architecture as a tool for social change: this is the ambitious objective of the Venice Biennale of architecture, running from 28 May to 27 November 2016. The event, entitled Reporting from the Front, is curated by Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, Pritzker Prize laureate and former winner of the Silver Lion at the 2008 Biennale as best emerging architect. He is the author of Elemental, an innovative social housing project conceived for a community of homeless people in the city of Iquique, Chile.

A look at the peripheries

Reporting from the Front is addressed not only to architects but also to institutions, because, as Aravena explains, "those who have the power to decide should understand that there are other ways of tackling problems and that their support would change everything for the better." The aim is to reclaim the peripheries, countering urban decay and helping to regenerate neighbourhoods made unliveable and problematic by an architecture conceived solely to increase the supply of housing, rather than to integrate the urban fabric.

Militant architecture and courageous responses

"Militant" architecture, as insiders have described it, conceived to engage with the great challenges of our time: from pollution to natural disasters, from social inequality to migration. The exhibition — comprising 88 installations from 37 different countries — seeks to dismantle an old way of looking at architecture, proposing courageous solutions and a shift in perspective on the very concept of living together.

A shift in perspective for a new way of seeing

It is no coincidence that the symbolic image of the exhibition is a photograph by the English writer Bruce Chatwin, depicting a woman at the top of a ladder contemplating what at first glance appears to be a desert.

The woman is German archaeologist Maria Reiche, who from the top of the ladder studies the Nazca Lines in the Peruvian desert. "It is a tremendously powerful metaphor that allows visitors to look at the projects with fresh eyes," Aravena explained, "and it conveys the importance of viewing things from a different vantage point." According to the architect, "the difficulty of circumstances should not excuse professionals from responding with quality architecture."

Building to improve people's lives

At the entrance, in the Corderie dell'Arsenale, visitors are greeted by a room from whose ceiling hangs a countless number of steel uprights. The walls, meanwhile, are of plasterboard. A true hymn to recycling, given that these are waste materials left over from the previous art Biennale.

Visitors move on into an evocative atmosphere created by the light rays of Stuttgart-based studio Transsolar, with the work of Matthias Schüler and Anya Thierfelder. The project, developed for Atelier Jean Nouvel as a test for the Louvre Abu Dhabi, harnesses the power of natural elements such as light and dust, channelling the forces of nature rather than working against them.

Along the route, visitors pause at the national pavilions, each offering its own alternative responses to the challenges of coexistence in areas that are often on the margins of the social fabric. The heart of the exhibition is occupied by a large scale model recreating the vast market of Durban in South Africa — once a hotbed of crime, it was regenerated through a series of interventions and transformed into a leisure destination for families.

Unfinished: Golden Lion for Spain

This is how the jury awarded this year's Golden Lion to Spain, which edged out the favourite Germany — present with Making Heimat. Germany, Arrival Country, an argument for a Europe open to migrants and opposed to walls. The winning pavilion, curated by Inaqui Carnicero and Carlos Quintans, is entitled Unfinished and presents both projects interrupted by the economic crisis and instructive examples of construction and interiors defined by reuse, reversibility and economy.

This edition, which has just opened in the lagoon city and already welcomed more than six thousand visitors on its first day alone, promises to be one with no star architects in the spotlight, aimed instead at the general public. Every project is explained clearly so as to guide non-expert visitors as well. "Because it is right," said Aravena, "that every citizen understands what they can expect, and starts demanding the quality they deserve."