Renewal of metropolitan areas - social and collective housing (a case-study from São Paulo, Brazil)

Abstract

Paper presented at the XXXIII IAHS World Congress on Housing, 27-30 September 2005,"Transforming Housing Environments through Design", University of Pretoria.

The development of architectural interventions in great cities opens up a debate about new forms of performance in urban space. The explosion of the so called “global cities”, linked to an international net of economical corporations and stimulated by the transnational capital, breaks up the modern city. The “social apartheid” leads the city in two speeds and restructures man’s surviving conditions: the “socially excluded” are willing to survive, while the “socially chosen” are supported by the redistribution of power in insurmountable walls: an overrigid distribution of capital and work. Today’s metropolis is the set for several strategies of urban reinvention that analyses the space through the contemporary chaos: they act in its real sphere, not from utopias. The city understood as a mutable and fluid organism puts in question the fragmented space concept: the city is revalued through reterritorializations and collective identities, permanently in change. The present study intends to create an alternative strategy for urban design in metropolitan areas that takes cultural and historical importance into consideration. It focuses on the excluded people such as recyclable garbage collectors, homeless, informal economy dealers and temporary occupants of abandoned buildings. The project is a proposal of a new methodology for acting in consolidated metropolis centers with social housing, and other infra-structure. It is located in São Paulo, Brazil.