CIDADES, Comunidades e Territórios

Building communal ties in the Arranjo Local da Penha

2021-05-05T12:10:11+01:00

This paper studies the development of Arranjo Local da Penha, a territorial community network created in 2016 in the favelas of Penha, rooted in the north zone of Rio de Janeiro. This network is led mostly by women practicing urban agriculture based on agroecology, who build and expand their project through local organization. Through field research and participant observation, the paper sheds new light on the practices and dynamics of this network. The paper describes the Arranjo’s trajectory, pointing out the limits and possibilities to the development of urban agriculture in the favelas of Penha. Overall, my research indicates an increase in women’s protagonistic role, in parallel to the building of strong emotional ties between Penha´s territory and them. These are outcomes of their effort to create access to “comida de verdade” (“real food”) in the favelas. The paper reinforces the importance of local food production as a path to promote not only health and well-being, but also the debates about memory and culture - leading to the strengthening of people´s social ties and their sense of belonging to the community.

New capital cities in the Global South

2021-03-29T11:30:12+01:00

This paper contextualizes Abuja’s planning history (Nigeria, 1979-1981) and Palmas (Brazil, 1989), considering networks of knowledge, travelling ideas, and the planners’ tool-kit. It analyses these new capital cities’ layouts through a more global reading of planning history. It argues that their plans, created out of political and economic imperatives and entrusted with transformative expectations, did not abandon the hegemonic modernist models in post-modernist, post-colonial times, regardless of the planners’ backgrounds. Global ideas concealed cultural sensibilities in both cases as local and foreign professionals developed comparable planning proposals in equivalent responses to the international frameworks.

City, culture and urbanism

2021-02-23T16:22:21+00:00

This article examines the formulation, implementation, and reasons for suspending the Master Plan of the Historic Centre of Asuncion (PlanCHA), Paraguay. Instead of a traditional master plan, the winner proposal of the international competition organized by the country's National Government in 2014 is a master process composed of dozens of top-down and bottom-up participatory actions, articulated by ten initial strategies. The research carried out on PlanCHA is part of investigations ongoing at Nomads.usp, the Center for Interactive Living Studies of the Institute of Architecture and Urbanism, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, on participatory decision-making processes in the context of urban interventions in several cities around the world. As in the case of Asuncion, we prioritize urban intervention plans that, in addition to face-to-face actions, include digital participation platforms. The research on PlanCHA aimed to understand the issues involved in the implementation of an action plan that included and depended totally on the participation of public managers, politicians, non-governmental organizations, universities, real estate agents, and traders for its success, in a capital city whose population has virtually no experience of participation in public decision-making processes. Finally, the article lists some hypotheses for the Plan's interruption, categorized for administrative, political, and socio-economic reasons. We interviewed the winning office team in Madrid and the partner team of Paraguayan architects who implemented the project locally. In Asuncion, we also met historians, members and former members of the National and Local governments, real estate agents, community representatives, cultural producers, residents, and academic researchers. We made several technical visits to the Asuncion Historic Centre and studied historical, urban, demographic, academic, and journalistic documents.

Araguaína/TO: city and discourse in the Brazilian Amazon

2021-01-07T12:48:54+00:00

This article aims at analyzing the “Espaço Cultural Agnaldo Borges Pinto”, located in Araguaína-Tocantins, founded on the concepts provided by Orlandi (1999) and Ultramari (2019). We assume that the construction of such a cultural space relates to the order of the “urban discourse”. That is to say that the urban discourse produces conflicts and a certain kind of urban “organization”. In order to achieve our aim, we take two institutional journals to construct our corpus, namely “Prestando contas a comunidade (2000), and Araguaína - História e atualidade (2000). They were both edited by the City Hall of Araguaína. In addition, data were also collected in local press between 2011 and 2020. By analyzing these records, the way this cultural space was meant was problematized. We especially highlighted how the circulation of meanings about “Espaço Cultural Agnaldo Borges Pinto” ocurred locally. Especifically, the analysis dealt with utterances found in the interviews extracted from the journals and from the sites visisted. Thus, we were able to map the designations and the process of adjectivation through which the construction of the space was textually and discursively signified. As a conequence, we were also able to reflect about the effects of this so called “order of urban discourse”, mainly to what concerns the category of “organization”. The idea of intra-urban space, as understood by Villaça (2001), allowed us to improve our analysis. Results have shown that there is an institutionalized discursivity in conflict. The construction and the conclusion of “Espaço Cultural Agnaldo Borges Pinto” is meant to be part of a bigger Project of constructing similar spaces, not only in Brazil but also in other parts of the world.

Community and Architecture Treble

2021-01-11T12:19:49+00:00

This research seeks to relate some of the processes that led to consider within the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne the inclusion of the concept of community and the successive incorporation of the settlers to the architectural project, by showing a context of references, reverberations and interactions around the subject. A bibliographic review of primary and secondary sources that narrate those actions from the end of the 19^th century was carried out, with the contribution of Patrick Geddes theories, which had a notable influence in Team X, leading to the end of CIAMs in the mid-20^th century, and also to the anarchist architect John Turner, a key figure who researched pioneering experiences of popular housing in Peru and disseminated them in the Global North. The discussions that took place in the CIAMs questioned the absolute hierarchy of the professional vis-à-vis the communities, in which the notion of authorship of work is disregarded and is fully transferred to the users. Those pioneering experiences can be a call for attention to consider spaces not disputed by the real estate market as a part of architectural praxis, especially in Latin America. This involves a process of recognition and clash with the reality of most of the geographic space of our cities – unequal in essence – and eager for expeditious solutions to the great contradictions that prevail in our context.

The Paintings on Mies Van der Rohe’ Collages

2020-12-16T14:26:58+00:00

A lot has been written about the architectural production of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, German architect naturalized American that built some of the most relevant pieces of architecture of the XX century. Mies produced an extensive amount of collages, today archived in the MoMA - Museum of Modern Art in New York, that unveil an accurate aesthetic of architectural representation. The principal investigation about this set of collages of Mies can be found in the book Montage Collage of Andreas F. Beitin, Wolf Eiermann e Brigitte Franzen, that constituted the catalog of the exhibition Mies van der Rohe: The collages of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, presented on October 28 of 2016, in the Ludwig Fórum in Aachen, Germany. In time, they all made an undeniable contribution to start a debate on this subject. However, in this article we focus on a crucial element of the composition that has not been sufficiently studied: the works of Art.