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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On Saturday 26th March a motorboat provided by the Empresa Metropolitana de Aguas e Energia spent the entire day shuttling back and forth across represa Billings, the large man-made water reservoir set in the lush nature reserve at the southernmost tip of the São Paolo Municipality. The boat moored continuously at the Cantinho do Céu pier to pick up and drop off the numerous people taking part in the third Jornada da Habitaçao organised by São Paulo Calling: international guests and São Paolo residents arriving from the city centre, as well as large numbers of inhabitants from the settlements which, like Cantinho do Céu, have developed along the banks of the Billings reservoir since the 1980s. An opportunity to try out a new and much quicker means of transport for connecting to the city centre: a kind of dress rehearsal for the new public water-transport system that the São Paolo local administration plans to develop.

Creating new transport connections across the Billings reservoir is the next stage of a bigger overall urbanisation project aimed at developing and improving the area with focus on creating a sustainable relationship between the neighbouring favelas and the reservoir. As well as creating infrastructure ...

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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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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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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. ...

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Q: Who are you and what did you bring to the São Paulo Calling exhibition?

A: I am an architect and part of the Laboratorio Arti Civiche (LAC), (http://www.articiviche.net), an interdisciplinary group of researchers, within the University of Roma Tre, investigating territories by creatively interacting with its citizens towards a common and collective transformation of the built environment.

When Stefano Boeri invited us to participate to São Paulo Calling, we decided to present the work that LAC has carried out in Metropoliz, in particular in response to a point of the Manifesto that says: "informal settlements are fast, sometimes faster than the ability of the public administration to plan its development". Metropoliz is presented in the exhibition as an occupation of the Blocchi Precari Metropolitani (Metropolitan Precarious Blocks), within the framework of the struggle of the housing movement, born in the total vacuum of public policies on housing and in response to speculation in real estate and land use.

The central question that we wanted to highlight about Metropoliz is the idea that a space created to give immediate solution to the social housing issue, can became an opportunity to experiment, through the transformation ...

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On a beautiful and warm Sunday morning in January, during the first weekend of the Sao Paulo Calling-project, Anna Dieztsch from DBBA, Joseph Grima from Abitare and me as the SEHAB urban planning coordinator came together to discuss together with the population the urban plan for São Francisco. It promised to get interesting: The podium discussion was led by myself, an urban planner with European background; Anna, a Brazilian architect, living and working for many years in New York, and Joseph Grima, an anglo-italian editor.

In 2010, SEHAB decided to elaborate an urban plan that would finally turn the punctual interventions by the public authorities of the last 30 years into a neighborhood. The plan was finalized within a six month period by the SEHAB urban design team, together with the team of Habi Leste (architects, engineers and social workers), responsible for the coordination of the slum-upgrading program in the Eastern part of the city, and with the participation of the local population and planning offices such as SMDU, SP Urbanismo, SP Trans, SVMA, amongst others. SEHAB is currently working on the implementation of the first phase of construction, together with Davis Brody Bond Aedes (DBBA).

The event ...

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On that January morning I woke up, got into my car and once again drove to the Eastern part of the city.

It was a sunny Saturday morning and the traffic was calm. So, I decided to go back in time and make an evaluation of the last years of this journey.

Many images started to be processed forming part of a history, and even before this film could reach an end, I arrived in São Francisco.

Near Rio Claro field, I saw many food stalls, handcrafts and a big stage from which we would be listening to good Brazilian pop songs later on.

Everything was well organized. Even the children were in their new uniform waiting for the soccer game.

At Promorar Rio Claro, Posagre was ready for SP Calling opening ceremony.

A large group of people was looking forward to the lectures and statements in order to exchange knowledge and experience.

Some discussion panels had the participation of leaderships of the respective areas, experts and guests.

Suddenly a community leader used the opportunity to talk about the transformation San Francisco has being going through in the last 30 years. According ...

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There are plenty of reasons to be optimistic about the relationship that the Municipal Housing Secretariat has been constructing with leaders of community organizations in São Francisco. The São Paulo Calling - Jornada da Habitação held on January 28th and 29th offered multiple evidence of an increasingly mature relationship between these agents, prevailing respect,tolerance, and joint search for solutions to matters of public and collective interest.

The first element to be highlighted as an expression of cooperation among them is the presence of a significant group of community leaders in all the preparatory activities and during the Jornada, ranging from activities that have entertaining and recreational nature to the discussions around the central themes of informal settlement upgrading in the city of São Paulo.

Guigui, Carminha, Luizão, Rose and Jerônimo, among others, have taken turns to represent their community at the time of the exhibition opening, in the discussions, and in the workshop with students from FAU Mackenzie, but also in the soccer competition and in the presentation of musical groups. Besides this, they asked Francesco Carreri for changes in the script of the minhada do ‘descobrimento’ (walk for the ‘discover’) of an important part of the neighborhood. ...

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"Hospital! Hospital! "And" Labyrinth! Labyrinth! "These are two slogans that guide us. They are words shouted joyfully by children leading a lenghty parade of people in the ascents and declines of Sao Francisco, dressed in white t-shirts decorated with hand-painted red hearts, under a relentless sun. The parade is formed by the comunidade of São Francisco, a "favela" of 35,000 people east of Sao Paulo that Sehab - Secreteria Municipal de Habitação -is transforming into a "town". This is the first Jornada de Habitação from the exhibition "São Paulo Calling", curated by Stefano Boeri, that in the coming months will bring more days like this in different areas of the city. The walk takes a different path than the one established and previously negotiated, even in areas where perhaps we should not have appeared without due notice. This causes a certain tension but then it flows smoothly through to the end. people looked first surprised, then they listened and finally found themselves agreeing: for the inhabitants it would be very important for a hospital to be built in São Francisco, given that today it takes almost an hour to reach the nearest hospital. Here, today, the claim for the house ...

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If we describe the way in which politics and architecture have experienced the birth, growth and explosion of the phenomenon of informal settlements (favelas, slums, bidonville, townships), if we reconstruct this history, we should speak of indifference and condemnation.
Since the end of the Second World War a lapse in memory, in attention, has created a paradoxical situation where, for at least 40 years, architecture and politics have argued to the historic city, the new city of trustees , the city of urban sprawl, but they were unable to face what was happening: anywhere a city based on the principle of survival was born, a city pushed to make maximum use of space, with minimal investments and costs in materials and technologies.
An unplanned city but made by a lot of rules. This informal city is now home for 33% of urban inhabitants of the globe.
A few months ago the population living in cities exceeded 50% of that living in the entire planet. This means that today we have 3 ½ billion urban people, a billion and half of whom live in informal settlements. For 2050, the urban population will be 75% of the entire population of the

...

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