‘An Abundance of Hats and a Shortage of Heads’

‘An Abundance of Hats and a Shortage of Heads’ notes and reflections on: Justin mcguirk, Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture verso, 2014 antonio di campli UTPL, Departamento de Arquitectura y Artes 16.01.15, unicam sad

窶連n Abundance of Hats and a Shortage of Heads. Notes and Reflections on: Justin McGuirk, Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture, Verso, 2014 Excerpt texts from: Justin McGuirk, Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture, Verso, London, 2014 Texts in Italian from the author Images from the Internet

Contents

Introduction 1. From Buenos Aires to San Salvador de Jujuy: Dictators and Revolutionaries 2. From Lima to Santiago: A Platform for Change 3. Rio de Janeiro: The Favela Is the City 4. Caracas: The City Is Frozen Politics 5. Torre David: A Pirate Utopia 6. BogotĂĄ: The City as a School 7. MedellĂ­n: Social Urbanism 8. Tijuana: On the Political Equator

1 Tuesday, October 5, 1897, Canudos, Brasil

The First Favela

Canudos ‘Do you know what those people up there in Canudos have done?’ Epaminondas Gonçalves murmurs, banging on the desk. ‘They’re occupying land that doesn’t belong to them and living promiscuously, like animals.’

Canudos was a town founded in the Bahia state of northeastern Brazil in 1893 by Ant么nio Vicente Mendes Maciel, an itinerant preacher who had been wandering through the backroads and lesserinhabited areas of the country from the 1870s onwards, followed by a band of loyal supporters.

As his following swelled, he took on the name Ant么nio Conselheiro (Antonio the Counselor) and increasingly began to trouble the local authorities, who saw him as a Monarchist and thus a threat to their legitimacy.

In this utopian community all property is communal and money is forbidden.

There were houses of mud, palms and cane. With a peak of 35,000 people in 1896 Canudos was the second largest town in Bahia after the state capital. It had schools, reportedly suffered very little crime, and by hard work the surrounding land was made agriculturally productive.

Canudos, the Holy City.

Fifty-two hundred mud huts and a handful of whitewashed churches, where a few years before there had been only a ruined farmhouse and an old well. The walls of the houses were the same shade as the parched earth on which they stood, so you could barely see the town until you were already in it.

Euclides da Cunha, an engineer and journalist embedded with the troops, nicknamed Canudos the “mud-walled Jerusalem,” but to the people who lived there, it was Belo Monte, the beautiful hill.

People included landless farmers, former slaves, indigenous people and cangaceiros; the fledgling settlement even developed a leather exporting business.

As a community, Canudos operated somewhat like a religious commune, with Antônio Conselheiro as the principal member and director. Canudos was a heavily religious settlement, under the sway of Antonio’s fanaticism, but despite his fanaticism he did not assume any official position of authority.

Canudos was not explicitly communist, and in fact could even be called monarchistic, but the settlement worked along somewhat communistic lines, practicing common ownership, abolishing the official currency, negating Brazilian national laws, as well as participating collectively in the management of the town. Canudos was in essence a reaction against the contemporary Brazilian nation-state.

The local government of Bahia felt pressure from landowners to take action against the settlement because of labor shortages caused by migration. The Brazilian national government wanted a military expedition sent to destroy Canudos in the name of liberalism and progress because the mere existence of autonomous movements not subject to state control was antithetical to the national interest.

Canudos stood for such autonomy, and therefore had to be destroyed.

The first three invasions were amply defeated by the villagers. However, in 1897, a considerably larger fourth invasion force managed to overwhelm the village.

The Brazilian army showed no mercy, brutally massacring the survivors of the commune and destroying the entire village. The town had 5,200 dwellings.

Brasilian Army

Canudos Survivors

The irony is that the remainder of the army that undertook this bloody campaign returned to Rio and founded a settlement that would, in turn, prove to be a revolutionary force in city-making.

Thousands of soldiers flocked to Rio when the war ended in 1897, because the government had offered them housing in the nation’s capital. Veterans built provisional shelters on the hill while they awaited the promised housing. When it never materialized, the initial settlement grew into a permanent community originally called “Morro da Favela”.

They founded the first favela.

Named after a fava bean plant that happened to grow abundanty there, this favela was located on a hill just outside Rio, subsequently named Morro da Providência.

Today Morro da Providência is in the hearth of the city, it sits on a hill between Rio’s Port Zone and central thoroughfare Avenida Presidente Vargas, houses 5,500 people.

Canudos

Morro da ProvidĂŞncia

Our Radical Future: Cults, Utopias and Rebellions of the 1890s The story of Canudos began with a dream and ended in a massacre. It was a dream of utopia and a dream of escape. It was an ancient dream: the earthly Jerusalem. And in the 1890s, it was shared by the dispossessed and marginalized the world over: by the inhabitants of Canudos in the droughtraved backlands of Brazil, by the anti-foreign Boxers in northern China, by the half-ecstatic, halfdespairing practitioners of the Ghost Dance in the American West. All of them, in their separate ways, were searching for space and the means to remake the world over in their image.

The 1890s were a time of starvation and revolt. It was a decade of environmental catastrophe, economic depression and savage colonial wars. It was also the golden age of liberal capitalism and global imperialism, a time when the combination of industrial manufactures and Western arms had penetrated almost every corner of the world. In the 1890s, most people still lived on the knife-edge of subsistence, stalked by the threat of drought and flood, boom and bust.

2 9:35 a.m. Saturday, June 30, 1962 President Kennedy arrives at the housing project Tours project-brief ceremony Nonoalco-Tlatelolco, Mexico City

The Modernist Utopia

In the John F. Kennedy Library’s digital archive, it’s scheduled, during his official visit to Mexico Ciy a trip to see Nonoalco-Tlatelolco, a vast housing estate, the biggest of its kind in Latin America.

The idea was to show to the US president Mexico’s modernization efforts presenting an industrialized ranks of housing estates stretching as far as the eye could see: mechanization, social mobility and economic power all wrapped up in one potent image.

1960-64, Mario Pani Conjunto Urbano Presidente Adolfo López Mateos de Nonoalco Tlatelolco Ciudad de México Kennedy didn’t visit Tlatelolco since the housing project was still under construction.

Two years later, the city would have an infinitely more impressive site to show off: row upon row of megabucks stand proudly over the low-rise sprawl of Mexico City. With their gridded, ultra-repetitive facades.

Here was the modernist utopia built on a scale that Le Corbusier had dreamt of but was never able to realise.

This city within the city comprised 130 buildings, providing 15,000 apartments.

At its height, Tlatelolco housed nearly 100,000 people.

It was the kind of solution that the problem of Mexico City seemed to demand, problem of population explosion fueled by industrialization and the accompanying mass migration from the countryside.

What was a population of a little over a million in 1940 was on its way to becoming 15 million by 1980.

Tlatelolco’s architect was Mario Pani. Like other prominent Latin American architects of his generation, he was trained in Europe, indeed in Paris, where he attended the École des beaux-arts in the 1920s before imbibing the spirit of Corbusian modernism.

For Tlatelolco took the modernist idea of social housing to its logical, many would say, absurd conclusion. If, in the mid twentieth century the city of the future would comprise rows of megabucks sitting in parklands and gardens, then the future looked like Tlatelolco.

Indeed, Pani’s plan had been to build ‘five or six Tlatelolcos’ on that site, with an extension of three million square metros.

In Luis Buñuel’s film about a group of delinquents in Mexico City, Los Olvidados (The Forgotten), there is a scene in which a youth who has settled into a life of crime murders a rival and steals the money out of his pockets.

In the background is a the steel frame of a modern building. This space-frame is surely a symbol of approaching progress. In Buñuel’s unremittingly portrait of life in Mexico City in 1950, crime is depicted as the inevitable result of poverty.

The fleeting shot of that construction site is arguably the only moment of hope: it suggests change, modernism rising to the rescue.

It’s not Tlatelolco that is being erected in the film, but it might as well be. The estate was built on the site of an overcrowded slum district, and Pani’s design, commissioned by the government, was intended to rehouse its inhabitants while bringing in middle-class residents to create social diversity.

In short, it was an old-fashioned slum clearance.

At the heart of the estate is a historic site.

The ruins of a pyramid mark the spot where the Aztecs were finally defeated by the Spanish, and right next to it stands the sixteenth-century church of Santiago Tlatelolco that heralded the new era.

Pani incorporated these pivotal monuments into a centerpiece called the Plaza de las tres culturas, a broad square rimmed by his brutalist apartment blocks. The three cultures meeting here were the pre-Columbian, the colonial and the modern, providing a symbolic ensemble that tied a modernizing Mexico to its past.

But Pani’s architectural allegory was to be overshadowed by tragedy.

In October 1968, only days before the Mexico City Olympics, students chose the Plaza de las tres culturas to stage a pro-democracy demonstration, challenging Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and the singleparty political system that produced him.

Díaz Ordaz called in the army, and hundreds of students were killed by soldiers firing into the square from the surrounding apartment blocks.

The poet Octavio Paz described it as a repeat od an Aztec rite, ‘several hundred boys and girls sacrificed, on the ruins of a pyramid’. This was the first blow to Tlatelolco as an emblem of modern Mexico.

The second came in 1985 when an earthquake brought one of its building crashing to the ground.

A dozen other building had to be pulled down due to structural damage, and the whole complex had to undergo a major structural overhaul. This was the more devastating blow to Pani’s vision. Today, Tlatelolco’s is almost unrecognizable even if tis scale remains intimidating. After the earthquake the neighborhood went into decline, becoming a no-go zone in the 1990s. It doesn’t feel like a no-go zone today, however.

This is a familiar story.

Housing estate in Europe and America have faced the same problems and seen public opinion turn against them the same way. Though rarely a fault of architecture itself, and more often a case of poor maintenance, mismanagement and blighting by poverty, the architects were blamed. Their sins were catalogued and generalized: treating people like ants, making cities ugly, replacing variety with standardization and repetition.

Citing ‘failure’, governments used these sins as an excuse to stop building social housing, relying on the private sector to fill the gap and allowing their neoliberal policies to make cities more unequal places.

1954/55, Minoru Yamasaki, Pruitt-Igoe, Saint Louis, Missouri 2870 apartments

A las 3:00 pm del 16 de marzo de 1972, la Autoridad de Vivienda de St. Louis demoli贸 el primero de los 33 rascacielos del complejo de viviendas Pruitt Igoe a trav茅s de la detonaci贸n. abandono de la idea de la ciudad como m谩quina > urbanismo postmoderno

By the darky 1970s, modernist housing estates were already widely discredited in Europe and America.

The architecture historian Charles Jencks famously pinpointed the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe in 1972 as the end of modernism.

This was not quite the case in Latin America, where ambitious social housing projects continued to be built until the end of the decade, often by military dictatorship who used them to reward their support bases. Latin America is where modernist utopia went to die. Anyway it was another event that signalled the end of social housing as an ideal, and with it the end of the architect’s reign as the most powerful force in city-making.

In 1968, the president of Peru, Fernando Belaúnde, initiated a project with the support of the United Nations that set out to solve the growing problems of Lima’s barriadas, or shanty towns. PREVI, Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda, was a different kind of proposal, opting not fot the artillery of the megablocks, but a more intelligent scheme of individual houses that residents could expand as their families grew.

The idea had come out of the research of an english architect, John Turner, who had studied the barriadas and was making a convincing case not to see then as slums that needed clearing, but as creative and efficient solutions to the needs of the poor. Why move them to new blocks on the edge of the city, fara away from their jobs and with rents that they couldn’t afford?

Controversially, Turner proposed that it was actually an advantage for the poor to build their own homes.

The instigators of the PREVI scheme met him halfway, with a hybrid solution.

The government would provide a framework of good architecture that was specifically designed to be expanded by the residents, it was modernism combined with the slums.

It was, in effect, an attempt to save architecture, to resuscitate it as a force for social change.

Aereal view of completed Previ project

A housing scheme in the very north of Chile designed by Alejandro Aravena and his practice Elemental, this is social housing built for a poor community with the barest of budgets. What was ingenious about it was that it seemed to rewrite the equation of social housing, providing each family with merely half a house and letting then build the other half according to their means and within a structural framework.

It was clever, adaptive and it allowed, just as PREVI had, people to participate in the end result.

3 A generation of Optimists

Why is Latin America special?

And what can we learn from it?

Resistenza la città coloniale: resistenza del popolo all’autorità. Dai tempi del dominio spagnolo per via del prevalere degli interessi particolari su quelli pubblici. se un’area a ridosso dei quartieri centrali viene dichiarata edificabile, la gente costruisce fuori da quell’area per pagare meno tasse, e poi i politici saranno costretti a portarci i servizi. attraverso questo ricatto si attua la resistenza al potere. le elite, quelle che tradizionalmente escono dalle aree centrali in costante ricerca di zone esclusive e sicure ora non sanno più dove rinserrarsi> si cerca il dialogo, si parla di spazio pubblico. occorre pertanto trasformare le ferite, le cesure di separazione in cicatrici, in membrane, in zone di contatto dotate di un carattere funzionale (sedi di passaggio di reti mobilità che si sovrappongono a sistemi ambientali), inventare nuovi dispositivi, nuovi modelli di spazio di interazione sociale. la rete è più forte dell’agopuntura. le due strategie vanno insieme.

La città latino americana è costruita su un’idea urbanistica semplice, il damero, la quadra, ed ha un forte carattere funzionalista.

Occorre lavorare su questo carattere funzionale senza cercare di addomesticarla secondo modelli europei di mixité o porosità. densità/spazio pubblico/centralità

la centralità ha 4 requisiti: deve avere un valore simbolico deve essere riconosciuta dalla gente del posto deve essere un posto dove va tutta la gente. riconoscere il valore simbolico dello spazio urbano

Medellin La domanda posta agli abitanti di un barrio su quale sia il loro spazio simbolico all’inizio non ottiene risposta; dopo un po’ si dice che lo spazio simbolico del quartiere è la casa parrocchiale, insistendo, si arriva dire che lo spazio è l’incrocio di due strade per la questione della visibilità e della sicurezza, infine che lo spazio simbolico è lì dove si va a prendere l’acqua.

Ci vanno tutti pertanto tutti concordano che questo debba essere uno spazio sicuro e non violento.

Accanto alla presa dell’acqua però c’è uno stagno.

Ogni volta che muore qualcuno del quartiere si compra un pesciolino vivo e lo si mette a nuotare nello stagno a ricordo del morto.

Questo luogo, il vero spazio pubblico del quartiere è un’infrastruttura ambientale.

Learning from Latin America There was a time when Latin America was a byword for precariousness, corruption and illegal practices. Today, we are just as likely to think of Wall Street in the same terms. By contrast, Latin America’s economies are relatively stable, demonstrating the kind of growth that the US and Europe would die form, and its governments represent a bastion of progressive politics that has not yet had to dismantle its welfare systems in the name of austerity. But it is on the question of the city that Latin America may have most to offer. The fact that Latin American nations endured the levels of urbanization that they did in the mid twentieth century, in conditions of scarcity, has made them a prime testing ground for radical ideas in urban development and management. For if growth was the paradigm in the twentieth century, so scarcity looks likely to be the preeminent condition of the twenty-first century.

Latin America has useful lessons to impart, about strategy rather than style.

No other region of the world has demonstrated the kind of collective effort and imagination that Latin America has in addressing the chronic symptoms of rapid, unplanned urbanization.

Anyway, if there is one area where Latin American experience contains a global lesson, it is in its attitude to the informal city.

What do we mean by ‘informal’? The short answer is slums. The slums are not defined as informal because they have no form, but because they exist outside the legal and economic protocols that shape the formal city.

Slums are far from chaotic.

Activists?

The first rule of the activist architect is that informal city, the slum, is a fact, and accepting it as functioning, productive piece of the actual city, and not something to be replaced, is the only way forward. The activist are cautious. They observe the conditions, they accumulate date, and then they experiment.

The modernists began with bulldozers; activist begin with a prototype.

Activists propose not objects but actions, not passive forms but active forms: systems, networks, connections, infrastructure.

They idealize ‘urban acupuncture’ because, having witnessed the onslaught of the modernists, a piecemeal approach appeals to our sensitivities. And yet there has to be something that makes all these micro-projects greater than the sum of their parts. As Jorge Fiori, an eminent teacher at the Architectural Association, once put it: ‘Acupuncture only makes sense if there is a body’, and the city is the body. In other words micro-projects only have a significant impact beyond their immediate site if they are part of a network of actions across the city.

open space / public space design strategies: >acupuncture and networks

U-TT / Urban Think-Tank (Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner) In engaging with the informal city, U-TT developed a methodology of maximizing the amount of social activity that a tiny plot of land could deliver.

U-TT uses the tactics of the informal city, developing a street-vendor style of architecture.

In the barrio of La Cruz stands a building that U-TT calls the ‘vertical gymnasium’.

Acupuncture / Vertical Gyms The Gimnasio Vertical is a replicable prototype, a kit of parts that can be assembled in custom contexts and modified to fit different programming, financial and ecological demands.

It consists of three floors and a rooftop court that provide an extremely efficient variety of spaces for different recreational activities. A pilot Vertical Gym opened in Caracas, Venezuela in 2004 leading to the three other Vertical Gyms under construction elsewhere in the city and several others in various stages of development around the world.

Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner were studying at Columbia University in New York City. They were inspired by the efficient use of space in Manhattan’s dense urban fabric, leading them to study recreational spaces such as the University’s gym and the 14th Street YMCA.

The 14th St. YMCA, New York City

The Columbia University Gymnasium, New York

Chacao, Caracas, 2004 The Vertical Gymnasium at Barrio La Cruz (Bello Campo), constructed over 1,000 m2, transforms the site of a former makeshift soccer field into a fitness complex with basketball courts, a dance studio, weights, a running track, a rock-climbing wall and an open-air soccer field—an integral leisure facility for this densely populated sector of the city.

15,000 visitors per month.

It has helped lower the crime rate in this barrio by more than 30 percent since its inauguration.

BARUTA VERTICAL GYMNASIUM Santa Cruz del Este, Caracas, 2013 .

Basketball courts, a dance studio, weight lifting, a running track, a rock climbing wall, and an openair playing field for soccer, combine with a covered area for gatherings before and after the training sessions.

The structure will also be used for cultural, entertainment and conference events.

Vertical Gym El Dorado, Petare, Caracas, 2013 The Vertical Gym was designed over an available lot of 1.388,88m²in a densely populated sector had a worrisome lack of schools, vocational and training centers for adults, and cultural, sport, and public spaces.

This Vertical Gym varies from the others in its two levels of parking and its integration with a frontfacing retail façade. The stores and businesses that inhabit this retail space will invite a diverse range of visitors to the building.

GROTAO COMMUNITY CENTER Sao Paulo, Brazil, 2009 -2014 In the Grotao Community Center and Park, the priority is equipping this peripheral neighborhood with infrastructure, water, sewage networks, lighting, services, and public space.

In addition to stabilizing the precarious ground and eliminating erosion, the terraced landscape transforms Grotão into a “natural arena” that encourages diverse community participation.

The lower zone of the site contains the music school prototype, which vertically stacks several diverse programs to maximize site potential. These include the bus station/transportation infrastructure, soccer pitch, community center, and the music school, which contains classrooms, practice rooms, recording studios, and performance halls.

Commercial spaces are also introduced on the first level as an economic vehicle that activates the street level.

The upper zone contains new replacement housing for those displaced from high-risk zones.

The building maintains both physical and visual connections within the area through a large, open level that works as a continuation of the terrace system.

Other ‘Urban Acupuncture’ Examples.

Pico Estudio Works In some troubled communities around Venezuela abandoned lots, junkyards, and urban pockets have been transformed into community spaces for peace.

The collective PICO estudio teamed up with several local firms as well as international firms, students, volunteers, and more importantly the community members themselves to pinpoint 5 strategic sites and convert them into productive structures that bring a sense of unity and safety.

The metamorphosis from a ruined site into usable public space built by the very members that live in the area introduces a a gesture not commonly seen in these zones, as well as pride amongst its citizens and a connection towards one another as they took part in contributing to the betterment of their tattered urban fabric

Pico Estudio. Petare In one of the densest slums of caracas, PICO estudio joined up with PGRD, Plataforma Gesti贸n Residuos de Ciudad and TXP, Todo Por la Praxis, to transform a self-built house occupying a footprint of roughly 120 m2 into a community space.

What was once a drug trafficking venue now hosts a recording studio, a multipurpose area, computer area, a waiting area, bathrooms and a kitchenette on the first floor and a rooftop basketball court to offer a safer alternative to the street court improvised by the local children.

Los Mangos a smaller squatter community founded in 2005 which now contains around 180 homes. With the help of Al borde and 439 Estudio Arquiurbano, a covered courtyard of 200 m2 stands as a gate into the suburb. traffic barriers line the entry road clearly marking the route of passage for cars and also assuring a safe public space for children and families. in this case, the challenge was to bring together government resources, local fabricators, community members and architects. as the suburb is home to a large metal fabricator, the primary material chosen for the pavilion was steel. only touching the ground in pinpointed spots, a space-frame canopy spans long distances maximizing the usable sheltered area. colorful metal drums now speckle the landscape as planters and seats surrounding a multifunctional courtyard.

Pinto Salinas Oficina lĂşdica and PKMN pacmanarchitectures teamed up with PICO estudio to transform an abandoned structure and improvised dump site into a town square. The community of Pinto Salinas is small but heavily marked by the drug scene, a condition which led the design team to create a central space that would encourage families to have more of a public presence and in turn help combat the darker scenes that would otherwise fill the streets.

A series of steel platforms creates a stepped topography that responds the site’s gradual slope. A steel canopy with metal mesh helps to shade the benches and steps and creates a point from which to hang lights that keep the lot well lit at night. The building in turn is covered with colorful hexagonal tiles and painted bright orange, making it inviting for children.

Vertical Gyms as social condensers Cedric Price, The Fun Palace

Networks / The Caracas Metrocable Two-hours commutes for the poor are part of what makes Latin American cities so divisive.

It takes about 5 minutes to get from Parque Central to the top of San Agustín. Previously the only way to get there was by climbing a concrete staircase for the equivalent of thirty-nine floors, a journey that took up to forty-five minutes.

The Teleférico para Transporte Masivo Interurbano, was opened in 2010.

The cable car system, which is integrated with the Metro System of Caracas, is 2.1 km in length and employs gondolas holding 8 passengers each. Metro Cable’s capacity allows for the movement of 1,200 people per hour in each direction.

There are five stations along the cable car line, dotted along the hilltops, and the journey from first to last takes less that fifteen minutes. That is the fact worth dwelling for a moment.

Two stations will be to be in the valley and connect directly to the Caracas public transportation system. The 3 additional stations will be located on the mountain, along the route in plots that concentrate fundamental community needs such as: accessibility, adequate pedestrian circulation patterns and constructive sustainability. All this under criteria of minimum expropriation and demolition of existing houses.

The five stations’ designs share a basic set of components in common; platform levels, ramps for access, circulation patterns, materials, and structural elements. However, each station differs in configuration and additional functions, and the separate stations include cultural, social and system administrative functions; replacement of demolished residences with more homes, as well as public spaces; a gym, supermarket, and daycare center; and a link between the cable car system and the municipal bus circuit.

For the design of the project U-TT took into account the lessons learned from project for the Long Island Expressway in New York, which was already obsolete before construction was completed.

The goal was to implement the means for change in relation to the fundamental needs of Barrio San Agustin, which its inhabitants identified as: - Safe access to public transport for residents of the neighborhood.

- The development of employment opportunities for the economy of the neighborhood.

- The development of sustainable infrastructure to give permanence and stability to the community.

- Improvements in health, education, employment opportunities and quality of life for the residents of San Agustin.

- Safety and crime reduction.

Connecting the informal to the formal is one thing, it is undeniably progress of sorts.

But if the next phase of the process is to incorporate them into the system, giving them property deeds, taxing them, plugging them into the grid and making them pay for water and electricity, then we already know where that process leads.

That way lies debt, gentrification, displacement through rising land values, the standard machinery of the city as a generator of surplus capital.

Incorporating them into that system would be a failure to recognize that the problem in the system itself. This is not stale Marxist theory, however.

U-TT’s alternative vision for the hill is not socialism but a model developed by the Manhattan elite.

They propose to divide up the hill into cooperatives, in the manner that wealthy New Yorkers build and manage their apartment blocks.

In this model, the government would grant communal rather than individual leases, and residents would group together, perhaps a dozen neighboring houses at a time, and take joint loans for the improvements they want to make.

Instead to be plugged into a grid, San Agustín could be a district that operates off the grid, with solar power and a degree of autonomy. ‘Why can’t be models developed for the elites function for the poor?’

This technical language is appropriated to a piece of engineering infrastructure, but it also carries more than a hint of the techno-utopian futurism that Archigram turned into pop icons in the 1960s.

Archigram’s progeny turned High Tech into the language of airports and banking headquarters. But in Caracas it has been reinvented, in vertical gyms and Metrocable stations, as part of the language of the barrio.

That homage to the 1960s extends to U-TT’s terminology. T hey describe the social amenities they’ve designed at each station as ‘plug-is programmes’ (think Archigram’s Plug-in City, where living capsules are slotted into a kind of mainframe).

MedellĂ­n. Drug lord Pablo Escobar and his wife Victoria Henao

Nets and Jewels. A Photogenic Story A rich but a violent city. One of the inevitable effects of the violence was a deeply segregated city. In affecters everyone, but for those in central and southern districts the northern comunas were literally a no-go zone. And it was this inevitable north-south border that a group of politicians and civic leaders sought to address when, finally, the citizens of Medellín had had enough of bloodshed.

In the Botanical gardens a vast wooden canopy shelters an orchid nursery. The Orquideorama’s octagonal roof, designed by local architects Plan B. In addition, a spectacularly landscaped swimming pool complex designed by young Medellín natives Paisajes Emergentes, next to it the mountain-shaped Coliseo sports complex designed by the prominent Colombian architect Giancarlo Mazzanti for the 2010 South American Games.

A series of new parks and public squares: Parque Explora, Parque de los deseos and Parque de los pies descales, finally the Parque Biblioteca España, a ricky promontory of a building grandstanding over the city from high up in what used to be a notorious slum.Making the Informal Visible.

Medellín’s Metrocable starts near the city centre and cuts swift diagonal lines to the poorest parts of the city. This is Línea K, which carries you east up a hillside to Santo Domingo in three stops.

The precedessor of Sergio Fajardo, Mayor Luis Pérez, initiated the Metrocable project.

With support form Medellín’s metro company, and a budget of 32 million dollars, he went ahead, and the cable car opened in 2004. It was an immediate success. Joining the main metro line, the cable car cut the commute, (previously on foot) to the top of the hill from in a and a half hours to seven minutes. Fajardo later extended the Metrocable, adding Línea J to access Comuna 13, the poorest neighborhood in the city. These two single lines are less ambitious that the cable car system in Caracas, which is a genuine circuit, bu they were a life-changing link from the comunas to the city centre.

One can nitpick with the quality of the architecture, but there is not a shadow of doubt about the message this library sends to the community: that it is valued, that it has opportunities, that it has a future. From the gaps between its three towers, visitors have a dramatic view of the city laid put before them. But it is the opposite view, from the valley below, that is most significant. The importance of Biblioteca EspaĂąa is as a beacon, signaling to the city as a whole.

Icons There has been much derision of iconic architecture in recent years, but this building needed to be iconic. Its very purpose was to draw the gaze of prospering paisas to he hills that they had blinkered from view as if they didn’t exist. The library has a symbolic purpose, which is to make the informal city visible.

Suddenly, the mutually exclusive agendas of social urbanism and urbanism of the spectacle can overlap, with a common goal. Here it was crucial to make the real scale of the city transparent. In a segregated city, where half of the city doesn’t exist, it is necessary to connect not only in a physical way but in a mental way.

Staircases The stairs are being built in the informal settlement Las Independencies (12 000 residents), located in the Comuna 13 as part of the Comuna’s PUI (part of a group of interventions including a Library Park: Parque Biblioteca San Javier , and the city’s second Metrocable).

With 130 linear meters, covering an area of 2000 sqm and replacing over 200 steps, the mechanical staircases climb- through 6 separate segments- 38 m in height.

The staircases are accompanied by other interventions comprising close to 3345 sqm of ‘green and public space, aiming to strengthen and better the life of surrounding residents.’ Contingent on this, a resident interviewed stated that this will be a very beneficial project for the neighborhood as it will bring a lot of tourism, and will end the violence.’ Indeed the staircases have been stipulated to help the security of the area, residents believing that as a new tourism spot, more police will be present in the area.

Comuna 13

Acupuncture / Networks urban densification by overlapping multiple uses of the same space

> section ‘Club Sandwich Urbanism’

>plan

Teddy Cruz Tijuana / San Diego. The Club Sandwich Urbanism Cruz has dome pioneering work in Los Laureles Canyon (Tijuana). He was first to pint out that the waste from San Diego’s construction industry was being recycled into new homes here. Further along the valley, where the settlements is more precarious, the evidence is everywhere: garage doors coming from San Diego are recycled as walls. The houses are works of assemblage, like habitable collages.

The use of readymades like this has led Cruz to describe such neighborhood in Tijuana as purely productive, as opposed to the consumption-based model across the border.

Revealing this symbiotic relationship was one way of ascribing value to a type of settlements that is under-respected. This level of activity need to be amplified if we’re going to understand the sustainable city. A collision of the ecological, the social and the political.

Many of those on the hillside have been leveled using foundations of stacked car tyres, also imported from across the border.

Elsewhere, there are whole post-war prefab houses, simply transplanted from the San Diego suburbs by trucks. In crowded areas these are sometimes rised up on metal stilts, right on the top of another house, a phenomena Cruz calls ‘club sandwich urbanisation’.

Learning from Tijuana San Ysidro: a new model of participative micro-development. He has been working with a local NGO called Casa Familiar, which does everything from providing social services to creating community art projects. With Casa Familiar as the backbone of the project, Cruz set about trying to turn two under-used plots of land into a dense programme of affordable housing and social amenities.

The idea is that the plots are curved up into this slivers, each one with distinct zoning that could allow it to accomodate a different housing typology.

1One of the Plots, which Cruz calls Living Rooms at the Border, would become a row of small apartments, a row of larger family houses, a row of live-works units for artists, and a row of flexible units providing temporary accommodation for guests or relatives.

Squeezing so many different typologies onto one land parcel is part of what’s innovative about this scheme. But even more interesting is the set of social relation between them. The development would begin with a row of open structures housing collective kitchens, informal markets and community workshops. This would be the public dimension at the base of the apartment building.

At the heart of the plot, meanwhile, is a 1920s church that is now Casa Familiar’s cultural centre, and which would be coprogrammed by the artists in the live-work units.

So one parcel of land is providing everything from a diverse range of housing to social amenities and a cultural programme. All of which is connected by a dense system of social relations between the neighbors within the plot and the community outside it.

2 The other plot provides housing for the elderly combined with day care facilities for children.

Here again, instead of building an old people’s home, Cruz has designed a set of unique row houses providing thirteen granny flats with a childcare incorporated, which would be partially run by the seniors themselves.

Tijuana’s mixed-use density infiltrating Southern California

Existing Land USe

Parcel-by-parcel investigation of land use in San Ysidro

Concept collage using Donald Judd’s 15 Untitled Works in Concrete (1980-84)

Casa Familiar Housing

Diagram for Senior Housing with Childcare

Videos 1&2

What is potentially seminal about this project is the diverse set if land uses.

‘We need a new concept of density’ he says. ‘Density is still measured as a number of things, units, per acre. Why not measure it as a number of social and economic exchanges per acre?

Cruz was inspired to think this way by studying the land uses in San Ysidro, which are often multiple and overlapping, a Buddhist temple functioning as an unofficial City Hall, a house front operating as a taquería. In the informal economy, as can be witnessed across Latin America, people will find a way to put even the most unpromising or unlikely places to social and economic use.

By contrast, the strict regulations governing any American city strive to segregate the domestic from the economic and categorize the city into zones suitable for property speculation rather than rich social interaction.

Designing the protocols or the interfaces between communities and spaces, this is what’s missing.

This means: how collective kitchens, informal markets and portents can all co-exist in the same building. > to challenge the American conception of the city as a rigidy zoned; the city must be more communal, more productive.

To draw on the much more complex dynamics of informal economies, where no space goes to waste, where every inch belongs to a dense network of social and economic exchanges.

Interior Urbanism / Superposition of uses

>Typologies Dislocation Latin America, as a whole, has an uncanny ability to dislocate typologies. First cable cars are transplanted from ski resorts to tropical slums, and now the escalator is plucked from its rightful place in airports and department stores to the urban mountainside.

The Triumph of the Un-Lettered City? it isn’t the European city of memory and identity; it isn’t any longer longer the classical modern city This kind of city calls for modes of intervention that go beyond the perpetuation of the modern/ colonial logics that informed former planning strategies.

Canudos For the Brazilian eye-witness Euclides da Cunha, the Counselor exemplifies the degeneracy and barbarism of his ‘uncivilised’ contemporaries.

For Mario Vargas Llosa, he represents the challenge to reconstitute ‘The vision of the conquered’.

‘En 1896 un millar de rebaños correrían de la playa hacia el sertón y el mar se volvería sertón y el sertón mar. En 1897 el desierto se cubrirá de pasto, pastores y rebaños se mezclarían y a partir de entonces habría un solo rebaño y un solo pastor. En 1898 aumentarían los sombreros y disminuirían las cabezas y en 1899 los ríos se tornarían rojos y un planeta nuevo cruzaría el espacio. Había, pues, que prepararse. Habría que restaurar la iglesia y el cementerio, la más importante construcción después de la casa del Señor, pues era antesala del cielo o del infierno, y había que destinar el tiempo restante a lo esencial: el alma.’

Messianism is a language that’s always spoken in the vernacular, and easily misunderstood.

To Marxists, charismatic movements seem primitive.

To liberals, they’re fanatical.

To the orthodox, they seem heretical.

And to those predisposed to put faith in revolution and resistance, they can seem like glimmers of utopia.

All too often, charismatic and millenarian movements are dismissed as anachronisms, suffering from what socialist historian E.P. Thompson called the “enormous condescension of posterity.”

Just as frequently, they can be used to ventriloquize the politics of the moment, and fulfill our own sense of what’s just and unjust.

People came to Canudos in search of salvation, but they also arrived in search of autonomy, and of dignity. They became masters of the art of not being governed. Their achievement was brief, but real.

And if in the end they failed, the failure wasn’t their own. Even if their project began in a dream, the city they created was real, and it was a failure of imagination on the part of the powerful that brought about its destruction.

Utopias aren’t political programs; they’re attempts to find the limits of what’s possible.

They crystallize aspirations and create a bulwark against despair.