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La Favela is the only architecture,
along with funerary architecture, that is made expressly to dissolve
the gaze for exclusion. It is also the only architecture proposed
in phases, that is in constant movement. If we add to this the fact
that the city of Sao Paulo, as C. Levi Strauss would define it, is
the city in movement - and nothing illustrates this idea as well as
the flow of construction (a new building every 2 hours) - and also
the incoming flow of population from the country's interior, which
installs itself in a precarious existence in the megalopolis, you
can see why movement is accentuated from these two routes.
And the video "Cartografías
para a remocao" also describes the favela or shanty town from
a constant movement. A visit through different favelas in the city
of Sao Paulo that show a building architecture that is focused on
the collection of heteroclitic materials drawn from, and even stolen
from the planned city's surplus. The favela gathers its resources
and materials from a planned context for the construction of districts
created in an unplanned context, and for this reason, with no final
pre-established form. This also means that the favela will never
be entirely finished; the structure of the favela is not articulated
in a project, but rather comes from the instrumentality of a random
architectural recycling.
The video includes shantytown
neighborhoods that will be demolished, and some have already been
destroyed (deactivated as the government perceives this demolition)
by the city of Sao Paolo. Behind this demolition is Proyecto Cingapura,
which is the largest shantytown (favela) verticalization and reurbanization
program in Brazil. It was planned by the city of Sao Paulo and implemented
in different parts of the city, with a total of 34,394 square meters
and more than 3000 apartments built.
But the removal of the favelas and the verticalization of these
deteriorated areas also generates the rupture of the group identities
and the social and symbolic restructuring of is "in-habitants"
in proletarian housing developments.
What is true is that behind these Faustian projects is a cultural
uprooting based on the "functional" notion of re-adaptation
and reeducation of the residents to convert them into citizens who
can be cataloged.
There is also a loss of urban and architectural values established
over the course of decades that are unique to the residents-architects.
These values can be recovered with a building policy that takes
these concepts into account, rather than the city's "clientization"
approach. These actions must be sensitive to communities establishe
in the megalopolis from the country's interior, and whose origin
is not other than that unnatural diaspora.
Finally, the project for the
verticalization of the favelas de Cingapura neighborhoods: a proposal
by the city government selected in the good practices selection
process sponsored by the Unesco in Dubay in 1996, which was intended
to reduce and prevent crime, obtain access to communications, provide
electrical power usage and generation, supply drinking water, waste
management, housing, and access to financing for housing, and, of
course, organization of the territory and regulations; I say that
ultimately the project failed. Failed, because among many other
irregularities, it was a project that did not implement a plan for
urban development and architecture, that did not address the involvement
of the residents, and that abandoned the completed housing to deterioration,
insular deterioration as the favelas grew around a vertical buildings
cast out among the shanties. There was also intent to ambush: the
intent to catalog all of the landless, lawless, submerged, and invisible
into the system; in other words, to prescribe a certain type of
morality for them because they were given the use of a predefined
space.
The video visits not just the
favela and part of the technological city, but also shows the Cingapura
verticalization project, and then articulates proposals for personal
intervention that mimics or attends to those "shantified"
resources, respecting their randomness and disparity, but making
them more hygienic and structurally consolidated around their characteristic
lack of distinction between the public and private.
Also, The photographs provide
a linear and horizontal view of favelas that are in danger of being
demolished by the city of Sao Paolo and replaced by a vertical proletarian
architecture with no social identity, that periodically alter the
group alignment and generate a process that detracts from identity.
For this reason, I have systematically
shown 2 parameters, either separately or together, of intervention
in the photographs
1- Projects to make containers compatible for housing modules
This group of photographs shows alternatives to that suppression
from an attentive "natural" mobility to that unplanned
growth of urban development. For this reason, there are digital
actions micrografted between the surface of the graft and assemblies,
that plan the project and supplement, from a personal proposal of
sustainable architecture, the preexisting shanties, but in a way
that is sensitive to the habits and customs of the inhabitants,
inhabitants who, on the other hand, have lived in these settlements
for decades.
2- Projects for the construction of buildings (institutional landmarks)
with an avant-garde aesthetic, in unstable neighborhoods, as a system
of social insertion, growth of the business fabric, and regeneration
of the land.
There are possibilities of incorporating areas of social exclusion
into maps of citizen inclusion. In other words, there should be
an official recognition that gives names to streets and numbers
to houses, and this will depend on the official recognition of some
clandestine settlements (more than 1000 in the last four decades).
This interior voyage that we are proposing was done photographically
with digital interference from an idea as simple as it is perfectly
feasible: If construction is taking place at a dizzying rate in
the city of Sao Paolo and both the city as well as private companies
live around a colossal construction site, why aren't public buildings
such as maternity wards, hospitals, courts, pavilions decentralized,
regulating and building marginal neighborhoods that are more compatible
with a dislocation of habitation that is more dynamic and non-concentrated?
Why not help private companies to create their high-tech buildings
in unstable neighborhoods?
This would make it possible to generate a business fabric around
marginal neighborhoods with minimal possibilities for sustainability.
In turn, each neighborhood would be identified by the building or
group of buildings that would give it an identity without damaging
its way of life, but increasing its social insertion, and would,
in a certain way, become its emblem, or even is aesthetic identifier.
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