Toon: day by day impressions and conclusion

Day 1

Cantinho de Céu, Parque Cidade Jardim

The park project could potentially be interesting. The success of these kinds of initiatives depends highly on participation by locals and maintenance. I wonder if this is thought through.

What fascinates me more is the urban agriculture, the informal market starts here. Exploiting the land at low costs for agriculture seems a win-win situation. The electricity company has a guarantee their land does not get squatted and is to a certain degree taken care of; the users of the land have a small income through farming. Anti-squatting policy, love it. I am disappointed not to see more similar initiatives.

What big a contrast did we see later at the shopping mall. It is deserted. It does not appeal to me at all. There are far more employees than costumers. Most of the shops are chains, selling large international brands.

Day 2

Paraisopolis, Jardim Pantanal

I am not surprised about the favela. If anything I expected them to be poorer and more crowded. There seem to be not too many people on the street on Tuesday morning. As we drive out of Paraisopolis the traffic and crowdiness increases. School is out. There is a very clear urban structure, a grid. I miss the narrow small streets and the economy aspect is formalized. There are shops instead of market stands, counsellors, you can pay with your credit card.

Jardim Pantanal is different. There is more space. The streets are wider, the houses are larger and all have a garden. Economic activity is not consuming, but on producing. If Paraisopolis is the city, the Jardim Pantanal is the village. I appreciate the local initiatives to educate the residents. The cultural aspect (local music and crafts) is immensely important. It helps building up a community. Am I falsely justifying informality?

Day 3

Lecture Maira Acayaba, visit Alphaville

The photography presentation is hard to see on the projector screen. It is hard to judge the images. Even though, I am very happy to see that people can access parts of the city at night.

On our way to Alphaville we pass the highway running straight through São Paulo, the snake, am I right? Maira tells me that on Sundays the road is blocked for cars and used for leisure. I feel like running. At night I see people running on Avenida Paulista. I had expected more places where you can play sports.

Now all the places where you can play sports are gated, like Alphaville. Alphaville is like a French holiday resort, but then with bigger houses. The only people I see are employees cleaning the driveways and gardeners.

Day 4

SEHAB lectures, visit to Praça José Luis de Mello Malhei

The lectures are, in my opinion, not too interesting. It seems to mee that São Paulo is too big for just one organization to build social housing. If you try to solve the problem of bad conditions in informal settlements with social housing, you will need much more. My thought is that SEHAB needs to first solve the problem of quantity by building basic housing, but housing with a high potential. Keep options open for developing quality and involve the residents. I think top down planning will be very hard. The new building designed by the architecture office provides 200 people with better housing, but you will loose the other 500 that need to move out of sight.

The visit to the neighbourhood near Estudantes is quite interesting. The city needs these kinds of spaces. It keeps local social workers in touch with the lower class of society. The garbage collection is another form of an informal economy, but opposed to the urban agriculture, this seems to have a rather negative connotation.

Conclusion

My general impression of São Paulo over the last week is rather positive. I expected the city to be much more crowded. People are quite relaxed. Culturally this is the biggest difference with European countries. The urban phenomena in the city are similar. I think culturally the difference with the United States is bigger, even though Brasil is not considered part of the western civilization. Architecturally the São Paulo tends to be more like the United States.

Economically the city does have a problem. There simply is not enough money to provide for sufficient housing and fair living conditions for everyone. So I think architects should be looking for low cost solutions, in which local participation is the most important key word.

Stair park

The initial planner of the site now occupied by Paraisopolis must have been Dutch, not having thought about the hilly landscape on the site. The square kilometer, now home to approximately 100,000 people, was divided into blocks by a simple 100x200m grid of streets. Some of these grid lines however go up and down the hillside so steeply that they can never function as a street. Such was the case with one grid line that connected the area with the circumfering road network.
Recently the municipality transformed this to-steep-for-a-street space into a stair park. Parallel to a staircase there is a terraced park which enjoys great popularity amongst de Paraisopolian children.
Grid and public space are also the key elements in a proposal of the architect Hector Vigliecca for restructuring the entire favela Paraisopolis. His focus is on the inner space of the grid blocks, which is so densely built that any contact with the public domain is impossible. He proposes to open up this inner world and introduce new residential buildings that improve housing conditions and shape urban space in one. Since the buildings stretch from one block center to another they effectively open up the grid blocks towards the grid streets. The municipality first approved and then rejected the proposol. It would require too much demolishing. An understandable concern if Viglietti's plan were rigid. But it's a simple scheme that gets repeated in each block. Why not simply try it out in one block and see how the neighbourhood responds, see where it needs adaptation or leave it as one unique intervention.

One attempt to restructure Paraisopolis, seemingly simple, yet bold for the staircase ends right besides a series of luxurous residential towers. Another seemingly compex yet smart and potentially much more flexible than it appears.

Marcia vive

My favorite SP picture today. This girl was killed while cycling at Avinida Paulista earlier this year. She was ran over by a bus.

Not knowing your city

Paulistas don’t know their city.
Photographers collective Rolê admits this and attempts to explore the city by walking around and exploring. A more ordinary Paulista might know his or her neighbourhood, the area friends or family live in, or the areas they visit for work or leisure.
Everyone knows the central areas, such as the historic centre or Avenida Paulista. Whether they come to visit the park, work, do business or leisure, or just pass by on one of the highways or high in the sky in a helicopter, the centre still is the best known and most recognised part of Sao Paulo.
The unknown parts of Sao Paulo for its inhabitants, are the extensive peripheries that actually make up most of the urban environment. It is here that class and wealth differences that are expressed in spatial segregation lead to ignorance of the people on the other side of the road or wall.

Just like the human brain completes and fills in the lateral parts of the visual field, Paulistas know only the areas of their personal focus. The unknown habitats of the social class outside their personal focus are completed by their brains in the form of stereotypes. These stereotypes can have dramatic effects on the experience of the city.
A specific type of urban environment, for instance a favela, stereotypically is an area that is chaotic and probably dangerous for people from the well-off classes. Fear of the favela dwellers is a result and leads to even further going segregation, eventually making the living in a gated community seem a logical thing to do.
Of course there is a real basis to this fear, but the risk is actually never ruled out. Actually, you can’t live within the walls you have constructed around your house forever.
Can visibility (tearing down the walls or letting daylight enter) solve part of this problem?

Day 3 08/04/09 Alphaville

You Dirty Favela!

Insult, pride, or just a word?

Formal / Informal 25 x 5 m

When Adriaan Geuze (West 8, Rotterdam) was designing a high density low rise neighbourhood in Amsterdam he decided to use a 25 x 5 m lot size, with patio houses back to back.
The lot size is identical to the one we saw in Cantinho do Ceu. Coincidence? Or Logical?
Compare the two!

Amsterdam:

Grotere kaart weergeven

Sao Paulo:

Grotere kaart weergeven

Day 01: Cantino do Céu, Cidade Jardins

Contrasts: A not yet reformed street of the Parque Residencial dos Lagos in Cantinho do Céu and two layers of transportation infrastructure in Parque Cidade Jardins, the new CBD of São Paolo.