Cultivating the Field in the Global Hinterland: Community Building for Mass Housing in the Amazon Region

The large-scale residential settlements that have sprung up over the last decade to house migrants flocking to join Brazil's burgeoning rural industries are in urgent need of retrofitting with infrastructure and community facilities if they are to become sustainable. To this end, international urban design practice the BAÚ Collaborative has initiated the ‘Eden’ project – a participatory design process that involves state authorities, local NGOs, residents and social workers. Rainer Hehl , a cofounder of BAÚ, outlines the problem, the project, and its test-site: the mining town of Parauapebas.     

Linking the Formal and Informal: Favela Urbanisation and Social Housing in São Paulo

São Paulo is Brazil's largest city with over 20 million inhabitants, 14 per cent of which live in informal settlements. Here author, critic and editor Fernando Serapião describes various housing initiatives led by Elisabete França during her two stints at the city's Secretaria de Habitação (SEHAB – Housing Secretariat), which employed design as a tool to upgrade and more fully integrate the city's favelas in the formal city.     

Rethinking Minha Casa,Minha Vida: The Resurgence of Public Space

Minha Casa Minha Vida (MCMV – My House, My Life) is a federal programme started in 2009 that provides low-interest finance to construction companies in an attempt to plug the housing crisis and roll out millions of homes for low-income families across Brazil. Architect Nanda Eskes of Atelier 77 and photographer André Vieira look at the impact that this fast-track, hands-off approach has had on the overall quality of housing provision and the urban environment; they also highlight some innovative initiatives that have been conceived to ameliorate its impact.     

Maps to Hack,Synchronise and Decipher: Unseen Cartographies of Rio

As a young architect in the 1990s, Gabriel Duarte , now an architecture professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, worked on the Favela-Bairro initiative. Here he describes how that experience of mapping and designing informal settlements proved formative, informing the New Cartographies research project that his practice, CAMPO, has undertaken to informally map Rio's physical and social transformations in the run up to 2016.     

Old Dispersions and Scenes for the Production of Public Space The Constructive Margins of Secondarity

The density of development in Belgium is such that the entire country has become an open city, with little sense of where one metropolitan area begins and another ends. Bruno De Meulder describes the underlying logic of this unbroken urbanscape, and the opportunity it affords for re-editing and reinserting informal social spaces in areas of wasted land. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Importing planning ideas,mirroring progress: the hinterland and the metropolis in mid-twentieth-century Brazil

By 1950, the northern region of Paraná State was an affluent settlement zone, due to the prosperous coffee-growing industry and a recent systematic colonization scheme, with its deliberate process of urbanization, which had been responsible for a network of planned new towns. The region was economically and culturally tied to the dominant city of São Paulo, and the changing image of its main towns – Londrina and Maringá – was basically the result of the work of prestigious São-Paulo-based architects and town planners that had been hired by the local elite. Notably, modern architecture and urbanism were imported as a means of achieving modernity: a targeted instrument of civilization, even in a colonization zone where material conditions were relatively unfavourable. In fact, the acts of borrowing, rejection, imitation, adaptation, and transformation can be observed in the movement of ideas. Thus, this paper aims to analyse the two-way relationship established between the most influential Brazilian metropolis and the wealthy provincial hinterland longing to mirror modern features. More precisely, it aims to account for foreign influences and local initiatives as global mechanisms responsible not only for the diffusion of modern planning and architectural practices but also for the construction of a pioneering regional identity.     

A History of Territories,Movements and Borders: Politics of Inhabitation

If the city is as much about culture as nature, then a cultural understanding of the shaping of the urban is as essential as a scientific one. Here, architect and critic Marina Lathouri , who directs the graduate programme in History and Critical Thinking at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture in London, describes how the concept of planning in the 19th century became intrinsically linked to notions of territory, borders and spatial organisation. She questions whether this might now be tested, and new design technologies used, to expose underlying emerging patterns of disruptive flows beckoning the possibility of the logic of a new social disposition.     

Mapping Scales of Urban Identity

Ricky Burdett , Professor of Urban Studies at LSE where he is Director of the Urban Age programme, is engaged in studying cities at different scales and regional contexts. Here he looks at what gives a city like London its unique sense of scale, and how it might be possible to design in the sort of vibrancy and spatial complexity that evolve in informal neighbourhoods over time. Through examples of local initiatives in Cape Town and Mumbai, he gives concrete evidence of what constitutes this approach.     

Articulating the Broken City and Society

Jorge Mario Jáuregui of Metrópolis Projetos Urbanos (MPU) has been responsible for more than 20 projects for the Favela-Barrio (slum-to-neighbourhood) Programme implemented by the Rio de Janeiro city government, and two large-scale urban redevelopment projects for President Lula's PAC (Growth Acceleration Programme). Here Jáuregui describes the strategies behind his work and specifically the transformation of public space that was undertaken at the Complexo de Manguinhos in northern Rio as part of the PAC scheme. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Citadels of Freedom: Lina Bo Bardi's SESC Pompéia Factory Leisure Centre and Teatro Oficina,São Paulo

Transgression is by implication transdisciplinary, slipping beyond accepted boundaries. Rachel Sara describes how Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi designed her buildings in a state of ‘incompleteness’, so as to be ready for a collaborative occupancy in ‘recognition that the users' experiences construct the architecture as much as the architect herself’.     

PREVI-Lima’s Time: Positioning Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda in Peru’s Modern Project

Launched in 1968, the PREVI-Lima housing competition brought informal urbanisation to the attention of architects worldwide. The competition brief required the design of low-rise, high-density expandable homes, grouped in neighbourhoods. Here Sharif S Kahatt puts PREVI’s experimental project within the social, political and theoretical context of the time. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The AADRL: Design,Collaboration and Convergence

Brett Steele, former director of the Architectural Association's Design Research Laboratory (AADRL) and now director of the Architectural Association, reflects upon the DRL as a laboratory for the production of a different kind of student and teacher, and ultimately as a new model for architectural education. His ‘screenshots’ offer an informal image/text-based window through which to browse the general atmosphere of that research endeavour. The DRL was also very active in employing outside specialists from a variety of disciplines including computer programming and robotics. These interests were situated within the DRL's much larger ambition of rethinking the very definition of research itself, not isolated in the purely reflective interests of history and criticism but based on the projective desires of innovation. Moreover, the organisation of these new laboratories of design life begin to resemble their objects of study. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Dissatisfied São Paulo

São Paulo is a city of voracious appetites: insatiable in its desire for development and transformation, having swallowed up a population of some 20 million. Could it, however, be approaching a moment of reflection and repose? Architect and writer Francesco Perrotta-Bosch describes how a new development plan, the Plano Diretor, is enabling the city to take stock.     

Shape and the City

At a time when architecture's historical relationship to the city -founded on various formal and, more recently, informal homologies – has been rendered inoperative, how might a renewed architecture constructively inform the megalopolis? RE Somol flings all the formal and informal protocols offered to the city by architecture out of the pram and calls for a politics of shape, a potential trajectory tested with two projects by Zago Architecture.     

Formalisation: An Interview with Hernando de Soto

The Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto is internationally renowned for his writings on the informal economy. Through his work as the President of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD) in Lima, he has effectively advocated the creation of a legal system to help the poor access property rights. In his latest book, The Amazon is not Avatar, he makes a significant shift away from the problems caused by massive urban migrations to cities to focusing on the benefits of property and business rights for resource-rich indigenous communities in the Amazon. Angus Laurie interviews De Soto on his current thinking and highlights why he has had such an important influence on social housing in Latin America. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A City at Play: Rio de Janeiro on the Eve of the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games

What will be the outcome of the large-scale construction programmes and under-delivered promises undertaken in preparation for the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games? Ana Luiza Nobre , Associate Professor of Architectural History at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and Head of Research and Education at the Instituto Moreira Salles, gazes into her crystal ball and asks what the ongoing legacy of Rio 2016 might be.     

Stages of a state: from São Paulo's Teatro São José to the Teatro Municipal, 1854–1911

This article uses the cases of the Teatro São José and the Teatro Municipal to explain how and why performance space in the city of São Paulo, Brazil, became an increasingly public issue between 1854 and 1911. Specifically, I analyse the ways in which the notion of the theatre as a public good evolved both in the discourse of paulistas and in the practice of legislation and contract negotiation. This article thus interprets planning history as a history of ideas and assumes cultural policy-making to encompass both government and non-government actors. To that end, utilizing legislation, government records, architectural plans, and the press as sources, I argue that theatres' ‘publicness’ in São Paulo was rationalized along three lines: their potential accessibility to a broad audience, their visibility, and their high cost. While public spending on the Teatro São José was justified on the grounds of economic development and moral and civic education, the Teatro Municipal garnered support as a project of Progressive Era urban reform that sought to affirm São Paulo's place in the civilized world.     

Penang Tropical City,Penang, Malaysia OMA

A mixed-use programme for Penang in Malaysia with the potential to accommodate a resident population of 27,000 required OMA to operate at a planning level, while providing architectural definition. João Bravo da Costa describes how this led to a strategy that focused on types rather than objects, and specifically a typological distribution of programme across the site.     

From Product to Process: Building on Urban-Think Tank’s Approach to the Informal City

Adriana Navarro-Sertich interviews a pioneer of the informal in architecture, co-founder and co-director of Urban-Think Tank (U-TT) Alfredo Brillembourg . Brillembourg explains how U-TT's work seeks to connect informal settlements with the formal city, enabling inhabitants to access services and infrastructure. U-TT is now taking the lessons it has learnt in working in Latin American cities, such as Caracas and São Paulo, elsewhere in the world with the aim of ‘working globally and acting locally’. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.