Mutirão Paulo Freire

MONU Magazine on Urbanism, 2020

As basic housing increasingly commodifies, a third of São Paulo’s metropolitan popu- lation is left to dwell in precarious conditions (Pinheiro, 2015). At the same time, speculative market-dynamics mustered a festering stockpile of vacant buildings and terrains (Silva 2009; Silva, Biava, and Sígolo 2009). Challenging this paradox, con- temporary urban social movements are providing shelter by occupying these residual spaces dispersed across the urban fabric. Resonating with a Lefebvrian plea for rights to the city (Earle 2017; Lefebvre 1968), occupation movements address housing inequal- ity through collective self-organization and -construction. This article explores how such urban movements produce peculiar forms of affordable housing. More specifically, it focusses on the occupation tactics that the Frente de Luta por Moradia, known as FLM (Alliance/Forefront of the Struggle for Housing) wields over successive stages of insurgent city-making in São Paulo.

2005

The text analyzes a proposal of collective habitation in the historical center of the city of São Paulo, designed for low-income inhabitants living in risk areas. The project, awarded with honorable mention in an important recent national competition, has as its main objective to rethink the social interests of collective habitation in the central regions of the great cities. The proposal looks to be an alternative to the traditional policies which are grounded in modernist principles and have been fulfilled in the city through the construction of "mega" housing settlements implanted in the distant peripheries. This solution caused a series of social and infrastructural problems in the city, which are difficult to resolve. The deformity of the center of this metropolis becomes a homogeneous model. However, if the objective is to intensify diversity, the differences must be articulated. This is not meant to add new dissonances, or to try to harmonize elements of conflicting genesis. The proposal looks to articulate the chaos and the generic, from the possibilities of experiences that a metropolis such as São Paulo allows. In the program, 160 habitations of different sizes form the building properly, and it reproduces the functional varieties and space dynamics in the implantation (and in the diversity of the occupation of the surroundings). Its volumes associate the necessities of the implantation, already assigned, the necessities of the units (insulation, ventilation, circulation, etc), and constructive rationality. The openings, ampler than usual ones in buildings of social habitation, are dimensioned in order to provide luminosity and ventilation beyond the visual and space relations with the external environment. The analysis looks to emphasize the innovative aspects of the implantation and the reorganization of the surrounding public space; they represent a new possibility for the transformation of the deteriorated centers of 266 Medrano, Recaman Brazilian cities. The urban renewal of these degraded areas must be opposed to the current trends that promote the gentrification of the central areas and the deepening of social divisions promoted by neo-liberal reforms.

Occupy All Streets: Olympic Urbanism and Contested Futures in Rio de Janeiro, 2016

Docomomo Journal, 2014

The 60s was a decade of profound change in Brazil. The federal capital was transferred to Brasília, which represented the realization of the ideal of the modern city envisaged at CIAM IV. Modern architecture, which in its Brazilian version, was characterized by the Escola Carioca (Rio de Janeiro School), gave way to the São Paulo avant-garde, concerned with truth to materials and social aspirations. In politics we saw the shift from a democratic government to a military dictatorship, which sought to legitimize itself through the creation of a state funding system to solve the nation’s housing deficit. These factors created the conditions for the development of a series of housing projects, including the exemplary project discussed in this paper.

Housing the Co-op: A Micropolitical Manifesto, 2020

2005

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 [1]. 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 [2]. 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 infrastructure. It is located in São Paulo, Brazil.

The Latin Americanist, 2018

In anticipation of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games, Rio de Janeiro initiated several urban infrastructure projects including Porto Maravilha, Morar Carioca, and the Units of Police Pacification (UPP) program. Starting in 2008, one aspect of that effort involved bringing favelas, irregular and unplanned neighborhoods, under the control of centralized urban planning. However, rather than consult the residents to align infrastructure planning with the needs of the community, the planners imposed projects such as a cable car and a funicular tram. The authors use mental maps drawn by the residents of the Morro da Providência favela to uncover five main themes related to that process: public space, sanitation, access to food, transportation, and fear. The method reveals the residents’ perspectives on the disconnect between the conceived social space of urban planners and the lived social space of everyday life, and thereby, how the infrastructure projects failed the needs of the favela community.

In 2009, Brazil launched the mass housing program “Minha Casa, Minha Vida” (“My House, My Life”), which aims to build 3.4 million housing units by the end of 2014. By reexamining the program at a critical time, Minha Casa—Nossa Cidade (“My House, Our City”) attempts to hack the production of mass housing and tackle the profound social changes currently underway in Brazil. In three chapters, the book reviews the history and implementation of the government program, highlights the ingenuity of “Popular Brazilian Architecture,” and presents design proposals by MAS Urban Design for low-cost housing. Building on the program’s success in broadening access to housing, Minha Casa—Nossa Cidade puts forth a vision for the city as a common project and the transformation of monotonous urban areas into popular neighborhoods—living environments that can be appropriated according to individual as well as collective needs. Edited by Marc Angélil & Rainer Hehl, in collaboration with Something Fantastic.

2014

works address the relationship between housing and urban development of contemporary cities. Theory of architecture and urbanism, urbanization, megacities, urban economics, urban sociology and urban planning are some of the fields involved in his recent research.