News

On July 3rd, at the Embassy of Brazil in Rome, the presentation of the video-diary SAUDE! took place, accompanied by a conference coordinated by Lydia Pribisova who also cured the relationship with the Embassy.

The video, created by the new ISSU producion (Daniele Zacchi, Azzurra Muzzonigro  and Laura Cionci), describes the action created by Laboratorio Arti Civiche, coordinated by Professor Francesco Careri in São Francisco, within the project São Paulo Calling, curated by Stefano Boeri.

The images are a mix of designs, stories and emotions that are mixed in a dynamic and fresh way, giving to the public the opportunity to get immediately in touch with the development of an idea that takes shape through cooperation and understanding of common realities, though geographically distant.

The video-diary has wanted to be a tangible evidence, both of the project and of the direct experience, free of genre labels. We wanted to leave a thin trail of time to give maximum emphasis to the personal and collective feelings, trying to combine the overall emotion of the whole work, with a growing interest with respect to its development up to Geronimo’s cry surrounded by the community and their shirts "Coração". ...

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It's been an intense, alive and memorable day.

The fact of publicly projecting the video-diary SAUDE! at the Embassy of Brazil I think was an important step under several perspectives.

In the first place what was publicly presented was a team-work, the result of months of preparation, and the result of a relationship between 'Rome' and 'São Francisco' that went far from weakening over time.It stands as a proof the directness and freshness of the chat via Skype with São Francisco, which was attended by both the Secretaria and the liderança.We watched the video simultaneously and after we connected again to exchange impressions and questions.

We lived very intense moments, you could tell from the words coming from São Paulo that they understood the depth and the potential of the gesture we elaborated together. That the simple fact of wearing T-shirts with red hearts while walking through the spaces of São Francisco and drinking medicina caseragathered in a circle in the area where they wish to see the hospital built, was a gesture that would have repercussions in history of São Francisco, is something the liderança had understood immediately. What has left me amazed and a ...

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One City, Many Forms

For a city as high on modern architecture as Sao Paulo, its newly found generosity of spirit towards its contrasting favela-studded landscape is a precious thing. The administration seems to be more accepting of the city’s diverse urban texture than ever before. It is now loosening policies to allow existing favelas to upgrade themselves and become well-integrated parts of the city. 

Sao Paulo has experimented with years of diverse approaches to ‘tackle’ these neighbourhoods. These have included encouraging migrants to go ‘back home’ or relocating them in social housing projects.

Today, of its officially estimated three million favela residents, the administration focuses on relocating only those who live in high risk zones. Local actors continue building and improving their houses, while the prefecture retrofits water systems and other civic infrastructure. Such a shift may be strategic, shrewd or contingent on electoral cycles. However, in a world with little patience for alternative forms of urban settlement – where everyone is in a hurry to redevelop according to the global standards of the day - such a reprieve is itself revolutionary. Especially when it is combined with the strengthening of local governance and emergent economic practices ...

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Click on the image to enlarge it and here to see the photo being exhibited.

Our obsession with mixing and merging urban landscapes and histories just moved to another level. We decided to let go of photoshopping for a bit and actually take a piece of Mumbai to Sao Paulo.

As part of the Sao Paulo Calling Exhibition curated by Architect Stefano Boeri and organized by the Secretariat de Habitaçao de Sao Paulo, images from Dharavi (Mumbai) became a part of the streetscape of Paraisopolis (Sao Paulo).

Residents of Paraisopolis chose pictures that appealed to them and in some ways corroborated their life, location or scenario across these two neighbourhoods that exist on either side of the globe.

Residents will exhibit them in their homes, shops, streets so that passers by can get a glimpse of the neighbourhood that is both so far away and astonishingly close in spirit. This live mashupcontinues to do what our mashed-up images always did – reveal connections across cities, to show they often emerge from similar impulses. From street vendors, to retailers, from residents to travelers, the neighbourhoods of Paraisopolis and Dharavi share as much in common ...

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The author of this article, Marcella Aruda, is a student of architecture at Escola da Cidade, Sao Paulo, Brazil. She participated in a three days workshop organized by URBZ in Paraisopolis. The students are seen interacting with local builder Ataide in the picture above.

What are the most productive and socially relevant roles that the architect and architecture student can play today? I ask this question because as a student of the discipline in Brazil, I feel that the architect’s social function has lost direction a bit. What I want to explore in this short essay is: How can Brazilian architecture colleges best prepare the student to practice his social function?

In the end of the 20th century, Brazil could be considered an urban country: in 2000, the population living in cities exceeded 2/3s of the whole country’s population, reaching 138 million people. This process of urbanization was lead by the cities in the southeast, principally São Paulo, and then started to expand to other regions.

While the medium annual rate of urban growth in 2010 was 1.9%, the São Paulo periphery’s growth rate was above 6% (Whitaker). In 2011 a government report (IBGE) ...

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As part of our Dharavi-Paraisopolis exchange we are also proposing a Paraisopolis-Dharavi Institute of Urbanology to be held next year, where architects and public servants come and learn from residents.

We are on a backlog of news from Sao Paulo. Here is a nice video by the collective LiveinSlums (Milan/Nairobi) summing up the Sao Paulo Calling event in Paraisopolis, which we are part of. It is in Portuguese, Spanish and English with Italian subtitles! This pretty much covers more than a decent amount of the world from where people got involved in the project. Milan, Sao Paulo, Mumbai and other cities dialogued with each other, with the favelas of Sao Paulo being the focus and point of inspiration. What is heartening is that the connections we evoke between our work in Dharavi, Mumbai and Paraisopolis, Sao Paulo seem to have became a distinct new arc in this multi-city story. A short feature was also aired on SBT Brasil yesterday: Click here to see it.

It was picked up and presented as an article published in BBC Brasil about what Mumbai could learn from Sao Paulo. It mentions our project for a Paraisopolis-Dharavi Institute of Urbanology next year. This institute began as a speculative exercise, a piece of fiction. For us, fiction is all about creative possibilities that are waiting to happen. It propels us into making new realities and ...

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Sao Paulo Calling: from Nairobi to Brazil

The trip to Sao Paolo started by Visa application process with the Brazilian Embassy in Nairobi, on the 10 of march. It wasn't easy to get the Visa at appropriate time. We are not sure with the reasons for the delay, for example that the internet system couldn't work during the time of processing...It took the intervention of Liveinslums and the Sao Paulo authorities to provide lots of documents and phone calls. But finally the Visa was ready after postponing the flight for 4 times.On 23 may we took a flight from JKIA to Johannesburg where we spent the night in the airport waiting to connect a flight to Sao Paolo, finally after 48 hours we arrived at Guarulhos Airport in Sao Paulo at 16.00 local time, where we were picked by a driver from the municipality who took us directly to Ville Hotel in Downtown to relax for the night, but before we had a pizza dinner with Lorenza, Maddalena and Francisca.The following day we visited a public school, Fernado Grazioso, in Bamburral to share our experience that we use in our country. It,s a simple technique of planting the vegetables ...

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Apresentação Orquestra e Escola de Samba

The project “CARNEVALMA” by Laura Cionci is spreading the message of the importance of the carnival mask -a mask that unmasks and declares, culturally used in the Uruguayan and Argentinian carnival, but has European roots- in expressing the needs of a community.

Like in Metropoliz the inhabitants were expressing their desire for a space, through the murga mask, the same way the community of Sao Francisco is sending a message of union, expressing a specific need of the local people. The performance aims at representing what will be fully expressed the next day through the public walk: the claim for an hospital.

Project CARNEVALMA: Laura Cionci

Tecnical Support: Azzurra Muzzonigro

Photos by: Daniele Zacchi

The walk crossed the different parts that compose the territory of São Francisco, from the occupations to the Promorar, from the Mutirao to the new predios and became the occasion to create attention among the population around the claim for health in a creative, ludic manner.

It ended in an area that the population had pointed out as a possible lot where to build the hospital. In that place ‘The First Cure’ a rite of traditional medicine took place, everybody stood in a circle and drank a homemade herbal remedy in coconut shells prepared by local inhabitants together with LAC. The ritual symbolized the first cure and stood as a site of hope for future transformation.

photos by: Daniele Zacchi

The spatial device to spread the call for an hospital in Sao Francisco would be for all the participants to wear a shirt with a red heart symbolizing health. The LAC team therefore organized a workshop involving the community, particularly women and children, to creatively paint 250 shirts with red hearts to be distributed to the people participating to the Jornada.

photos by: Daniele Zacchi

We met with the leader of São Francisco to share their story and their struggles and pull out some issues that are important to them.

The discussion was organised by subjects in relation to its relevance  to the main question investigated: the strength of the community and the transformation of space.

We asked the community to seek their own issues that are central to their collective strengthening and how this translates into spatial transformations.

Everyone’s opinion is unanimous that the current most important and most urgent struggle is the need for a hospital around São Francisco.

photos by: Daniele Zacchi

Heliópolis. Living Stories extends the research on the transformation and adaptation of existing buildings started with the Sao Paulo Calling Moscow research. Three built social housing projects within Heliópolis were examined through a series of interviews with their inhabitants with the intention of understanding the processes that are triggered when new social housing blocks are inserted into the tissue of the existing favela. The project is born from the conviction that the different processes, physical and social, positive and negative can be highlighted to make evident both the ways that people think of their (new) surroundings and also how they adapt to them and adapt them to their own and changing needs. While some of these processes of transformation refer to physical transformations and are easier to observe – the increase or adaptation of housing for extra space or different uses, the occupation of public space for personal use, the compartmentalization of public space including fences, etc. – others refer to complex and at times hidden social transformations that are either consequences of the spatial changes or have a subsequent spatial effect – for example, processes of segregation between inhabitants of the new blocks and those that stay in the ...

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