First there's the city of the future, a city of bold and new ideas and infinite confidence in progress. The architecture of this city responds to the present as if it was seen from the future.The most recent future I've seen so far in Sao Paulo is Rino Levi's FIESP-CIESP-SESI building on Paulista Avenue, a radical brutalist reinterpretation of the skyscraper. It dates from 1979.
The second city is the city of the present. This is the city of favelas and other illegal settlements. They are extremely flexible. Migration is high, investments are low. This city is in a permanent state of now. It doesn't plan a future, it doesn't look at the past. It simply responds to changing conditions in a bedazzling pace. Months, not years. As Cantinho do Ceu's lake shores get cleared from any development, business will first decrease as a response to having fewer customers. No sooner than the planned park along the shores is in place will business anticipate to the commercial opportunities linked to it.
The third is the city of the past. It's the city of paranoia, of people locking themselves up behind fences and reflecting in their architecture eras of which they believe things were better. 19th Century Parisian architecture is stretched to a hundred meter tall and Greek temples are scaled up to giant shopping boxes to forcefully fit the current context of the metropolis.
Unfortunately, the city of the future (modern and bold architecture, the faith in social transformation) is now buried in the past, and the city of the past (post-modern language and visceral individualism) is our future. And the informal city keeps struggling day by day.
ReplyDeleteHow about a Future 2.0? A participatory future which is powered by the individual initiative and steered through strategic design?
ReplyDelete...then I wonder how the Future 2.0 would look like in more detail. Participation - and if we didn’t knew it before we learnt it during the workshop :) - requires active stimulation. Furthermore, if strategic designs steers individual initiatives, how can be the different roles assigned or appropriated: planner, builder, financier, user, etc... further a strategy implies - if not a goal - than at least a direction towards a guided development should happen. In which ways could individual initiatives that as seen on numerous occasion through world history, do not obey to a steering hand for a general good, can be framed to lead to good results by avoiding negative outputs at the same time. Last but very important, how could we then deal with uncertainty - as decentralized, informal participation will ultimately be unpredictable as long we have not understood the complex processes underlying their formation.
ReplyDeleteI know it is not easy to hypothesize with so little information about such issues but strategic designs have been proposed and tried out before. A workshop such as the CSI may allow us to think a step further than the information at hand actually would normally enable – we would like to create discussions not necessarily convince with bullet proof proposals.