News

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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Entrepreneurship is a term that has always appeared associated with the promotion of socio-economic rise of individuals. It has been frequently mentioned on the social intervention agendas, especially in vocational training proposals and policies of local social development.

But what is entrepreneurship?

Historically, the term was used to identify the individual who starts an organization. But little by little, the entrepreneur started to be recognized as not only the one who innovates, and in 1985, the "intra-entrepreneur" term was introduced, referring to enterprising people within an organization.

One of the greatest scholars on this subject, Robert Hirsch, determined that entrepreneurship is the process of creating something different and with value by devoting time and effort, assuming the corresponding financial, psychological, and social risks, but getting personal and economic rewards from it.

Many people believe that Entrepreneurship is a key promoter of economic and social development of a country. The role of the entrepreneur is to identify opportunities, grab them, and get the resources to turn them into profitable business.

How to become an entrepreneur?

Entrepreneurship is not a personality trait. For an individual to be able to identify opportunities and resources, connect ...

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All kinds of serious problems are evident in irregular settlements, among them, the lack of infrastructure, poor environmental conditions in most dwellings, the lack of qualified public spaces, and lack of equipment and services.

We know that the solution of these problems depends on the implementation of infrastructure, but also on new conditions for the population citizenship, by guarantying quality projects for both housing and for public spaces that provide some features of the formal city in the informal city.

Working in Paraisópolis, there we realized certain values that ought to be incorporated to the formal city discourse too.

These are the values that I called the Seven Lessons Learned from Paraisópolis, in the absence of a better name.

There is a city that is built from its geography, its topography, and its hydrography, in contrast to the history of Sao Paulo, where this fact was systematically ignored, and we are still paying the consequences of a proud and irresponsible deployment.

1. We can have a compact city with higher densities than the densest city of Europe, as opposed to the sprawling city of neighborhoods and individual house condominiums that fill the landscape on

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For a city as high on modern architecture as São 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.

São 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 such as local currencies. ...

Read more