For more information contact: Kristine Stiphany
This studio will design transitions toward ecological and housing convergence in Brazil’s post-industrial urban areas. It conceptualizes transition as an infrastructure for progressively revealing and repairing human and non-human habitats that are significantly compromised where climate change and capital co-locate, as is the case where property owners in industrial areas maintain an abundance of vacant sites that could be converted for collective social and ecological use.
São Paulo is South America’s largest city, containing the most historic and industrially productive post-industrial territory in the country—the Tamanduateí crescent— as well as São Paulo’s largest favela (slum). In the Tamanduateí, vital properties have been converted for capital-led development or left vacant to appreciate, in either scenario failing to provide housing for the workers who once sustained this megacity. In 2014, São Paulo changed course and developed an urban plan to convert the Tamanduateí’s ownership structure by building social housing on some vacant sites, but the plan never materialized. Given this promising change of direction, this studio will revisit the idea to explore how housing might be incorporated into the Tamanduateí in ways that promote a socially, economically, and ecologically productive future for alternative ownership arrangements among working class populations.
Toward this goal, the studio is organized around three phases of work that consider:
(1) What are territories of resource co-management that mediate the economic agendas of industrial actors and the ecological imperatives of post-industrial landscape conservation?
(2) What are gradients of cooperative housing that merge local material resource streams and emerging upcycled technologies?
And (3) How can biophysical gradients and material modules co-create scenarios for post industrial regeneration?
The course will develop proposals that respond to a multi-year participatory action research with a local community organization, UNAS. While Brazilian architects, planners, and urban designers will review the midterm work, UNAS members will critique the final proposal. Students will produce individual projects, and together we will consider how they interact and relate as a broader vision that responds to UNAS’ five areas of desired change, including land reparations, collaborative housing, decarbonization, circular economy, active landscapes.