Urban pedagogies as a practice of the right to the city in Brasilia

URBAN PEDAGOGIES AS A PRACTICE OF THE RIGHT TO THE CITY IN BRASILIA UNDERSTANDING THE PAST AND PRESENT TO CHANGE THE FUTURE MARIANA ROBERTI BOMTEMPO

URBAN PEDAGOGIES AS A PRACTICE OF THE RIGHT TO THE CITY IN BRASILIA UNDERSTANDING THE PAST AND PRESENT TO CHANGE THE FUTURE MASTER THESIS DESIGN AND URBAN ECOLOGIES MAY 2016 MARIANA ROBERTI BOMTEMPO ADVISOR: GABRIELA PEREZ RENDON SECONDARY ADVISOR: MIODRAG MITRASINOVIC

Cover Picture: Taguatinga by Giovanna Karoline, student from Our Common Home Program, 2016.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It was long way to get here and it was not easy either. Although fortunately, during this journey I had support from family members, old and new friends, who became family after all we have been through in these past two years. These people are extremely important in my life and I would like to say a few words to them.

I would like to thank my parents for the support, who since the beginning, knowing me as anybody else, were always cheering for my accomplishments and giving me strength in the moments when I thought I could not handle it anymore.

My brother, who even without understanding much about what was going on, has shown his support and admiration for me during this time, and has even learned English to come to visit me in New York.

I would like to thank Ricardo, my boyfriend and partner in life, who since the beginning of this idea, has shown patience in being apart from each other and gave me the support and the love I need to pursue my dreams. He has shown that love is not selfish, love is the strength that unites two people to grow together as better human beings.

I would like to thank my friends in Brazil, who before I came here and while I was here, have always believed in me and showed that true friendship goes beyond country boarders. You pushed me away from Brazil, but closer to your hearts.

I would like to thank my Brazilian friends in New York. All of you, in some moment, have given to me the warmness of our people and our culture. You have shown me the beauty of being from this enormous, but still unique land of people who struggle, but fight back and always have hope that better days will come. I would like to thank especially Silvia for being my family here. You have showed me the power of friendship to overcome all the barriers that can appear in our way when living far from family. Thank you for being the sister I have never had.

I would like to thank my international friends from Design and Urban Ecologies and Theories of Urban Practice, aka DUErs and TUPers. Guys, you rock! I will never forget this group of the most insightful, critical and lovable people I have ever met. Together we can make this world a better place. Especial thanks to Shibani, Gamar, Sascia, Alexa and Masoom whose friendships have showed me the power of strong women to support each other in our breakdown moments.

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I would like to thank my professors at The New School, who have always pushed us to our best. I would like to thank you for all the knowledge you shared with us.

I would like to thank especially my dedicated advisor, Gabriela, who as a Latina woman like me represents the strength and love that we need to overcome the paternalist world we live in. Thank you for never expecting less than excellence from our work. I would like to thank Miodrag for always be so friendly and open to his students, and do whatever he can do to help us on the hard moments in the program and sometimes even in life.

I would like to thank Jeremy Butman from the Writing Center who went word by word on my thesis so I could make sense of my ideas in this language, which is another challenge for me. Also to thank Hannah who gave me professional emotional support.

I would like to thank Jo達o for being so ambitious with this project and bringing it to reality. Thanks for trusting me to join you in this program and for being such a great work partner. Thanks, Nilva, and the community from JMJ High School for trusting us and giving all the support we need to start this pilot idea. Thank you all the students from JMJ who decided to participate and give your time and dedication. If it were not for you, all of our ideas would be worthless. Thank you for making our dream come true.

I would like to finally thank the Program Science without Boarders from the Brazilian Federal Government for the financial support from the CAPES Foundation, Ministry of Education of Brazil, under grant 88888.075748/201300. I appreciate all Brazilian citizens that financed this program through heavy taxes that impact so hard the income of Brazilians, especially those ones with the lowest means to survive. I believe I have the responsibility to somehow pay back our society.

Even being such a long journey, I believe it is just the first step to a long future that is coming, I will continue to be optimistic and enthusiastic for a better tomorrow.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT 11 PREFACE 12 INTRODUCTION 15 METHODOLOGY 16 URBAN PEDAGOGY AS A PRACTICE OF THE RIGHT TO THE CITY 18 WEAK TIES: THE RIGHT TO BRASILIA 23 STRONG TIES: YOUTH TAKES OVER THE RIGHT TO THE CITY 38 DESIGN PROPOSAL: URBAN INVESTIGATIONS IN TAGUATINGA 57 PILOT PROJECT: CLASS TAKEAWAYS DIARY 71 CONCLUSION 110 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES 112 APPENDIX I: CASE STUDY TAKEAWAYS 115

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ABSTRACT Built from ‘scratch’, Brasilia was constructed to be the Capital of Brazil in the end of the 1950s by a labor force that could not afford and was not allowed to live there. Nowadays as the fourth biggest population in the country, Brasilia faces a dramatic social-spatial segregation due to urban policies that were applied to keep it sectored, placing low-income neighborhoods far from the wealthy ones and from most of the formal work positions. To challenge and change this recurrent scenario of Brazilian cities, it is necessary not only to develop policies and apply them, but also to plan processes and public instruments that foster civic participation and consider citizens’ priorities. However, ‘participation’ has been dangerously misused when the population is called to give their opinion on topics that are not clearly explained and the outcomes tend not to actually represent the need of these communities. This creates an obstacle: without knowledge of urban processes, public instruments and effective ways to achieve their visions, urban citizens feel powerless and are unable to put into practice their ‘right to the city’ (Harvey, 2012). Recently, Erminia Maricato named this phenomenon ‘urban illiteracy’, that must be targeted to promote more democratic cities. In this project, I would like to contextualize this ‘urban illiteracy’ in the scenario of Brasilia, where, for the first time in the history of such a young city, the percentage of native born residents is bigger than the migrant ones, and the sense of belonging is emerging in this generation who is trying to find a space to create their urban identity. It is a great moment to inspire the youth to take over Brasilia, to assist them to discover their role as citizens of Brasilia and create the tools that can support them to envision the future of the city. In order to achieve this, I am proposing and prototyping in collaboration with one local partner an after school pilot project for high school students in Taguatinga, Brasilia.

Through this program these students will be encouraged to investigate, explore, understand and discuss their neighborhood in the context of the city, and to use creativity as a way to express the outcomes of their findings.

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PREFACE ‘as long as the oppressed remain unaware of the causes of their condition, they fatalistically “accept” their exploitation’ (Freire, 1970 - Pedagogy of the Oppressed).

It was July 7th of 2012. By that time, I was an intern at an urban planning company that provided technical support for the Government of the Federal District to develop the Land Use Law of the not-heritage areas of Brasilia. There is a different law for the heritage areas as they must preserve some specific characteristics of the city’s initial plan. At that day, I was scheduled to work in one of the workshops that have been happening since June to communicate the law to community members. The office that I worked for had had meetings with the government agency in charge of producing this law, and after finishing defining the zoning of a group of Administrative Regions (the smaller areas that the Government had divided the Federal District), we had workshops with community members of those areas to discuss the decisions. The workshops were run usually in schools that provide the space for the meetings. In each workshop room there was a person from the office, that worked for, and a representative of the city agency. That day, they assigned me to be in the room following the work of community members from the neighborhood of Estrutural.

Estrutural is an informal settlement that started around a landfill with people who used to survive collecting and recycling the trash from the whole city that is placed there. Later, land grabbers split the area to low-income families that could not find another place to live in Brasilia. Nowadays, Estrutural has 40,000 inhabitants. At the same time, Estrutural is located on the border of the National Park of Brasilia, the largest environmental protected area of the city, which turns the situation into a more complex scenario as it is in the middle of the conflict among environmentalists, government, social assistants and public health.

The meeting was scheduled to be in a school that was not close to Estrutural, so the community members got an old van and arrived late as they got lost in this other neighborhood. Their first complaint was ‘why are you doing this meeting so far from us? It is not easy to get transportation and to arrive here!’. As I had my car and lived in that area, I had not even considered this issue. How can you have a participatory process with community members in a place that it is not in the community area and not even accessible by public transportation? They were right and were completely ignored by the members of the city agency there.

After this first bustle moment, the person from the government who was in charge of that group pointed out the map on the wall and said something like ‘we are here to discuss the land use law in the area of Estrutural. Here it is our proposal and we want to listen to your demands’. After the announcement, all the community members started to talk at the same time, about different issues like: the streets needed to be paved, the neighborhood needed more infrastructure, asking what does that map mean, what the government was trying to do with them and so on and so forth. Nobody had any idea of what they were doing there. Neither did I. I did not know what to do, I was an intern and I could not guide the attitude of that group.

While I was desolated seeing that situation and thinking how hard it is having the ‘community’ participating in legal decisions, I was amazed with how well organized among themselves they were. The residents of Estrutural had a person that represented each block, and some of these representatives were in this workshop. They knew each other, they recognized each other as neighbors, they knew what the ones who were not there demanded and they were pointing out on the map showing where each of them lived. There was a potential of taking something out of that workshop.

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Since the beginning of the event, I recognized one of Estrutural’s residents that I had met before when I was taking the Social Housing class at the University of Brasilia. I waited for the break and informed him what that workshop was about, how that moment was an opportunity for them to be heard in the process of producing the Land Use Law, and how that they should look at that map and say the things that they agreed with or not. After the break, this resident took the leadership of the group and they were able to raise some points about the land use proposal. Unfortunately, it was too late for them to actually understand such a complex discussion. That experience took me time to digest and understand.

I went back to work on architectural projects, because I have found the urban planning field top-down and hopeless.

In addition to my frustrated professional experience in the field, I had also to reflect on the causes of lack of understanding on complex issues from the population in general. I reflected on my own educational experience at school and despite the fact I have always been in some of the best schools in the city, there was a moment when I stopped my critical thinking. It was at high school. During this period, students have mainly no contact with practical knowledge and what it is taught in class has little relation with real life. Most of the knowledge is really scientific and does not demand a critical approach. As high school in Brazil has only three years, the student use this time to be trained to pass in a test to get into an university, the ones who are able to answer the hardest questions get a place on the best colleges.

Back when I was in high school I stopped thinking by myself and started repeating what they had taught me to do. The schools in Brasilia were mainly concerned about having as many students as possible getting into the best universities so they could have these numbers as their marketing strategy. There was not much thought on students as citizens, in the sense of people who are part of and participate in a community, and the main focus was on a professional degree that was not necessarily related to the common benefit, what ignored completely the fact that in reality we live in a society.

After some reflection on these experiences and what I have learned since I started the program Design and Urban Ecologies at The New School, my energy towards the importance of education, participatory processes and awareness of uprising movements to get their rights and connect the insurgent with the urban policy inspired me for this thesis. Because of that, I want to understand better and put into practice the potentialities of educational tools to build critical awareness so communities can develop new subjectivities that may transform or/ and challenge the existing scenario.

Figure 1: My identification at event. On the top is saying Collective Construction of the Law Outline for the Federal District. Social Participation Process.

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INTRODUCTION This thesis project aims to challenge the status quo of social spatial segregation in Brasilia, a consequence of restricted urban policies and lack of citizenship participation that has resulted in a in city which the right of living in the city — work opportunities, good public education and health facilities, reliable transportation, urban infrastructure, among others – belongs only to certain communities.

In order to achieve that, first of all, the project should generate a preliminary understanding of Brasilia by learning about (1) how the right to the city can be practiced through urban pedagogies having design as a strategy to communicate with people, (2) how the right to the city can be contextualized in Brazil and Brasilia, taking into consideration the law and the history of the city, and how the uneven growth is affecting residents’ lives in different scales, and (3) which are the current forms of participation and the social movements that are already on the field fighting to achieve a more equitable city.

Secondly, the project aims to design a pilot program to create awareness and expose urban issues and forms of civic participation in the city district of Taguatinga. This program will be in a partnership with the private high school JMJ and João Augusto, a graduate student focused on urban education from Politecnico di Torino, who will be working with the students on a daily basis, while I will be following the activities through video calls and giving online support and feedback. The program aims to investigate how the school, as the converging center in the neighborhood, can search for alternatives for the well being of the community. The students will be encouraged to explore, discuss and understand their neighborhood inside the city, and to develop strategies to communicate their findings and to empower the local community, employing creativity, art and design. The program will be divided in three phases during the year of 2016:

• The first phase is called ‘What is the city?’. From February to May, the

students will have an understanding of the main concepts related to city systems and how they are interrelated. Also they will apply this knowledge investigating some of these systems in their neighborhood and communicating what they learn about the city-making process to the community.

• The second phase is called ‘What is produced here?’. From May to August, together with the students we will map the local economy, and examine which are the existing ways of production in the neighborhood and their narratives, relating them to the community.

• The third phase is called ‘Do the city yourself’. From August to November, the students will propose and prototype ideas that can bring changes towards a desirable future for their community.

Afterwards, the outcomes of the three phases of the program will be exposed and shared to create public awareness about the students’ findings and the power of the youth transforming the city. Due to time concerns only the first phase of the program will be study object/prototype of this thesis project.

However, there will be time to share their findings through online platforms, and to discuss and reflect with the students on the process. It will be envisioned strategies to extend this pilot program to other private and publics schools, or even community centers, making the necessary adjustments to these groups.

Finally, together with the classes’ takeaways, the third part of this project is the analysis of the outcomes produced by the students, how they were able to cultivate critical thinking through the process and if they were able to get the knowledge we shared with them into an informative tool. The students will also have a day only to evaluate the first phase of the program with open discussion and online questionnaires. They will evaluate our performance as facilitators, their evolution through the phase and their outcomes. This evaluation is going to be extremely important to help shaping the program to improve it in the future.

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METHODOLOGY Research, Visualization & Analysis

• Field research: Open ended interviews and informal conversations with

young adults who have been involved on alternative urban practices in the city of Brasilia. The goal of these interviews was to understand and analyze their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and challenges while developing and applying their projects on the field, and how it would be possible to take the knowledge from their experience into my project. I interviewed Natalia Magaldi and Manuella Carvalho from Move and Occupy your Neighborhood, Pedro Ernesto from Making a Neighborhood Plan for Vila Cauhy, Gabriela Bila from New Guide for Brasilia, and Abder Paz from Mercado Sul in Taguatinga.

• Visualizations: Produce maps and data visualizations that help visualize and spatialize main aspects to understand Brasilia’s urban development, the settlement patterns of the population according to government’s plans as well as informal occupations, how the population was placed in this urban sprawl and which are the main characteristics of city’s residents • Field images: Collection of current and historic pictures from Brasilia that can visually represent and support the arguments of the text. Images that can explicitly show the urban conflicts on the ground, once maps or data visualizations are not able to show tangible consequences.

• Urban policies analysis: Having a basic understanding on the current urban laws existing in Brazil that regulates the right to the city and the consequences of the lack of effective practice of the law.

Literature Review

• Theoretical literature: Authors related to the thematics of ‘right to the city’,

alternative urban practices, pedagogies and education, critical analysis of the history and the current situation of the urban sprawl of Brasilia.

• Methodological literature: Authors that apply methodologies of pedagogies, participatory action research and design for social innovation.

Case study

• Case study of inspiring practice of urban pedagogies as Center for Urban

Pedagogy with: a. semi-structured interviews with a member from staff: Sandy Xu, b. semi-structured interview with students who participated of the Urban Investigation program in their school and the perspective of their practices in the city might have changed after the program, c. analysis of their projects and methodologies, d. field observation on City Studies program for two weeks at the International Community High School in South Bronx with analyses of the methodologies, responsiveness from the students, and strategies to engage high school students into critical thinking.

Design propose

• Taking in consideration the previous research, literature and case study, I

developed and brought into practice an after school curriculum program in partnership with João Augusto at JMJ High School in Taguatinga, Brasilia.

João Augusto is a graduate student of Architecture from the University Politecnico di Torino, Italy. The students will explore and understand better how their city works and share this knowledge with other community members in a first moment, aiming that later they can see themselves as protagonists on the city building processes. The curriculum has three

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phases: (1) the first phase will be about investigating about how cities work and investigate how the main challenges of cities are reflected in their neighborhood and it is called ‘What is the city?’, (2) the second one the students will learn about the existing ways of production in this neighborhood asking themselves ‘What is produced here?’, (3) finally, they will propose and produce ideas that can bring changes towards a desirable future for their realities: ‘Do the city yourself’.

Prototype

• For this thesis project, only the first phase will be prototype and study

object, due to time constrains, but it is exactly the phase in which the main focus is to share knowledge and experiences with the students about the city, so they create awareness about their role as citizens. The students will also learn how to use tools to communicate their knowledge to share their findings with other people.This phase, ‘What is the city?’, has three main outcomes presented by the students and several small assignments to guide them towards these outcomes. Unfortunately, it is not the ideal scenario where I can be closely monitoring the students inside the classroom, but I will be able to help them through online tutorials and video-calls, providing material and giving feedback on their research. The program will be further detailed on the design proposal and implementation strategy section.

• During the program we asked the students to respond to simple forms as resources for feedbacks, until the end of the first phase. These forms will be sent to their emails so they can use their passwords to access and answer in the classroom. Through these forms we can have quantitative data evaluating the methodologies of the program, and their own evolution.

Between one class and the other, the steps were reinforced in order to get feedback and follow their understanding of the program’s narrative.

• At the end of each phase of the project is planned a open feedback session with semi-structured questions to be discussed with the students. From the first phase, I gathered students’ feedback on my final version of the thesis and make an analysis and self-evaluation of the program.

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URBAN PEDAGOGY AS A PRACTICE OF THE RIGHT TO THE CITY The idea and the practice of the right to the city rise up in the urban field, from the streets and from the oppressed people who are struggling for justice1. At the same time, there is little awareness in these communities of the unnaturalness of the conditions in which they live and how they could be different. Because of this, oppressors tend to censure and neglect visions of alternative futures so the oppressed ones remain unaware of the causes of their reality and fatalistically ‘accept’ their condition2.

I believe that participation can be achieved through education, once we understand how our world works we can actually be free to make informed decisions, and it inspires the capacity of reflexion on our own acts. Freire argues that education can bring freedom, but to achieve that we must always reflect on ourselves and how this can enlighten our relation with the world3. He also affirms that the reflection itself is not enough to change the reality. We need to act, the practice is the combination of action and reflection4. The reflection and self criticism will be inevitable if you want to release yourself from preconceived concepts. There is no absolute truth and there will be variables that will change during the fights.

It is important to highlight that education is not necessarily what is taught at schools. Schools institutionalized the education, they can be instruments of social control once they alienate the students instead of stimulating them to produce the knowledge5. Education is a long process that keeps being deconstructed by questioning and it comes from the different communities that we are part of such as family, neighborhood, religion, workplace and friendship groups.

The freedom that is built through education is a collective construction, one person cannot free the other one by himself/herself, because we all have our own knowledge and there is no single truth that will free all of us from shallowness.

This collective construction is mediated by the reality that we need to transform6, and it is our role to keep reflecting on the changes that are happening and which are the consequences of it.

The practice of the right to the city is also a collective construction, as defended

by Harvey7: The right to the city is, therefore, far more than a right of individual or group access to the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change and reinvent the city more after our hearts’ desire. It is, moreover, a collective rather than an individual right, since reinventing the city inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power over the processes of urbanization. ‘The freedom to make and remake ourselves and our cities is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights. How best then to exercise that right?’

The urban land inhabited by us is likewise a product of collective human labor, which means that the “urbanization is about the perpetual production of the urban commons”. Later these commons happen to be appropriated by the political power and destroyed or capitalized by private interests8. For Harvey, the neoliberal politics also promotes the divestment of the public goods, and

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1 Harvey, David. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. New York: Verso, 2012, xiii.

2 Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 2000, 64.

3 Cohn, Sergio. Paulo Freire. Rio de Janeiro: Azougue, 2012, 17.

4 Cohn, Paulo Freire, 17.

5 Cohn, Paulo Freire, 24.

6 Cohn, Paulo Freire, 21.

7 Harvey, Rebel Cities, 4.

8 Harvey, Rebel Cities, 80 & 87.

defies and threatens the collective labor, which wants to keep the value of these commons under the control of the ones who produced them. While discussing this issue, Harvey affirms that a way to support the commons can be envisioned thorough education9.

Education becomes collective when it is appropriated and protected by the social forces for mutual gain. It is through this political action that citizens can contribute to benefit the commons, whether they are shared spaces or shared goods (public health, infrastructure, education, and so on)10. As the cities attract the surplus of international capital, the provision of these urban commons to the working class in the urbanization process by public or private ways is decisive for the capitalist development11.

However, the urbanization is happening “at the price of burgeoning processes of creative destruction that entail the dispossession of the urban masses of any right to the city whatsoever”12. As a consequence of that, for instance, displacing low-income families, who live with irregular income and financial hardships, can be easily done by offering them relatively low money. Meanwhile the wealthiest part of society can refuse money to protect their assets13 as they have not only financial resources, but also the knowledge about the law to defend themselves.

The collective right of changing the life and reinventing the city can be distorted for interests that do not correspond to the common good. It can be used to transform the social capital into profit for real estate developers: “the better the common qualities a social group creates, the more likely it is to be raided and appropriated by private profit-maximizing interests”14. For instance, in Williamsburg, New York, the social capital brought by the street artists in the begging on the 2000s was easily turned into profit for luxury condominiums that popped up in the neighborhood, evicting not only the low income families that lived in the area, but also some of the artists that could not afford the new scenario.

It is hard for most people to understand the nuances behind the benefits of capitalism. What is positive about capitalism does not belong to its nature, but rather to its bourgeois-democratic historical moment in which it expanded and continues to exist; in its essence capitalism continues to be as bad as it always was15. I believe the biggest strength of capitalism is the fact it deludes people, mainly middle-class ones, making them believe that one day, they will be part of that selective group who are and will always be the oppressing ones. But this is not going to happen unless you join their ideals, and even if you join the owners of the power, in the first moment of crisis you will be the first to be kicked out.

The second strength of capitalism is the “freedom” and “democracy” that it sells, people truly believe that they are free in this system that makes them work to get money to survive, and not actually to pursue what they believe or love.

On the other hand, turning this reflection into practice through participation is not an naively optimistic goal. Taking small steps and operating on local scales has shown that small changes can be the deep ones. Participation can bring different

9 Harvey, Rebel Cities, 73 & 87.

10 Harvey, Rebel Cities, 73.

11 Harvey, Rebel Cities, 73.

12 Harvey, Rebel Cities, 22 13 Harvey, Rebel Cities, 20.

14 Harvey, Rebel Cities, 78.

15 Cohn, Paulo Freire, 190

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‘knowledges’ into the production of the space, reinventing it16. It is possible by uniting social knowledge, which usually is ignored by techno-scientific knowledge, with academic knowledge. In this process of collective construction, people have two rights: to acknowledge what they already know, and to be able to participate in the construction of the knowledge they do not have17. History has shown and Freire agrees that if we do not work on the present the future will be no different18.

Unfortunately the present is not easy, the concept of the right to the city is legally suggested by the Estatuto da Cidade (City Statute), a Brazilian Federal Law from 2001 that will be further explored in the next chapter. So far, however, as with most of the laws in the country, there is a huge gap between what is on paper and the reality. Freire19 would argue that the dominant classes do not approve laws that are in their interests, but I believe that the dominant classes are even crueler than just not approving the laws. Actually, the policy makers (mainly part of the dominant class) in Brazil approve the law, use it to the benefit of their sponsors and themselves, and never let the population have the opportunity to learn what they could achieve if they demanded the law be carried out as it is written. Because of this dynamic the law is only on the benefit of the ones who can pay lawyers who understand it.

The democratization of urban development is a crucial topic for cities nowadays, and criticism from outside or relying on political will is not enough to foster change. For Cruz, it is time to infiltrate the institutions and retrofit the existing mechanisms towards social benefit20. At the same time, it is necessary to mediate the crisis of knowledge exchange between communities and institutions. In order to achieve that, urban academics and practitioners have an important role in this scenario of miscommunication. In 1995, for instance, the mayor of Bogota, Antanas Mockus, developed urban educational model as a tool to rethink the city’s infrastructure and mobility systems, building civic participation through urban pedagogy21.

DESIGN AS URBAN PEDAGOGY There is a clear conflict of interests in the cities between the bottom-up needs from the urban communities and the policy makers’ decisions that are topdown. This conflict produces a space of mediation that needs to be filled up by tools that are able to communicate the policies to the population so people can actually participate as citizens. It is expected that through awareness the citizens can also claim their rights and participate in decision-making about social movements.

In this middle ground of urban conflicts, where the top-down and the bottomup collide and/or are mismatched, the political emerges22. The middle ground that Mitrasinovic23 talks about on Concurrent Urbanities can bridge the gap between different domains in society clustering working groups that represent all levels of society, from the single insurgent action to the most institutional stage

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16 Cohn, Paulo Freire, 141.

17 Cohn, Paulo Freire, 141.

18 Cohn, Paulo Freire, 101.

19 Cohn, Paulo Freire, 167.

20 Cruz, Teddy. Concurrent Urbanities Designing Infrastructures of Inclusion. Edited by Miodrag Mitrasinovic.

New York: Routledge, 2016, 17.

21 Cruz in Mitrasinovic, Concurrent Urbanities, 20.

22 Cruz in Mitrasinovic, Concurrent Urbanities, 12.

23 Mitrasinovic, Miodrag. Concurrent Urbanities Designing Infrastructures of Inclusion. Routledge, 2016, 182.

represented by the state and the market. While the nation states are distant concepts, the “urban citizen” sees the city as a “primary community of reference” and an opportunity space for citizens to claim rights and aspirations24.

24 Holston, 23, 2008 in Mitrasinovic, Concurrent Urbanities, 187.

The space of mediation of knowledge in city conflicts can be filled up with the work of designing. Coming from radical urban activist practices design can build connections between governments and disenfranchised communities25. Design is a knowledge field able to make people envision scenarios that do not exist yet, but through the right guidance can be achieved. Through design it is possible to catalyze processes of identifying opportunities in the existing situations, and to develop ways to reshape this specific context26. The existing scenarios, policies and relations can be more easily understood by the capacity that design has to communicate complex themes into something visual and consequently more digestible. This allows democratic participation to be more tangible once that design enables the understanding and consequently “the formation of new political subjectivities”27.

Design can be used also as a tool to boost democratic processes when the codesigning activity explores innovative strategies, ideas and organizational approaches28. Together with pedagogical strategies, design can encourage people to not only reflect on the reality but also to plan and apply innovation.

Through this process people actually can make something that they believe leads towards a collective benefit, turning this action into a political one against the predatory production of the urban common.

To participate of the process of urban transformation through design innovation Mitrasinovic explains29: First, designers have set out to unearth, codify, translate, and map patterns of urban practice of individuals and communities that exhibit varied degrees of socio-spatial innovation in their attempts to create new modalities of sustainable urban cohabitation and governance. Second, designers committed to the pro-

25 Mitrasinovic, Concurrent Urbanities, 182.

26 Mitrasinovic, Concurrent Urbanities, 185.

27 Mitrasinovic, Concurrent Urbanities, 194.

28 Mitrasinovic, Concurrent Urbanities, 183.

29 Mitrasinovic, Concurrent Urbanities, 187.

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duction of transferable forms of urban knowledge are committed to strengthening and scaling up practices of such innovative urban communities, and also to mobilizing its principles to other urban communities in need. Finally, an important aspect of this line of work is to transform the work of urban social heroes into concepts of urban innovation.

There are others intangible dimensions existing in social life, for instance, “relationships, trust, symbolic and cultural values, social capital”30, that can be connected using design as a channel to incorporate them in the processes of city making. There is a lot of work to be done and signs from urban social movements that have critical people with political energy looking forward to taking action31.

Several inspiring practices will be addressed further on in this research. Design can be a tactical pedagogy to coproduce new propositions for civic resilience that seeks “socio-spatial inclusion and justice” and alternative modalities of governance32.

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30 Kaldor 2003 in Mitrasinovic, Concurrent Urbanities, 190.

31 Harvey, Rebel Cities, 88.

32 Mitrasinovic, Concurrent Urbanities, 196 & 198.

WEAK TIES: THE RIGHT TO BRASILIA THE RIGHT TO THE CITY IN BRAZIL After understanding the concept of the right to the city, it is important to question ourselves: whose right, what right and which city? These questions were raised in a conversation with Edesio Fernandes, a Brazilian lawyer and expert on urban land use and policy, who has been producing important analysis on urban land issues in Brazil.

With a population of more than 200 million inhabitants1, Brazil has 85% of these people living in cities2. This scenario turns of the right to the city into a really broad and complex discussion. What makes this discussion even harder is the fact that the urbanization process took place in a fragmented and segregated way, socially and spatially. There are two specific areas where the fragmentation and segregation has manifested in Brazilian cities, which are left behind in the development of urban settlements and represent informality and uneven urban growth: the favelas and the peripheries3.

These areas are the main victims of precariousness or lack of collective services that are socially necessary for subsistence, which exacerbates the deterioration of the work relations4 and the exploitation of these residents. The existing peripheries, among several issues, expose that (1) being far from the work opportunities and not having efficient public transportation affects the chances for people to get better job opportunities5, and (2) there is barely any relation between different segments of society, which creates urban environments with lack of space for diversity and tolerance.

In order to achieve change, Critical Urban Theory is able to identify the reasons why certain situations exist6, answering the questions of whose right, what right and which city. However, only exposing the situation is not enough, to bring the right to the city into practice it is necessary to propose alternative urban strategies, and to politicize the implications of this praxis7. This right is not only a legal claim, it is also a socio-political and philosophical value, which is part of this complex goal to be achieved. Brazil has taken the first step as it is a country that has this right as a federal law.

The City Statute was approved in 2001 (Law no. 10.257/2001) and although it is envied by policy makers and city administrators around the world, its ambitiousness has not been deeply effective8. During the last half of the 2010s the emergence of what it is called the new lower middle class – families that through social policies of income redistribution are now consuming more than just the basic needs – had aggravated the consequences of existing issues like violence, mobilities and environment deterioration9. In addition to that, in the same period (1) the urban land speculation in Brazil had “broken historical records”10, (2) the urbanized land and properties vacant and abandoned continued without 1 IBGE projection 2016 2 World Bank projection, 2015.

3 Ribeiro, Marcelo Gomes. “Território E Desigualdades De Renda Em Regiões Metropolitanas Do Brasil.” Dados [online], 920.

4 Ribeiro, Território e Desigualdades de Renda, 918.

5 Ribeiro, Território e Desigualdades de Renda, 924.

6 Marcuse, Peter. “From Critical Urban Theory to the Right to the City.” City 13, no. 2-3 (2009): 185-97, 189.

7 Marcuse, From critical urban theory to the right to the city, 194.

8 Fernandes, Edesio. “The Challenges of Reforming the Urban Legal Framework: A Critical Assessment of Brazil’s City Statute Ten Years Later.” In Fostering Development through Opportunity, Inclusion, and Equity, 279-91. Washington, DC: World Bank, 2013, 280.

9 Fernandes, The Challenges of Reforming the Urban Legal Framework, 281.

10 Fernandes, The Challenges of Reforming the Urban Legal Framework, 281.

23

fulfilling their social function, and (3) housing programs such as Minha Casa Minha Vida (My Home My Life) increased the social-spatial segregation creating low-income residential areas that are really sparse.

The combination of “speculative land markets, clienteles political systems, elitist urban planning practices and exclusionary legal regimes”11 has resulted in an informal urban process that is the main way in which the cities were produced in Brazil. What resulted in tens of millions of Brazilians who would not have access to housing in cities if not through informal (and illegal) ways12. The creation of the City Statute was a result of the work of several academics, urban managers, politicians, social movements and NGOs so it could turn this abstract right into a law asset to protect the citizens from the imbalance resulted from the capitalist production of space13.

In a briefly explanation of the City Statute, Fernandes14 defines:

The City Statute has four main dimensions, namely a conceptual one, providing elements for the interpretation of the constitutional principle of the social function of urban property and of the city; the regulation of new legal, urbanistic and financial instruments for the construction and financing of a different urban order by the municipalities; the indication of processes for the democratic management of cities; and the identification of legal instruments for the comprehensive regularization of informal settlements in private and public urban areas. Combined, these dimensions provide the content of the ‘right to the city’ in Brazil, as well as indicating the conditions for the materialization of the new social contract proposed by Lefebvre.

The new social contract proposed by Lefebvre supplants the currently dominant liberal right with the social right which aims at the common benefit, broad human rights and addresses the context of the cities. However, the City Statute by itself it is not enough to achieve the all of these dimensions, it is just a regulatory framework to the cities that need to define by themselves how the municipalities will pursue this urban reform agenda. As the municipalities define the methods to develop what is asked by the law, some of them misrepresented the philosophical background behind the law. In these cases, these ends are used to justify the means.

The social function of the urban property, for instance, has its meaning determined by the local government to be a right protected of the law and it has not been given attention by all municipalities. The Municipal Master Plans that were finally defined as an obligation for local public authorities by the Federal Government (1) still had a “dominant technocratic perception of urban planning”15, (2) failed to capture the surplus value collected by the state for social redistribution through urban infrastructure, access to urban land and housing and, (3) did not have a clear approach to socioenvironmental issues or criteria for expansion of urban zones16.

The lack of projects is not the only issue to fulfill the City Statute. Inefficiency, waste, lack of continuity, corruption and the appropriation of the law by conservative segments of the polity are part of the problem in all levels of government in Brazil. In addition to that there is a huge gap between the legal-

24

11 Fernandes, Edesio. “Constructing the `Right To the City’ in Brazil.” Social & Legal Studies 16, no. 2 (2007): 201-19, 204.

12 Fernandes, Constructing the ‘Right to the City’ in Brazil, 203.

13 Fernandes, Constructing the ‘Right to the City’ in Brazil, 208.

14 Fernandes, Constructing the ‘Right to the City’ in Brazil, 212.

15 Fernandes, The Challenges of Reforming the Urban Legal Framework, 288.

16 Fernandes, The Challenges of Reforming the Urban Legal Framework, 289.

order and the social realities. Most of the Brazilians have no clue about their rights, are not able to claim them and have a strong cultural perception that the law exists only as a technical instrument to solve conflicts17.

There is a need in Brazilian civil society to recognize the social and collective rights18, and to stop reducing the “public sphere” to “state sphere”. For that, it is necessary also to build the capacity of people to understand complex issues.

Recently the INAF19 has shown that only 8% of Brazilians between 15 and 64 years-old are able to elaborate on complex texts, to interpret tables and graphs with more than two variables and resolve problem-situations in different contexts.

This means that even with the decrease in illiteracy in the country – nowadays only 8.3% (IBGE, 2014) of the population older than 15 years-old is not able to write or read a note, – what has been taught in the schools does not have the same quality to everybody, so this education has not provided the freedom that Freire advocates for.

BRAZIL

Brasília

The Indicator of Functional Literacy argues that education does not come only from school. In some countries, even with low schooling there were people showing better performance on the evaluation of this test. This fact shows that places that promote sharing of knowledge can complement abilities of writing, reading, resolution of problems and understanding complex issues. So as the lack of formal education is a challenge, it should not be an obstacle, which reiterates Freire’s points of view that we all have some kind of knowledge and through sharing it and learning from each other people can overcome this gap towards democracy.

It is clear that the existence of the City Statute is not enough to change urban and social realities, and Brazil and Brazilians have not yet done justice to it20.

However, there are important lessons for academics, city administrators, activists and urban planners to keep and raise the conversation about the slow process of change in such deep urban conditions towards more equalitarian Brazilian cities21.

THE RIGHT TO BRASILIA THROUGH ITS HISTORY Brasilia is the capital of Brazil and it was built from ‘scratch’. Before the construction of the city, the area was mainly Cerrado forests – one of the biggest Brazilian biomes and considered one of the richest savannas in the world. The biome was basically treated as tabula rasa and completely destroyed and reshaped in order to construct the city. By that time, there were some small towns around the site where Brasilia was built that now are part of the ‘metropolitan’ area of Brasilia. Nowadays, Brasilia is the fourth most populated city in the country and is another sad reflection of the deep social-economic Brazilian inequalities placed in the urban space.

Most of the cities in the world were developed and keep being developed without citizen participation. Brasilia not only followed the same path, but also had some 17 Fernandes, The Challenges of Reforming the Urban Legal Framework, 288.

18 Fernandes, The Challenges of Reforming the Urban Legal Framework, 290.

19 Indicator of Functional Literacy, February of 2016, a partnership between Instituto Paulo Montenegro and NGO Ação Educativa. Source: “No Brasil, Apenas 8% Têm Plenas Condições De Compreender E Se Expressar - Notícias - UOL Educação.” UOL Educação. February 29, 2016. Accessed April 25, 2016. http://educacao.uol.com.br/noticias/2016/02/29/no-brasilapenas-8-escapam-do-analfabetismo-funcional.htm.

20 Fernandes, The Challenges of Reforming the Urban Legal Framework, 291.

21 Fernandes, The Challenges of Reforming the Urban Legal Framework, 290.

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Figure 2: Pioneers in Brasilia, 1959. In the background is the construction of the official house of the President, Planalto Palace.

Source: Historias de Brasilia, Facebook Page.

Accessed on April 8, 2016. https://www. facebook.com/historiasdebsb/photos/a.29452 9840729133.1073741828.294467654068685 /463909640457818/?type=3&theater

peculiar aspects that have aggravated the lack of rights to its citizens through its history. The construction of the city was part of a plan to occupy the interior of the country, that since the colonization was mainly on the coast. However, the labor force that constructed it could not afford and was not allowed to live in the El Dorado they worked for. It was on the law that “the essential purpose of Brasilia [as an] administrative city with an absolute predominance of the interests of public servants and their families”22 did not have to include other kinds of residents. Ignoring the fact of the cities are places for diversity, the Organic Law of Brasilia deprived the citizens of any kind of participation and argued that ‘in whatever form, the participation of the inhabitants of the Federal District in direct political campaigns would rob the Federal Government to devote itself entirely to the study and solution of high national problems’23.

The main core of the city was planned and built accordingly to Lucio Costa’s urban design project, which followed Le Corbusier’s concepts and the CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) manifestos. Brasilia was built exclusively to be a bureaucratic city and house the employee of the public sector.

Clearly, the decision defined who would be deprived of the right to the city that they constructed, and who would just arrive to that place with full rights to it24.

The segregation did not leave margin for second thoughts: the first satellite town was inaugurated two years before the Plano Piloto, in 1958, and by the end of 1961, three other ones were founded25.

The land that became the Federal District was expropriated by the government, with the exception of the areas of Planaltina and Brazlandia, two existing

26

22 Ministry of Justice, 1959 in Holston, James. The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989, 279.

23 Holston, The Modernist City, 276.

24 Holston, The Modernist City, 248.

25 Holston, The Modernist City, 257.

settlements. This action was taken so the areas around the Plano Piloto, what would later become the capital of the country, would not be available to be sold by the market and stayed in the control of the Federal Government. In this case the segregation that happened in the city was directly promoted by the state. In 1956, two zones were defined to be camps and for commercial establishments that later would be destroyed.

One of these first settlements for the workers in Brasilia is called Nucleo Bandeirante, it was known by Cidade Livre (Free City), because it was a space where the inhabitants could actually experiment with the city, as it was the place to provide goods and services to the new-comers. It was the place where the buses with the workers who were looking for jobs arrived and where the inequality of the open market and entrepreneurial ethic prevailed. Accordingly to Holston26, the Candangos – first inhabitants of Brasilia – were expecting new social habits, but were betrayed by the founders of the city when they had their insurgence of unexpected and contradictory developments censured.

Taguatinga, the first official satellite town, was the consequence of squatters being removed from an area closed by the Nucleo Bandeirante, to a place 25km further from the Plano Piloto, so migrants of low-income could acquire a lot. Four thousand migrants, who ran from a strong draught at the Northeast of Brazil at that time, had their their shacks dismantled and transferred to Taguatinga, even after a social mobilization among them with violent clashes and resistance.

All this effort was made, in order to keep these people far from the new capital. Unfortunately, after being dismantled by the government the residents’ association did not survive27.

The creation of the satellite town gave the migrants the right to property, meanwhile it refuted the socio-political scenario of participation developed by this people to achieve this28, after achieving their goals of urban land or a house, the political association which generate that was dismantled. “The rebellion of the pioneers forced the state to recognize their rights to the city. However, it was not to the Plano Piloto itself, but rather to cities on the periphery of the capital”29.

By that time, the Plano Piloto remained and stayed empty with the necessary urban infrastructure sustained by the taxes of all Brazilians for a long time while people were being placed far away. Through this attitude the planners secured the stratification of society and the consequent intolerance to diversity from the foundations of Brasilia.

The periphery of Brasilia was produced in two ways: the usurpative and the derivative30. The derivative form is represented by the satellite towns because they derived from settlements initiated by pioneers and were created by executive or legislative order. The usurpative are the squatter settlements, that once they had they right to housing denied, they organize to usurp it. As the state owned all the land and the urban services, the ones who usurped the land in Brasilia confronted the political powers directly to get what was denied.

The narrative of urban expansion of Brasilia is guided by the “cycles of rebellions and legitimation, of mobilizations and dissolutions”31. In the ten years after the foundation of Brasilia, around 100,000 migrants had moved to the city looking for a better life. In 1971, around 80,000 squatters were moved to a satellite 26 Holston, James. “Free the Spirit of Brasilia”. University of California, Berkely, 2009, 1.

27 Holston, The Modernist City, 262-263.

28 Holston, The Modernist City, 276.

29 Holston, The Modernist City, 257.

30 Holston, The Modernist City, 270.

31 Holston, The Modernist City, 298.

27

28

1958

1975

1960

1982

1964

1986

1991

2009

1997

2013

2004

Sequence of Maps 1: Evolution of the urban sprawl of Brasilia. Source: SEGETH, 2015.

Maps by Mariana Bomtempo.

29

town Ceilandia, which stands for Center to Eradicate Invasions plus the suffix -land: CEI-land. Nowadays, it is the biggest satellite town with almost 500,000 inhabitants (PDAD, 2015).

For Holston32, the fact that the expansion of Brasilia is created by sparse informal settlements that later become legal, reinforces the paradox of the spacial segregation and the strafed inequalities in a city that was created with the premisse to be different from the other Brazilian cities. In this sense, the narrative of people being placed separately from each other exaggerated the pattern of inequality. In general this pattern is different from other cities in Brazil, where it is still possible to see the favelas from elite buildings. In Brasilia this is not possible.

Figure 3: Pioneers in Brasilia, 1959. In the background is the construction Ministres Esplanade. Source: Historias de Brasilia, Facebook Page. Accessed on April 8, 2016. https://www.facebook.com/historiasdebsb/ photos/pb.294467654068685.2207520000. 1461973 843./521103358071779/?type=3&theater

Cities are places where people from different socioeconomic classes and cultures hesitantly intermingle33, but in some cases they are spaces where some have a good life in a beautiful and well cared for city while looking at the urban survivors as “incapable, uncultured, envious, dangerous, marginal”34. Because of the distance, there is no cohabitation among different classes in Brasilia, and it has created a strongly intolerant environment, not what the planners imagined, nor what is familiar in other Brazilian cities.

THE RIGHT TO BRASILIA TODAY The dichotomy between the Plano Piloto and the Satellite Towns is too simplistic to define the complex urban sprawl that Brasilia is nowadays. Before the construction of the capital there were already two settlements and some of the camps built to house the construction workers remained as neighborhoods.

Some of the informal settlements arranged by people who were seeking better opportunities were removed to Satellite Towns, while others remained as informal settlements and some new ones started and kept growing more recently. Some huge areas where there were small farms for local production did not resist the market pressure and were illegally divided as horizontal condominiums to house the middle class. Meanwhile, the Plano Piloto remained not much different from what was planned, with huge plots of vacant land sitting on urban infrastructure speculating, while the whole city effervesced with settlements popping up everywhere.

Accordingly to Holanda35, this has produced an urban settlement that is characterized by the features: fragmentation, low-density, eccentricity and sociospatial segregation.

The city has expanded to accommodate the different segments of socioeconomic classes. The gap between the wealthy and the poor neighborhoods in Brasilia is enormous. Accordingly to CODEPLAN (Federal District Agency of Planning), in 2013 a person in the wealthiest neighborhood (Lago Sul) had a median income more than 10 times the income of a person in the four poorest areas of the city (Estrutural, Varjao, Fercal and Recanto das Emas).

30

32 Holston, The Modernist City, 298.

33 Harvey, Rebel Cities, 67.

34 Freire, Pedagogy of the City.

35 Holanda, Frederico Rosa Borges De. Brasília: Cidade Moderna, Cidade Eterna. Brasília: FAUnB, Faculdade De Arquitetura E Urbanismo, Universidade De Brasília, 2010, 47.

Map 1: Monthly median income per capita.

Source: IBGE, Census 2010. Map by Mariana Bomtempo.

The elite of Brasilia is mainly composed by the upper-echelon stable positions of the State Machine bureaucracy. To be part of it you must be part of the elite group or you have the opportunity to pass a test to get a great position in the government. This hunt for public servant positions creates generations of citizens in Brasilia who pass most of their lives studying for these tests as a way to get better paid careers and stability. There is a huge waste of human resources in the city of people who are not producing ideas because they prefer the stability of a government position. It is one of the few ways to have social mobility in the city. Unfortunately, under such a selfish environment, “ideals of urban identity, citizenship, and belonging, of a coherent urban politics, already threatened by the spreading malaise of the individualistic neoliberal ethic, become much harder to sustain�36.

As the planners were trying to avoid having more people than they wanted in the Plano Piloto area and keep its administrative function, several satellite towns were created to be dormitory cities, while most of the work positions stayed on and were created at Plano Piloto. This situation is aggravated by the fact that the public transportation is not reliable, because of that there is one car to each 36 Harvey, Rebel Cities, 15.

31

Map 2: Density and the areas with most of the work positions. Sources: IBGE, Census 2010.

PDAD 2013. Map by Mariana Bomtempo.

32

two inhabitants in average. This is expensive for the citizens and the state that have subsidized automobile industries for several years, and continues to expand roads and parking lots, destroying space for people to gather. The maps below show the contrast between the density of residents in the areas and the amount of working positions (Map 2), and the size of the population whose homes are dislocated from work and the distance travelled daily by these people (Map 3).

Map 3: Daily travels to work. Source: PDAD 2013. Map by Mariana Bomtempo.

Over the years, Brasilia has expanded extremely fragmentary which has enhanced the absence of cohabitation of different segments of society and unequal distribution of infrastructure and resources in this urban space. In this scenario with a well-defined division and a huge distance between social classes, the upper class, which also commutes by cars, never encounters or acknowledges the reality of the lower class, which lives far and commutes by an inefficient public transportation system. It can be said that “such inhuman environment promotes social exclusion by limiting interaction, preventing the ‘unexpected’, and controlling access and use, resulting in a sterile urbanity”37.

Even in the social clubs that were opened to have people sharing the facilities did not work, and private clubs organized accordingly certain social parameters were created. “The idea of Brasilia denied the old Brazil twice: it negated its underdevelopment as well as its urban life”38.

37 Hehl, Rainer, and Marc M. Angelil. Minha Casa--nossa Cidade: Innovating Mass Housing for Social Change in Brazil, 333.

38 Holston, The Modernist City, 25.

33

The Modernistic Apartheid

Sequence of Maps 2: Racial segragation.

Source: IBGE Census 2010. Maps by Mariana Bomtempo.

There is a myth, which protects the Plano Piloto of Brasilia, that any kind of change would change the city’s title as a World Heritage site. This discourse, in association with the lack of understanding about the topic, fabricates and perpetuates the image of the ‘untouched’39 modernistic landscape of the city. In 1988, in the article Brasilia Revisited, Lucio Costa, the planner who designed the Plano Piloto, said that it is not the interest of Brasilia to become a big metropolis, the city is an expression of a particular urban concept, it has an affiliation, it is not a bastard city40. What did Costa mean by a bastard city? If the Brazilian metropolises are bastard cities, why did he prefer to live in Rio de Janeiro instead?

This ‘protection’ corroborates the discourse that has been the common place in cities all over the world to help commodify the modernistic urban scenography of Brasilia. “The role of architecture has been ultimately reduced to decoration, a Harlequin dress designed to spectacularize the scenographic effects of metaurban settings and to fabricate social consensus via consumption; a consensus that, no doubt, also needs heavy policing to be sustained”41. The buildings and monuments in Brasilia have been reproducing the discourse of isolated objects to beautify the city.

The narrative of using the city as commodifiable object happened in other ways too. The urban land in Brasilia that belonged to the government was used for a long time as bargaining chip by the ones in power, especially in the 1990s when Brasilia started voting to chose the local representatives. It was also during the 1990s that the Brazilian economy opened explicitly for neoliberal capitalism, which protects the private property rights. These two simultaneous facts, the exchange of lots for votes and the neoliberal economy, produced in Brasilia the atmosphere to have this value of the private property right as an “hegemonic form of politics, even to the lower middle class”42.

There are economic conditions for this territorial dispersion, most of the land that has urban infrastructure remains unoccupied and open for speculation as a market reserve43. The agency TERRACAP is responsible for selling the existing unoccupied plots in the downtown, usually for extremely high prices, this cost is transferred to investors and to the clients through real state developers. Some of the areas remained unoccupied because the lack of revision of the zoning regulations. For instance, some areas that were initially designated for institutional use and are not necessary anymore do not have its use changed, mainly because of inertia and ideology to keep the original shape of the city44.

The social-economical inequalities, the distances and the lack of education are hard barriers to be overcome, which is necessary to subvert the utopia of a city without diversity that Brasilia was meant to be. It will definitely be a long process to change this narrative, and most of the people against it will argue that it will change the title of World Heritage from the city. However, Brasilia must belong to its citizens, must be occupied, must be less unjust to its inhabitants, and to achieve that it does not matter what title the city has. Even if promoting these

36

39 Here I added quotes to untouched because several aspects of the original plan were changed, and the city did not lose its title necessarily. However, this is a long and complex topic that it is not going to be detailed in this project.

40 Costa, Brasilia Revisitada, 18 in Holanda, Brasília: Cidade Moderna, Cidade Eterna, 58.

41 Mitrasinovic, 2006 in Mitrasinovic, Concurrent Urbanities, 4.

42 Harvey, Rebel Cities, 15.

43 Holanda, Brasília: Cidade Moderna, Cidade Eterna, 59.

44 Holanda, Brasília: Cidade Moderna, Cidade Eterna, 58.

changes would take the title away from the city, which is not necessarily true when it is done by experts and citizen participation. What should be preserved in the city are the very abstract modernistic concepts that can keep existing with diversity and more density. It is worth it to let the Candangos take Brasilia back.

Figure 4: Estrutural, 2011. Informal settlement of low income families. People moved to the area to survive collecting recyclable material to sell. Photographer: Joana Franรงa.

37

STRONG TIES: YOUTH TAKES OVER THE RIGHT TO THE CITY Cities are complex environments where we have our daily struggles to survive, and understanding how this ‘engine’ works is the first step to be able to participate in the processes while actually promoting changes. Brasilia is not different from other cities in the aspect of complexity, but on the other hand it seriously suffers of lack of citizen participation on decision-making processes and of awareness of the role that residents can play to practice their 'right to the city’.

More that a top-down approach is also necessary to develop citizen participation in the city. Since its construction, Brasilia grew without any consultancy of the population, nor participatory process. In addition to that, the lack of education is a important struggle to overcome in order to develop real citizen participation.

Without knowledge, the participatory process becomes another tool to use the mass to achieve “democratic” goals that still do not benefit the collective. It is inherent to a real democracy to spread awareness about people’s rights to the city.

Meanwhile the urban sprawl was expanding, Brasilia confronted the lack of attachment on the part of new residents who did not have roots in this new settlement. This lack of roots is another obstacle for citizen participation. Brasilia has only 55 years of its foundation, and it takes time to build communities and a feeling of belonging to a certain place.

However, there is a great potential through youth to represent a change of paradigms of the way the city is shaped. Today, the population of city-born inhabitants is larger than the migrant one (2010 IBGE Census), and this mass of young brasilienses that was born in the 1980s and 1990s and raised in the capital is willing to build its own identity. An example of this enthusiasm is the success of the New Guide of Brasilia among the young people in the past two years.

The author of the New Guide of Brasilia, Gabriela Bilá, said in the interview I did with her that she was not expecting so much repercussion on her guide, but as people identified with it, it has grown from a crowdfunding project to a publication sold in three of the most relevant book stores in the city. The guide talks about alternative lifestyle in Brasilia, with famous street food spots, walking distances between the main touristic points, the location and the types of fruit trees in the city, different kinds of party places, among other information. Something like Brasilia Not-For-Tourists.

After the Guide, the project expanded to other products related to the city identity like fabric patterns for clothes related to the city, photograph exhibition and wood pieces to ensemble Brasilia’s architecture icons. It turned to be a huge project of identification and feeling of belonging with the city. Gabriela believes that the population relies its own the identity through the architecture because it is really different from other places and it is the strongest aspect in such a young city. However, her project aims to bring to the surface the daily aspects of the life in Brasilia besides the sterile architecture: how people interact with the monumentality and which are the narratives behind the democratization of these spaces of contemplation.

These Brasilia’s residents, together with the new generation that is raising, can be important vehicles to drive different scenarios from the disconnected one that has been imposed on residents until now. After so much struggle to settle in Brasilia people feel rooted and for Harvey1: “People who own their house or who

38

1 Harvey, Rebel Cities, 30.

have secure tenure have a larger stake in their community and thus are more likely to lobby for less crime, stronger governance, and better local environmental conditions.�

In this context, finding a way to channelize the youth energy towards a collective benefit of the production of the city is a great opportunity to practice the citizenship and change this recurrent top-down approach of city-making, so more people can actually participate and have the right to Brasilia. Among several projects that have raised the voice of youth or driven by them in Brasilia towards a collective construction of the city, I selected three practices to analyze their goal, approach, challenges and outcomes. The objective it is to support my argument of the potential of timing and youth engagement in the city. ________________________________ NEIGHBORHOOD PLAN FOR VILA CAUHY

https://issuu.com/pedroernestobarbosa/docs/final_miolo_capa_3

During the year of 2015, Pedro Ernesto developed for his final undergrad Thesis a project that aimed to regularize and improve the situation of the area of Vila Cauhy in Brasilia. It is a really complex scenario: it is an environmentally protected area close to a stream, subject to floods and in soft soil. The community of this informal settlement is exposed to health issues due to lack of sanitation, some areas have several families living in small spaces and the youth barely has outside space for leisure.

Figure 5: Workshop with the Community in Vila Cauhy. Source: Plano de Bairro da Vila Cauhy, Facebook Page. Accessed on April 8, 2016. https://www.facebook.com/planodavilacauhy/photos/pb.1104613232906063.2207520000.1461599334./ 1118872394813480/?type=3&theater

39

For Pedro, his biggest challenge was the lack of knowledge available on methodologies on how to deal with people so he could develop this project with the community. Accordingly to Pedro, even having an advisor, Liza Andrade, who is a huge enthusiast of participatory processes on urban projects, he felt several times that he did not know how to work with different kinds of people so they could be heard.

Through connecting with a student from his University, who lives in this neighborhood, he was able to start the relations with residents. Then he tested several strategies to get his goal: to get the community involved and have a voice in the process of proposing improvements to the area. His approach included: community events and meetings, game boards, photograph contest, among others, and during the process he developed a proposal to reshape the occupation taking in consideration the demands of the residents and what was possible to achieve in such risky area.

Since the beginning he made clear that his project was an academic proposal, but if they liked the study it could be used by the community to achieve their goals to improve the neighborhood. He said that in this kind of community it is really common to have politicians showing up and promising several benefits and not deliver on any, just in order to have their votes in the elections.

In the end the neighborhood representatives received a publication as the outcome about the process and the project so they could ask the government to fulfill their demands. Pedro is trying to engage the city government towards the project to become reality.

SOUTH MARKET LIVES http://www.mercadosul.org/

Mercado Sul used to be a vibrant commercial area when Taguatinga was founded. With the expansion of supermarket companies in the 1970s the market was abandoned. After that, the area around had a long story of disinvestment, it was turned into warehouses, night clubs, prostitution spots. In the end of 2000s the puppet artist Chico Sim천es opened his workshop and started the Mamulengo Theater Company - Mamulengo is a traditional puppet theater style of the North East of Brazil, - attracting other artists to the area.

In the past 10 years, different projects and alternative urban practices have been placed in the market. Several constructions of the old market were occupied, some squatted, and renewed by artists using the space for their practices, productions, events, galleries, gatherings, cooking, living, among others.

Through their daily activities they discuss and claim their right to the city and the materialization of the social function of the properties protected by the City Statute is their goal.

I had an informal interview with one of the leaders of the group, Abder Paz, in which he explained that they have been struggling to avoid gentrification in the market. This is one of their biggest challenges. The rent used to be really cheap two years ago and now it has raised it as the artists brought life and consequently economic interest to the area. They are organizing and fighting to avoid this, so the rent it is still cheaper than most places around. They have also struggling to improve the conditions of the constructions, but without making the rents more expensive. Abder said that they wanted the city to fix the sidewalks, but they know that if it gets really nice, they would lose their place as it will get expensive.

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The market survives by its solidarity economics, the different practices feed each other and they also sell their products to visitors and during the street fair they have once a month. The market receives the support of MTST (biggest national squatting movement focused on right to housing) and other organizations towards the right to the city, they also receive support from academics who have seen in this community an inspiring practice of living in the city.

Figure 6: Music event at Mercado Sul. Source: Mercado Sul VIVE, Facebook Page. Accessed on April 8, 2016. https://www.facebook. com/EspacoCulturalMercadoSul/photos/ pb.331520280255742.

-2207520000.1461600654./ 774978145909951/?type=3&theater

While I was talking with Abder in the market, everybody who passed by him greeted each other, and when I used the term “solidarity economy� to define their practiced he affirmed it is what people from the academy call their approach, but he is not really concerned about it. He said that they try to always do what they believe to improve their actions towards a better future for the next generations as an outcome.

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MOB - MOVE AND OCCUPY YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD http://www.coletivomob.com/

In the beginning, MOB was an acronym which meant Occupy Brasilia Manual, recently they changed to Move and Occupy your Neighborhood (Movimente e Ocupe seu Bairro) what they believe has brought a broader understanding of their practice. It started with Julia Sollero and her final thesis project for undergrad, later joined the group Natalia Magaldi, Manuella Carvalho, Eduarda Aun and Thaynã Reis. Each of the architects had started her own practice through her final project at the University, and as they all follow the same ideals, approaches and interests on urban interventions and participatory processes, they decide to join their projects into one collective.

Their biggest challenge is the skepticism coming from the communities, city agencies, academia and sometimes even themselves. Naming their practice as tactical urbanism, they believe it is something that is still being digested by the traditional urban planning or urban design fields, so they believe there is a lot to fight for.

So far the practice has not been able to sustain itself, most of what it is done is achieved through donations and partnerships. However, the founders are planning to start a business model so in the future they can be consultants on projects of urban interventions with community participation and develop products that can be sold to generate income such as prototypes and publications.

In order to better understand MOB's practices I am describing and analyzing two of their projects: Guará by its residents Manuella’s project focused in the neighborhood of Guara, where she has lived for more than 10 years, for her thesis in Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Brasilia, advised by Camila Gomes Sant’anna. She wanted to raise awareness and build empowerment in the community through researching, understanding and reinforcing the feeling of belonging. As most of the neighborhoods in Brasilia, Guara exists in the shadow of the Plano Piloto, ignoring the production of culture and identity existing on the other areas of the city.

Manuella felt really lost in the beginning of the project without having much idea of ways of achieving what she wanted. So she tested several methodologies to get different informations she needed to move forward proposing something that could be meaningful to Guara and which goal would be questioning and building awareness about its citizens’ identity.

Her proposal was developed based on research using online forms answered by residents and an action that she has done at a street event, where she placed a chalkboard so people could answer the question ‘What do you want for Guara?’

Through this research, Manuella developed as an outcome a fold-out sharing the information that she collected about the neighborhood, its citizens and their aspirations.

Youth at Varjão Natália developed for her final project in Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Brasilia, a participatory process to get the youth in Varjão - a lowincome neighborhood, but really close to extremely high income area, - unified seeking for better public areas, especially using art as a catalyzer of this energy.

This was the main goal of the project.

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Working with participatory processes are really hard. For the first workshop she invited more than 200 kids from the neighborhood of Varjão, even saying that they were going to have popsicles and food after the walk in the neighborhood.

Only 4 students showed up. It was really frustrating and she wanted to give up on the process, but with her own strength and with the help of her friends and thesis advisor, Liza Andrade, she continued with the project with more 2 workshops and a final event with community members. Natália spoke with me about the importance of the food to break the ice and get the community involved. For the other workshops, she has done a partnership with a capoeira group, so the youth could be more involved.

The bigger event of her research reunited more than 100 people, including young and adults at the main square of the neighborhood. She was able to get this in a partnership with existing community organizations in the neighborhood, like the capoeira group and the judo group, with city’s NGOs like Rodas da Paz (a group engaged with urban bikes), and with city’s local agencies. For that they were able to close the main avenue for cars so the kids could play, paint the street, and practice the activities. She said that the organizations were already there and her role was mainly to get them talking with each other to promote this activities. She is planning for 2016 to keep the project rolling so they can actually build most of the ideas planned together during the workshops, producing several outcomes.

She is a member of the culture community council now and the second event had just happened on April 3rd 2016.

Figure 7: First event Youth’s Street in Varjão.

Source: Rua do Jovem no Varjão, Facebook Page. Accessed on April 8, 2016. https:// www.facebook.com/ruadojovemVarjao/photo s/a.1408710106120831.1073741827. 14 08668069458368/1493309767660864/? type=3&theater

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Map 4: Location of the inspiring practices in Brasilia. Map by Mariana Bomtempo.

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What it is inspiring for me in all of these projects is the fact that they came from the ambition to act, to turn a demand into something tangible. Some of them, from the academia to the field. For me they are all successful just because they tried out their theories, doing something that they truly believe in and had the potential to bring some change. These projects overcame personal fears to bring communities’ voices to city-making processes and were able to develop a small change, but big enough to maintain and evolve its existence.

solidarity economy

youth involvement

pedagogies

feeling of belonging

urban interventions

community empowerment

participation action research

right to the city

addressed aspects MOB

move and occupy your neighborhood actions spread in the city

mercado sul vive south market lives

plano de bairro neighborhood plan vila cauhy

CUP

center for urban pedagogies new york

Icons in this diagram by Iconoclassistas

taguatinga

The energy emerging from the projects above are as inspiring as a long standing practice of urban pedagogies like the Center for Urban Pedagogies in New York City. They have years of methodologies and successful approaches towards citizen engagement, so I decided to focus closer on their youth programs as something similar to what I want to propose on the next chapter.

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Sequence of Figures: Students from CUP’s Youth Programs working on their investigations: Stand Clear of the Raising Fares, Who Rules, Soak It Up, Shelter Skelter, If You Can Make It Here and Hello My Name Is Minimum Wage. Source: Center for Urban Pedagogies Webpage. Accessed on April 29, 2016. http://welcometocup.org/

CASE STUDY From New York to Brasilia The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) is a non-profit organization that uses design and art to translate urban and public policy in order to improve civic engagement. CUP uses visuals as a way to simplify complex topics making them more accessible, in a way that more people, mainly from historically underrepresented communities2, can participate in issues of social interest.

Through demystifying how urban-related topics impact citizens on their dailybasis, the community participation can be more diverse and this community will be able to make conscious decisions.

The group of recently graduated professionals who started CUP was formed in 1997. These people were really interested in the city and came from the areas of architecture, graphic design, art and public policy3. In the beginning the outcomes of the partnerships with several people and the research on the topics that were of interest to this group ended in exhibitions. Once an exhibition was over, they felt that the usefulness of the information exhibited was over too.

I was able to talk with Damon Rich, one of the founders of CUP in a lecture at the New School. He sent me some articles and interviews, and I asked him about how they decided to collaborate with high school students on projects.

He said he met a high school teacher who said that instead going to get the interviews Rich has been doing for the exhibitions, the students could conduct the interviews, which would not sound weird to the interviewees, as it would be students doing research for the school. In these partnerships both would get the knowledge and benefit from the process.

CUP’s projects are collaborations of a diverse group of people, among them art and design professionals, community-leaders, policy-makers, community advocates and students. CUP works with community organizers, not directly with the community, because they develop the tools so the organizers can better communicate with the community and continue to work with them. This communication engages hands-on, interactive and participatory workshops as strategy4. Once the community is able to understand the issue, they are able to contest and promote change5.

Visuals are important strategies to communicate with communities as in New York there are different languages, education backgrounds and reading levels. These less represented communities are also the ones that need this understanding the most. Making these strategies playful helps the topic to look less scary and like an official government document. With these tools that look like they are for kids, people also relax and are less afraid of saying what they think and less intimidated by the topic. In a interview I did with Sandy Xu, one of CUP’s staff, in December 2015, she explained that in the beginning it was intuitive for CUP’s founders to use visuals as pedagogy, inspired by the tradition of work on civil rights from Septima Clark and the Sister Mary Corita Kent6.

Accordingly to Christine Gaspar, CUP’s executive director, the toolkits that

2 Gaspar, Christine. Concurrent Urbanities: Designing Infrastructures of Inclusion. Edited by Mitrasinovic Miodrag. New York (N.Y.): Routledge, 2016, 76.

3 Gaspar in Mitrasinovic, Concurrent Urbanities, 76.

4 Mitrasinovic, Concurrent Urbanities, 193.

5 Mitrasinovic, Concurrent Urbanities, 193.

6 Gaspar in Mitrasinovic, Concurrent Urbanities, 85.

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they have done for community leaders have been overwhelmingly positive7.

“CUP conducts an annual evaluation with the groups that have toolkits, and we have consistently found that they continue to run workshops regularly on their own”8. The kits can be composed of posters, booklets, pamphlets, videos, maps, models, interactive online platforms9. CUP applies design as a tool to communicate an issue or to collectively produce the knowledge and actionable strategies to promote change10. For them, contributing to social justice can be achieved through giving to people of different backgrounds the ability to influence and participate in decision making processes11.

CUP has two approaches to get civil engagement through education: the youth programs and the community education programs. The first one works in partnerships with schools and the students produce the knowledge together with a teaching artist. In the second one, the community education programs, CUP makes calls for applications so community leaders can start a partnership towards developing tools to understand a specific issue from that community. In the interview Sandy Xu, said that through this process they try not to be jingoistic about an issue: “we explain how it works and people decide what to do”.

The community education programs are done in partnerships between designers and community advocates to produce the tools. In the youth programs, the students are invited to investigate about an aspect of their city and to use design to communicate their findings. Both processes bring new approaches to inclusion of urban citizens in the political protocols of processes of urbanization12.

The youth programs can be during the summer or during the semester, this second one can happen in two weeks during a regular class called City Studies, or a semester long after school project that is called Urban Investigations. In an interview for City Atlas New York in 201213, Christine Gaspar said: "with our Youth Education programs we don’t really have a 'client-driven' model, so to speak”.

This is different approach from the Community Education programs.

To decide on the topic, CUP works with the in class teacher to see if there is a particular issue or concept that teacher is having difficulty explaining and feels like could be made clearer by assigning this topic to be developed by CUP’s investigative method. The topic could also be determined by the grants financing it. For Xu, “in general we are looking for questions that the students haven’t thought before that illuminate something complex about the city and allows them to see their own place in the decision making process. Something tangible, ideally, happening in their neighborhoods”.

City Studies are programs that the teaching artist from CUP will plan with the teacher and apply with students over two weeks of alternative activities in a regular class. Usually looking at social justice or civic issues, the teaching artist will develop activities differently from the daily ones in order for the students to approach this topic differently. In the end the teaching artist is in charge of producing a visual about what was discussed so the students could share what they learn.

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7 Gaspar in Mitrasinovic, Concurrent Urbanities, 85.

8 Gaspar in Mitrasinovic, Concurrent Urbanities, 85.

9 Mitrasinovic, Concurrent Urbanities, 193.

10 Mitrasinovic, Concurrent Urbanities, 193.

11 Kasper, Jeff. “Christine Gaspar.” New York. April 24, 2012. Accessed April 16, 2016. http:// newyork.thecityatlas.org/people/ christine-gaspar/.

12 Mitrasinovic, Concurrent Urbanities, 194.

13 Kasper, Jeff. “Christine Gaspar.” New York. April 24, 2012.

The Urban Investigation Program is an after-school semester-long intensive research project to which students are invited to participate in an investigation of a previously defined topic about their neighborhood14. The students will have a topic to research in the city: looking for how it works, identifying and interviewing key stakeholders and community members, reflecting and using the skills that they learned during the semester to create a visual educational tool to make this issue accessible to other people and distribute it also to community organizations that have been working on the topic15.

For both programs, CUP partners up with a teaching artist selected after interviews and resume analysis. The class' curriculum is developed in a partnership between this teaching artist, a member of the school involved and CUP’s staff. This curriculum guides and helps the educator with methodologies that have been successfully practiced in other situations. When I asked Xu about why they change the teaching artist every time they start a program, she said that “each project is different and it might need a person with a different skill-set or style. CUP’s role in all of this is like project management, art direction, translating between the community, the community organization and the graphic designer”.

Accordingly to Gaspar16, the students like to research on topics that are in the news so they can contribute with information and the different points of view that exist in order to help people understand the different sides of the issue. Interviews are important strategies to reflect the different perspectives, and for CUP it is a great tool to expose the students to the complexities of the issue. In addition to that, CUP applies critical and analytical thinking in order to help the students to realize how they can participate in these processes.

In the Youth Education programs, the goal is for young people in communities impacted by social injustice to understand that their community’s problems are not naturally occurring, but are the products of decision-making. They learn that they can hold decision makers accountable. The experience helps reframe their perception of the city, helping them find pathways to civic engagement, while also giving them hard skills in interviewing, research, art-making, and collaboration. Most importantly, the projects take the natural cynicism of young people and develop it into critical thinking17.

During the interview with Sandy Xu, I asked her about feedback from the students, she said that CUP does not have a formal way for feedback on the work from the students, it is usually evaluated through what they have learned with the project. They have tried surveys to get answers from the students but once all of them copied the answers from each other, so they stopped doing this.

To evaluate the success she said that “if the project looks cool, other people can use it, if they have developed the skills in the process”, it can be said that it was successful.

After the project CUP does not keep the relationship with the students. They are trying to develop another pattern of engagement with the high school students, interning or working in the summer with CUP’s staff in Brooklyn. This would be a way to try to keep in contact with students who are more interested in CUP’s work.

14 15 16 17

Gaspar in Mitrasinovic, Concurrent Urbanities, 77.

Gaspar in Mitrasinovic, Concurrent Urbanities, 77.

Kasper, Jeff. “Christine Gaspar.” New York. April 24, 2012.

Gaspar in Mitrasinovic, Concurrent Urbanities, 83.

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When I asked about funding in CUP, Xu answered: “We have a few grants that are in support of one program. The Ford Foundation grant we have is only for public access design and some of the youth education programs might come from a particular foundation that wants us to focus on like green infrastructure or, you know, trash recycling, how do trash and recycling system works. It depends.”

CUP has not worked international partnerships and Sandy Xu was pretty surprised when I told them they became a reference for practices worldwide. I have found a group called Micropolis from Belo Horizonte, Brazil, for instance, which affirmed to me they follow the same steps as CUP. Sandy said that they have been working with other organizations in other states in the United States and do not want to “colonize other places”. When I asked if she sees the practice from CUP as radical, Sandy Xu said: “I think we are pretty radical.”

Katherine Gil, 18 years-old from Honduras, Central America.

As case study, CUP has shown that through urban pedagogies is possible to achieve the right to the city inspiring citizen engagement. They have shown that there methodologies and approaches that can be replicable in other places also to bring the discussion of the right to the city into the table. After understanding CUP’s methodologies and organization structure as an alternative urban practice that aims to improve civic engagement with youth, I decided to check on the other side if their discourse was being effective with some students. I wanted to understand how these methodologies and practices were being seen by the students and if it had actually changed their perspective as an active part of this system.

Interview with students from International Community High School South Bronx, New York City

Kulsuma Dulon, 20 years-old from Bangladesh, Southeast Asia.

In November of 2015, I was looking for students who have participated in one of CUP’s Urban Investigations Program in order to get the students’ point of view in this kind of pedagogy. From CUP’s webpage I could see a student who have participated in a ceremony with Christine Gaspar at the White House to get the 2015 National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award from the hands of Michelle Obama. So I found this student on Facebook and he immediately answered me. His name is Shaffiou Assoumanou and we schedule a meeting at the school and he called three more friends to participate in the conversation that was really inspiring for two hours. I spoke with: Aichatou Meite, 19 years-old from Ivory Coast, West Africa (who did not send a picture), Katherine Gil, Kulsuma Dulon and Shaffiou Assoumanou.

All of them are senior high school students and worked in the same Urban Investigation Program: “Who Rules?” In this project, the students learned, investigated and informed the community about how the City Council of New York City works, and how they could participate in this process of decisionmaking. They said that their school is one of the schools that has a partnership with CUP. CUP hires a teacher that is related to arts and this teacher comes to the school for this after school program class from Monday to Wednesday.

Shaffiou Assoumanou, 19 years-old from Togo, West Africa.

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In beginning of the semester the class is offered to the students, the teachers go into the classes offering and explaining the class, and the students sign up if they interested and have asked permission to their parents. Because of that in Urban Investigations only students that are interested participate and there is no limitation. This group got interested to participate in the project to learn communication skills, how to approach people and cameras skills, and Shaffiou also because he has a friend who worked on a previous video which made him interested too.

The starting point of the program was to get students skills, “we started by learning how to take pictures and shot videos”, explained Shaffiou. The students knew the main topic of the project, but it was open for them to use the creativity of how to frame it. “We have all the information, how are going to move the information, and we thought about making a video. In the beginning we didn’t know that we were going to make a video… The teacher asked us ‘what do you want to do with the information?’ I think we knew that we were going to make the video because we learned the skills”, said Shaffiou. They also believe that the main point of the video was to make it easy and accessible to people to watch and understand.

They also learned how to make interviews, how to ask follow up questions and how to approach people on the streets. “We learned how to make questions, we decide on the ones that were more accurate”, explained Katherine. When the students visited the City Council, they learned before going how it works and who they are so they could ask the “right questions” accordingly to them.

During the process the students acknowledged that about 50% of the people they interview did not know about the City Council. They reinforced that as immigrants the experience was important to introduce them to the political system in New York City. They were also able to introduce other people into the topic and share their knowledge with other community members who did not know about their rights before. For Aichatou, “we’ve got information on the city council, you feel more introduced to the city, you feel more comfortable in the city, after that”. She added that also knowing more information, sometimes more than people who are citizens, gives these students the responsibility towards these communities.

The process changed the perspective for the whole group, mixing theory and practice. For Shaffiou “that changed my perspective and that also inspired me to ask myself ‘What can I do to help all those people to get engaged into the community?’ Because CUP helped to get vision about it, it is my turn now to do something to help those people”. “This program makes you feel like you are leader to your community”, affirmed Aichatou.

The students feel proud of their video, it was screened to a group of people: teachers, families and community members. Accordingly to them, they had fun and shared different ideas with their friends while working together. They also got to know “really important people, who manage the city that we live in”. The video was also screened to other community organizations that work with youth in Washington DC, when Shaffiou went with CUP to receive the award. They ran a workshop on “how to make a good interview” at the same meeting in Washington.

Shaffiou believes that the program helped him with his English and to communicate with people, improving his confidence when he is speaking and making eye contact. Kulsuma feels that now she wants to participate in decisions about the city, not only rely on her family’s decision; she also liked working with people and it helped her to think about studying sociology at college next year.

Katherine believes that in high school people are more interested in grades than in what they are learning and miss opportunities like this one.

“The program inspires youth to take action… If you always expect everything from the government that’s why nothing happen”, said Shaffiou. “The most important thing is to educate people, because if you don’t know what your problems are and you have a problem, and you don’t know what things you can do, how can you solve those? As she [Kulsuma] said, you are just going to be sitting down, 51

complaining about things and don’t take action. And if you feel you are not aware of the opportunities you have to change it, how are you going to change it?”, emphasized Aichatou. Kulsuma wrapped up the conversation affirming: “people do not know how to use their power”.

This conversation was key for me to keep researching on these methodologies to bring them to my design proposal. The students were really inspiring and showed that it is possible to achieve change and improve citizen engagement through urban pedagogies. So I decided to follow one of CUP’s Youth Programs as a volunteer teacher for two weeks in order to see these methodologies being applied and the reaction of students to it.

Observing the Urban Pedagogies in South Bronx (before taking it back home) “The reality of exile is always a borrowed reality, because you are not being able to experiment in your original reality. You have to make the learning of another reality without forgetting your previous context.”

Paulo Freire18

From February 2nd to February 12th of 2016, I worked as a volunteer in one of Center for Urban Pedagogy’s youth projects: City Studies. I worked as an assistant to the teaching artist Meredith who accepted having my help in the classes that she had planned with Jenn Anne from CUP and Al Hassam the in-class teacher of that group of students. City Studies is a two week program in which a regular class of students approaches one of the curriculum’s topics in a more creative format. I helped the students and the teaching artist in class, 18 My translation. Cohn, Paulo Freire, 187.

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giving them advice and support for the activities. I could also make observations on how the urban pedagogy works on the field, which are the strengths and the weaknesses of the methodologies, and the challenges and the opportunities of the class itself.

The classes happened at the International Community High School in South Bronx, which is the same school from where I interviewed the students from the Urban Investigations, another youth program from CUP. It was a great coincidence, because not only did I have two of the students that I interviewed before working with me now, but also I could actually see them participating in class.

Meredith together with Al Hassam and Jenn planned two weeks of intense productivity so later Meredith could produce a final visual outcome compiling the information that was built by the students. Their theme was Human Rights for Immigrants which was really personally related as the school is for international students.

It is a really hard task to build a curriculum, especially not knowing or feeling the environment with the students before proposing the activities. Also everything is too fast and there is not much time to process what happened in one day so you can improve whatever did not work on the following day. Another thing that I could observe was that it does not matter how much you plan the class, which is important to know and to not feel bad about improvising. A positive aspect of City Studies program, is the fact that it is a good opportunity to learn how to deal with this kind of situation quickly and be able to improve for the next group of students.

It was a really good opportunity to follow a teaching artist and getting her prospects while working and the passion that basically is what moves these kind of projects. Almost everyday, we talked and shared opinions on the class that

Figure 8: Students working at the International Community High School. Picture by Mariana Bomtempo.

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happened, the outcomes, the challenges and the frustrations with the process, the good surprises that we had in the classroom with the students and how we could make the other day better.

City Studies differs a lot from the Urban Investigations program because the second one is an optional after-school activity, so it has only the students who are really interested participate in it. While City Studies is part of the regular classes, but with a different approach that not necessarily is the interest of all the students. High school students are easily bored and when they are obliged to work on something that it is not their interest the energy is lost really fast, which can happen more often on the City Studies programs. Another huge difference is the time to realize the activities. It is not surprising that usually the final product presented and probably the engagement of the students with the Urban Investigations’ topics are more intense than in City Studies.

In general it was an extremely insightful experience, the students that engaged on the discussions and activities seemed to be having a good time and their reactions were inspiring. On the other hand, I honestly do not know about which points everybody got really interested in this kind of class. Some students got more engaged on the activities in different ways which clearly showed the importance of having variable approaches to achieve the different ways of understanding. In the end of this publication there is an appendix with the description of the daily observations, thoughts and insights. ________________________________ Projects like these are creating empathy towards citizen participation and identity. These kinds of bottom-up urban transformations reflect the need of new collaborative forms of governance19. They are all inspiring forms of urban practices: the ones that are starting in Brasilia are part of a valuable momentum to bring these discussions into the ground, and CUP in New York, shows that with compromise and methodology it is possible to keep these practices happening for several years. Recently, MOB got a partnership with the city agency which promotes housing in Brasilia, Codhab, to take their participatory approach into other parts of the city. This is the first step on a journey of bottomup transgression to transform top-down policies20.

All of these processes of urban transformation can be translated and facilitated, this space is the middle ground that Mitrasinovic explained and I cited in the begging of this thesis. Quoting from Teddy Cruz21 this middle ground “I have been interested in pursuing in my practice, through what we call ‘tactics of translation’".

In order to achieve that, my proposal is an after-school program at the JMJ high school in Taguatinga that will happen during the year of 2016 with a local partner in class, the program proposed for the pilot prototype will be detailed in the next section of this thesis project.

19 Cruz in Mitrasinovic, Concurrent Urbanities, 9.

20 Cruz in Mitrasinovic, Concurrent Urbanities, 15.

21 Cruz in Mitrasinovic, Concurrent Urbanities, 15.

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Figure 9: Participatory workshop for a square in Planaltina, 2016. Source: MOB Movimente e Ocupe seu Bairro, by Eduarda Aun.

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a casa

the home

a praça, a ágora, a casa comum

the square, the agora, the common home

praças que se conectam, a casa comum expandida 1

squares that are connected, the common home expanded 1

praças que se conectam, a casa comum expandida 2

squares that are connected, the common home expanded 2

nossacasacomum

our common home

nossacasacomum

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Program’s logo by João Augusto

nossacasacomum

DESIGN PROPOSAL URBAN INVESTIGATIONS IN TAGUATINGA Design proposal and implementation strategy Our Common Home Program People daily live cities as spaces to reside, to meet, to work, to study, to them are share, among others, but the knowledge about the forces that control not understood by these residents. People have little knowledge of the operating systems existing on the urban environment, and this lack of understanding was named recently by Ermínia Maricato as ‘urban illiteracy’1. To challenge this urban illiteracy is extremely important to develop and share knowledge so people can take informed decisions on the ways they want to participate on the collective process of construction of the cities. Participation without knowledge is not democracy. Building and sharing knowledge are strong empowerment actions.

Inspired by the energy from the alternative urban practices that hover in Brasilia and the consistent practice from Center of Urban Pedagogies in New York City, I decided on a design proposal that is an after-school program for high school students. It is a great moment to approach the youth as key stakeholders in transformative processes in the city, who are growing population in Brasilia that is building its identity and feeling of belonging to such new urban space. I believe that by sharing the knowledge about the forces that shape our environment, the cities, more people can take a more active role in shaping these forces or infiltrating the system to shape the city themselves.

The school is a place with the potential to provide resources to engage investigations, discussions and knowledge-sharing. Freire is critical about how the schools instead of providing this space for collective construction of knowledge, most of the time, invite the students to assume a passive attitude2.

Freire argues in favor of the dialectics between teaching and learning3, inviting the students to assume an active posture and to create new knowledges4.

This program on the other side aims to have the school as the converging center in the neighborhood, that can search for and produce alternative urban strategies envisioning the common benefit of the local community. The group of students will be encouraged to question, explore and discuss their city and neighborhood.

Subsequently, they will employ creativity, art and design to communicate their findings and to develop strategies to empower the local community.

This after-school program was developed and shaped in a partnership with a local partner: João Augusto Pereira. We graduated in Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Brasilia together, and now he is finishing his master thesis project, at the Politecnico di Torino in Italy, which is also focused on the potential of education to build awareness among citizens in order to have them participate in city-making processes. It was a fortunate opportunity to build collectively this project, because both of us were aligned looking for methods to bring Freire’s theory of “self-awareness raising through collective self-inquiry and reflection”5 into urban topics. Most of Brazilian population lives in cities, but they do not understand how the place they live works. In this case, we (architects) are

1 TV Boitempo. “Ermínia Maricato: ‘Cidade é luta de classes!’”. Filmed [January 2016]. YouTube video: 4:04. Posted [January 2016]. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=9R4S6ZaDniU. 2 Cohn, Paulo Freire, 24.

3 Cohn, Paulo Freire, 195.

4 Cohn, Paulo Freire, 24.

5 Fals-Borda, Orlando, and Md Anisur Rahman. Action And Knowledge: Breaking the Monopoly with Participatory Action Research. New York: Apex Press, 1991, 17.

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Map 5: Location of JMJ High School in Brasilia. Map by Mariana Bomtempo.

practicing another role of our profession: the explainer6.

The program aims to take the recurrent cynicism of youngsters to foster critical thinking about and engagement in changing their environment into a desirable one. The group of students involved has 20 kids from the last two years at the JMJ High School, between 15 and 17 years-old, and the program has its own studio/classroom equipped with projector, laptop, locker, group tables and chairs. The school is a private school for mainly middle class families. The census tract where the school is located has an income of $1,321.84 (reais) in average per person per month and racially has 13% of black residents, 46% of brown residents and 40% white residents. These demographics are really close to the average in the city.

The program is planed to happen during the whole academic year of 2016, as summer in Brazil is from December to March, the academic year coincides with the regular year from March to November. The program will be run by João in two meetings per week, and I will be online during these meetings and giving online support and feedback on the activities. From June 2016 onwards, both of us will be in class with the students during the classes.

It is important to stress that it takes time to establish an egalitarian relationship and trust with children and adolescents, and this is key to get their experiences, beliefs and opinions7. The students in this program will be partners of the collective construction of knowledge and we believe that having more time to meet and talk with each other can open the doors to this horizontal relationship.

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6 Rich, Damon. “Spread the Word.” Residential Architect. November/December 2006.

Accessed February 16, 2016. http:// www.residentialarchitect.com/practice/spread-the-word_o 7 Fals-Borda, Action and Knowledge, 55.

The facilitators are aware that there will always be a hierarchical-tension between the ‘expert’ and the ‘participants’ in educational projects. However, we believe that it is better to deconstruct this tension by making it clear than to ignore it, and let the group find collectively a way to deal with this difference8.

Basically, the program has three phases. The core of the first phase is understanding the city as a space where complex systems operate, people intermingle and the students are also effective participants in this environment.

The group of students will investigate how their city works and communicate this knowledge with other citizens. In the second phase, students and facilitators will collectively map the local economy, acknowledging the potential opportunities to produce locally and relate the narrative of these businesses with the local community. Finally, they will use the knowledge gathered about processes and production in the neighborhood to propose and prototype ideas that can bring changes towards a desirable future for their community.

Most of the activities and methodologies of this program are based on participatory action research strategies. Accordingly to Rendon, participatory action research is9 an experimental and innovative approach to economic, social, and political change which actively engages people in generating knowledge about their own living conditions in order to produce fundamental reorganization of urban socioeconomic systems and relations of power. Similarly, socio praxis offers participatory mechanisms and methodologies that go beyond merely describing social and urban reality.

The first phase of this program will be presented in New York as my study object and prototype for my thesis project in May 2016. In August, it will be presented in Brasilia at the meeting of the existing thirteen JMJ schools in Brazil, and in December it will be presented in Turin, Italy, by João as his study object focus thesis.

Our Common Home Program has three phases, accordingly to the following timeline:

8 Rich, “On Education, Pluralist Planning, New Institutions and Language”, 25 9 Rendon, Gabriela. Concurrent Urbanities: Designing Infrastructures of Inclusion. Edited by Mitrasinovic Miodrag. New York (N.Y.): Routledge, 2016, 100.

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Phase 01

February 2nd to April 28th, 2016 - 60 hours of class

What is the city?

In the first moment, we want the students to develop awareness about the reality in which they live in order to communicate their findings to their community.

Accordingly to Fals-Borda10, if a project aims to achieve development for a community, it must first be understood in terms of people’s thinking and where they live, before becoming a project on the site.

Students will be able to visualize and to recognize the complexities and the dynamic between the several systems that compound the ecology of the city being introduced to them in a ludic way. It is expected that the students will be able to (1) relate how the issues (mobilities, housing, socio-economical, environmental, among others) that we face daily in cities are connected, (2) apply these concepts to understand how the city where we live works, and (3) explain how the history of the place is reflected in this reality.

It is presumed that through the class process and field investigations students will be able to see themselves as active stakeholders learning and sharing information about the right to the city. In this phase, we aim to use local history, media/design literacy and production, and civics as methodologies for engagement11, called by Rich as the “New Civics”.

Phase 02

May 3rd to August 11th, 2016 - 78 hours of class

What is produced here?

After having a broader understanding of the complexities behind the daily life in the cities, the students are expected to understand the importance of the local production and economies to raise/keep the energy towards a vibrant neighborhood. Students will be instigated to investigate how the production of goods, knowledge, culture, among other things, happens on the daily basis and how it can empower the local community.

I would like to punctuate that I agree with Rich when he affirms that “empowerment has been a buzzword since 1960s. It is related to the idea of the ones in power giving some power to the ones who don’t. Usually people just give as much power as they want to give”12. So in order to achieve this empowerment in this phase without being ingenuous, it is important to also understand in which conditions the “powers” are operating in the neighborhood. In other words, while the students are getting the information about the local production, they will be understanding the people are that are making this happen and how they are making it happen.

Phase 03

August 16th to October 27th, 2016 - 88 hours of class

Do the city yourself Students will propose strategies, platforms or any kind of projects that can change or improve an existing scenario of their community towards what they

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10 Fals-Borda, Action and Knowledge, 116.

11 Rich, “Finding the civic in the situation”, 2.

12 Rich, “On Education, Pluralist Planning, New Institutions and Language”, 19.

believe can benefit everyone. They will have to prototype and test their own ideas in the real life. They will have the support of the facilitators, the people that they met on the previous phases on the neighborhood and specialists on the field. We believe that “reflection on the action made it possible to accumulate knowledge on the day-to-day processes, problems, fears and limitations involved in taking collective action”13.

From the learning of the first two phases of the project, our aim is that the students will gain confidence on their “collective abilities to bring about positive changes in their life situations” in order to “organize themselves for that purpose” on this phase14.

There are several strategies that can inspire students to envision change. I could use as an example the strategy described by Rich15 as Xerox Adaptive Reuse.

In this strategy students receive photocopies of pictures of a building or a open space that could be changed, they are asked to draw how it might have been in the past and how it could be in the future. This proposal is not focused on the feasibility, but on how things are reshaped through time and can have its use reimagined to promote change. To add complexity and feasibility to their proposals we can ask them “What would it take to make that happen?”, so the students could investigate and actually turn their proposals into something real.

Exhibition at school with guests from the community and city planners The exhibition aims to spread awareness of students’ discoveries among the school and the community which the school is part of. Community members who participated on the process will be invited to give feedback to the students’ projects. Family members and students’ friends will prestige the work done by the students. Also with this exhibition we intend to promote the program and inspire other schools to work on similar approaches.

The idea is to have the exhibition placed at the school for the public to visit to see and interact with the students’ outcomes and it will be planned accordingly to the production of the students.

13 Fals-Borda, Action and Knowledge, 49.

14 Fals-Borda, Action and Knowledge, 136.

15 Rich, “Finding the civic in the situation”, 3.

Icons in this section by Iconoclassistas

November 8th to December 1st, 2016

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As the phase 01 will be the prototype of this thesis it is detailed below: Phase 01 _What is the city?

Phase 1 is divided into three parts to organize the construction of knowledge through time in order for the students to get some kind of contact with the concepts to understand them and be able to participate in the processes of city-making. Initially, to introduce the students into city planning and management concepts in a tangible and less intimidating format, they have to build their own virtual city simulating being mayors in the game SimCity, which stands for Simulation City. In the game, it is possible to operate enormous amount of data related to urban systems in a playful format that is accessible for kids at the age between 14 and 18 years-old. Their goal is to have a functional virtual city with more than 50,000 and less than 100,000 inhabitants. This amount of inhabitants adds complexity to the virtual city, while being achievable and manageable for the students. While using the game to make connections between the existing systems that compound the cities, the students will have small assignments, tutorials and feedback to acquire communication skills in order to be able to present their findings.

In the following moment, the students will unpack the knowledge about concepts and systems related to city planning and management, tracing connections between the challenges, the solutions and the interventions that were necessary to achieve their goal. These challenges and interventions will be listed so to visualize the relation between them in urban processes. The students will also debate and discuss the relation between the virtual city and real city focusing on the concept of right to the city and the importance of the relationship of people with the urban space while pursuing this right. After understanding these urban systems and their interconnection, the students will chose some of them to research in their urban space.

The final part of the phase ‘What is the city?’ is grounding the knowledge of urban systems into the neighborhood where the students live. Initially they will learn how to map how these systems exist in the city and to stabilize connections between the stakeholders of these systems. Later, they will split into groups to make deeper research on the systems they are more interested to understand how it operates in the context of the school neighborhood. Finally, they will communicate what they believe it is important to inform the residents about using videos to share online and to be part of the final exhibition at school at the end of the year.

More details on each phase, methodologies and desirable outcomes on next pages.

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PART 01 _Virtual city Students will be introduced to concepts related to cities in a ludic way, simulating being mayors of their own cities using the game SimCity. The game aims to give an overview of the complexities and the connections that compound the urban environment. Students will start questioning how cities are shaped and transformed through city planning. The artificial intelligence of the game is able to give different responses to solutions, so they will also discover that there are different causes and consequences of problems in the cities. Even in a game there is no magic solution.

The game was a strategy to show the students that the program uses nonconventional methodologies for learning and we want to approach the youth using their language to talk about serious issues. Using games to approach complex topics is a strategy that has been used for a long time, including Center for Urban Pedagogies, and after understanding better how SimCity works as a computer game it has shown a great potential to disarm the fear of the topic of urban planning and city management.

Despite the huge prejudice from academia on the use of simulation games as methodology, SimCity has been used in urban planning programs in universities world wide, including Brazil and United States. In 2007, John Gaber from the Auburn University explained the pros and cons of using the game in an article.

Recently, a Professor from the University of Vila Velha in Brazil, Pablo Lira, was cited as using SimCity as an innovative way to approach urban planning by Observatorio das Metropoles (Metropolis Observatory)16, an important urban research laboratory in Brazil.

It is simulating cities that students can use some given-solutions to try to see how they can or cannot work, or which additional decisions are needed to be made so these solutions can actually be effective. For example, a given-solution for traffic sometimes can be adding more roads, but actually while there is no advance in collective transportation, more roads will only bring more traffic. In his article Gaber17 argues that using SimCity

The two most relevant strengths of the game as methodology are the fact that (1) it enables learning through multi-dimensional levels and the interconnectedness among these levels18 and (2) it pushes the ability to identify and solve problems19.

Dealing with urban issues in a comprehensive scale provided by the game, instead of the usual approach that we have facing one problem at the time, is much more difficult and reproduces the domino effect of city planning and management20.

16 “Cidades Virtuais: Uso De Games Para Estudos Urbanos.” Cidades Virtuais: Uso De Games Para Estudos Urbanos. February 25, 2016. Accessed February 26, 2016. http:// observatoriodasmetropoles.net/index.php? option=com_k2&view=item&id=1483:cidadesvirtuais-uso-de-games-para-estudos-urbanos&Itemid=164 17 Gaber, J. “Simulating Planning: SimCity As a Pedagogical Tool.” Journal Of Planning Education and Research 27, no. 2 (January 2007): 113–21, 113.

18 Gaber, “Simulating Planning SimCity as a Pedagogical Tool”, 113.

19 Gaber, “Simulating Planning SimCity as a Pedagogical Tool”, 113.

20 Gaber, “Simulating Planning SimCity as a Pedagogical Tool”, 120.

urban interconnections Icons in this section by Iconoclassistas and The Noum Project

students are confronted with an array of planning problems that require them to observe what is going on in their city. They must analyze data, think, and plan for a whole host of situations that planners face on a daily basis. These situations include population growth, traffic congestion, housing shortages, infrastructure improvements, lack of public open space, greenhouse effects, and shortages of health and educational services.

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An aspect that can be seen as positive and negative at the same time is the fact that everything costs money in the game. It is positive in the sense that in real cities money is what moves the investments, and the money in the game does not come from nowhere, it comes from taxes and floating municipal bonds, similar to what happens in the real world. The negative aspect is the fact that in SimCity there is an assumption that all investments that are made only by the government, which excludes private-public partnerships that are extremely complex approaches to raise funds and make improvements in the real cities.

This assumption also reinforces that all the investments have an “ultimate goal of growing a city and promoting economic development”21. This economic development, once it happens in a virtual city does not affect real people and dehumanize the consequences of this assumption, resulting in phenomena like gentrification and creation of ghettos. Although this insensitive economical growth should not be the assumption about managing real cities, (as cities are for people, not for profit) unfortunately, it is a really common approach that has been taken by post-industrial neoliberal metropolises.

urban systems

How? Activity 1) During the classes, the students will work on the simulation of their cities on the game helping each other with the doubts in class and in an online group we have for discussions and announcements. Questions relating the virtual city with the real city will be discussed in class.

Activity 2) At the same time, they will collectively build a panel/diagram from the icons with the main features of their virtual cities sharing the challenges or issues, solutions and interventions, that they have faced while making their cities. The icons represent: roads, zones, power, water, sewage, government, waste disposal, fire, health, police, education, mass transit, parks, culture, trading, mining, gambling, electronics, drilling. Through the game they are also able to produce maps and graphs about their cities with data related to: population, happiness, building density, residential, commercial, industrial, land value, industrial tech, power, water, sewage, waste, fire risk, health, crime, education, germs, air pollution, ground pollution, wind, radiation, bus, trains, street cars, boat, coal, ore, oil, trade, tourism.

digital media tutorials

Basic Skill Set 01 During the classes the students will have two packages of skill sets. These skill sets are important strategies to give the students the ability to communicate by themselves and envision alternatives for professional practices. These tools will use design, creativity and digital media as platforms. As youngsters, they prefer to be treated as young apprentices and learning to use tools that are closer to professional approaches, instead of tools that could be seen as childish for them.

Through simple tutorials and assignments the students will learn some basic concepts and tools to communicate ideas: • How to make a time lapse, a screenshot and screen recording.

• How to use the Windows Movie Maker to produce a video.

• How to use your smartphone to take a good picture, shoot a good video and make a good audio recording.

Outcome 01 The students will receive bullet points with the minimal information that is

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21 Gaber, “Simulating Planning SimCity as a Pedagogical Tool”, 116.

necessary to present their city. They will deliver a video (up to 3 minutes) explaining how they developed their cities from 50,000 to 100,000 residents, which were the challenges and what they learned about how the cities work through the simulation in the game. Each student is responsible to make their own video about the city. The videos will be screened in class for critiques about the challenges with the game and the technical hardships building a narrative and making the video. This video is also a first contact with video editing to help them to produce the final outcome of this phase, which will also be a video explaining their findings in the real city.

PART 02 _Unpacking: from the virtual city to the real city As Gaber22 argues and I agree, any kind of education tool that is integrated to a curriculum, whether it be images, videos, handouts or computer simulations, can fail if it does not match the objectives of the class or if it leads the students to get false conclusions. “SimCity should not be seen as a panacea that can save a poorly taught class”23.

To connect the game with the real world, we called this part as “Unpacking” so we could discuss with the students the strengths and the weaknesses of the game as a tool and which are the main differences between the virtual and the real city. The students will also question the flaws of the game and which are its strengths as a tool to understand concepts related to the city issues.

It is expected that the students will discuss the issues like (1) the lack of citizen involvement when it is about a game, (2) how the simulation starts a city from scratch, which usually is not the case, (3) the amount of power that is in the hands of the planner, and from this problem we can discuss (4) how Brasilia was also treated like a tabula rasa and designed from a top-down view.

This phase is mainly to reflect and discuss what the students learned from simulating a city and relate this with the real city through the lenses of the right to the city. The students will be instigated to relate how certain challenges and issues raised while building the virtual city relate with the real city from their observation of daily life. After learning the challenges they faced in the virtual city, they will be split in groups to do research on topics that they want to understand better in their own city.

How? The students will have three classes for discussions about the relations between the challenges, solutions and interventions with different activities and approaches as strategies to make this transition from the virtual city to the real city.

Activity 1) They will watch video documentaries that relate the issues raised on the diagram developed on the previous part with the Brazilian cities and the concept of the 22 Gaber, “Simulating Planning SimCity as a Pedagogical Tool”, 116.

23 Gaber, “Simulating Planning SimCity as a Pedagogical Tool”, 120.

24 Gaber, “Simulating Planning SimCity as a Pedagogical Tool”, 116.

debates

Icons in this section by Iconoclassistas and The Noum Project

Complex social-economic topics that are extremely relevant in the discussion of the right to the city like poverty and race will also be discussed in this moment as the game has a sterile environment24. Here we start to look at the city as a complex system beyond a place with infrastructure, services, urban planning and production, the urban space is a place for people.

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right to the city. The screenings will be followed by class discussions instigated by open ended questions.

matrix

Acitivity 2) They will have one collective activity that is called Matrix with the Challenges, Solutions and Interventions, which will be produced in class. The themes from the previous Challenge-Solution-Intervention diagram will be divided in four main groups: urban design (zoning, roads and parks), urban infrastructure (sewage, water, energy and trash), urban services (fire service, health, education, police and transportation), urban production (exploration and extraction of minerals, trade, electronic industry, culture, gambling). To be able to do that we will use an online spreadsheet on Google Docs, each group had at least two computers to populate with the information. To populate the spreadsheet: • Firstly, the students will list the challenges related to their theme.

• Then, they respond to the challenges accordingly to how to interfere in their theme to solve the challenge.

• From the final matrix we will be able to raise critical points in the cities.

Outcome 02 As a tangible and visual outcome the students will have the Matrix relating the the Challenges, Solutions and Interferences and the driving themes to be investigated in the real city. From the Matrix will be possible to make visuals like tag clouds.

As intangible, the knowledge gathered from the discussions guided by the documentaries.

PART 03 _Real city: Present and Rewinding This phase was mainly inspired by the Youth Programs from CUP, especially Urban Investigations. Rich would describe as aiming to “take bunch of students and ourselves, conduct interviews, visit site, then bring the collected material back to the studio and try to make different forms of representation to communicate what we have learned”25.

The methodology of interviewing Stakeholders on urban issues is a recurrent strategy from Center for Urban Pedagogies. Rich26 argues in favor of it as a low-budget technique of understanding the complexities of an issue through gathering the different points of view on the topic. When the students are exposed to a diversity of narratives, they understand that different understandings of the issue lead to different believes on the present27.

mapping

The students will investigate, using the theme dissected from the last outcome, how it is their own city/neighborhood. Each team will produce a video from the visual material collected from field research, interviews with community members and stakeholders related to their thematic, mapping, etc. So they can share their findings with the other classmates and with the community related to that topic.

How? Initially, to introduce the students into the complexity of the real city, they will have two activities to show them how to ground and visualize the knowledge: Activity 1) They will make online maps, like what they had in the game SimCity, placing the information on the their city now. Each student will be in charge of mapping one

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25 Rich, “On Education, Pluralist Planning, New Institutions and Language”, 18.

26 Rich, “Finding the civic in the situation”, 2.

27 Rich, “Finding the civic in the situation”, 2.

of the systems, like sewage, water, police, education, among others from the Matrix, and all of these maps will be in relation to the school. So in the map of water, the student will map where the water comes from to get to the school.

Activity 2) The students will be split into groups to draw connections between the main stakeholders related to the driving themes extracted from the Matrix. The goal of this activity is to understand that these systems not only operate as a physical object, but also there is a huge network of stakeholders that operate, use, manage, finance, etc. that system.

Activity 3) The students will gather data from field and community research through community surveys, pictures, videos, mapping. We aim to interview at least one stakeholder related to their question for investigation. They will be encouraged to search for alternative practices and/or how the youth is related to their topic. They will be assisted by me and João through the process contributing with knowledge and connections about their themes.

For Fals-Borda28, this technique of production and diffusion of new knowledge is central to the process of Participatory Action Research. It incorporates formal data or the written knowledge in other formats of data. Using other practices from traditional sociology and anthropology can be helpful for participatory action research; these methodologies can be open interviews, census survey, photograph, cartographic, statistics, sound recording, field research and community surveys29. All of these methods are seen as traditional approaches, but when used by high school students who are not into these professional fields, they are effective ways to place youth as producers of knowledge and to join academic with popular knowledge.

Activity 4) Following the research about the present of the city, the students will look at their theme, questioning “why my city is like this now?”. They will watch and debate a documentary about the construction of the city and make research on the local history. It is expected that they can realize how historically the city has been shaped by city planning without taking the residents into consideration, and how its inhabitants have been fighting back to be part of the process of city-making.

We expect the students to understand and relate the narratives of their own families with the city through interviews and oral narratives.

Understanding the history of a place as a collective construction is a methodology described by Falls-Borda30 as “Critical recovery of history”. On our project we 28 Fals-Borda, Action and Knowledge, 9.

29 Fals-Borda, Action and Knowledge, 10.

30 Fals-Borda, Action and Knowledge, 8.

community survey

interviewing

Icons in this section by Iconoclassistas and The Noum Project

After more grounded discussions on the issues on our neighborhood, the students will be split into four groups to work on deeper researches. These topics will be chosen collectively in accordance to the interest of the students.

In this moment, we differ from CUP because as their Urban Investigations program starts with a pre-defined topic, the students join the program if they are interested on the topic or or not. In our program, the investigation is part of a bigger curriculum, so we prefer to have them researching something they are interested in to propose interventions on the final phase by the end of the year.

This strategy connects back with using the game to have an overview of existing urban systems, so they could make this informed choice.

collective construction

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plan to use the collective narratives to tell the stories that are not told about the formal history of the city. Using oral tradition and interviews with old members of the community, who have good analytical memories, and family members are ways of getting this relevant information31.

Basic Skill Set 02 In addition to the skills developed in part 1, the students will also learn more skills to complement their abilities. It will continue to use design and visuals as communication tools. These skills will be shared through simple tutorials and assignments in order to learn: • Interview techniques.

• How to geo-reference pictures.

• How to make basic online mapping.

• Compiling and reading data through spreadsheet applications.

knowledge sharing

Outcome 03 We expect that the students understand that the real politics in the cities does not have a precise conclusion, and it is composed by contradictory messages that need to be unfolded in order to navigate and participate on these tumultuous realities32. They will present a compilation of the findings about the neighborhood of Taguatinga related with the group’s topic through educational videos to be shared online. They will also add to the video the narratives about the city and the relationship of their personal histories with the city. To produce this video, they will use the skills that they have been leaning in the program. The video must include: a. Introduction of their theme. b. Who are the stakeholders related to their theme. c. How the theme relates with the urban space of the neighborhood/city. d. Which were their findings with the field research related to their theme. e. What stakeholders or specialists think about the theme. f. What did they learn from the project.

STUDENTS FEEDBACK + EVALUATION FORMS During the program the students will be asked to evaluate the main activities through online forms. This information will be described together with the Class Takeaways on the Pilot Project on the next section.

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31 Fals-Borda, Action and Knowledge, 8.

32 Rich, “On Education, Pluralist Planning, New Institutions and Language”, 22.

CONCLUSION The new knowledge that is produced through Participatory Action Research can incorporate styles accordingly to the skills and the ability of the participants33.

As this pilot project program is composed by high schoolers from a private school, who are basically middle class students, most of our decisions about tools, methodologies and approaches were made focusing on their interests and abilities. In case of applying the program with youth of low-income families, we do not believe that most of our methodologies should be changed. The most important would be to have funding to buy tools that might not be accessible to all students, like audio-recorders, cameras, laptops, among others, and this resource would be key to keep the project more independent and growing to other parts of the city. However, to approach other ages of students or adults from community centers it will be necessary to reshape these tools.

It is through enlivening people to question their routine and the environment in which they are, that it is possible to help them to connect facts and get conclusions, in order to have intellectual base to pursue change34. This knowledge can be more powerful than outside intellectual input to a community.

I believe that the biggest challenge of the program is to sustain it as a practice for a longer period of time. Both students and facilitators are middle-class and the pressures coming from the capitalist reality are hard to battle when it is a matter to keep the standard of living:

On the other hand, this is a good opportunity for the students to think about their power to change their city, creating a momentum that is different from the narrative of the city that has been neglecting the existence of the majority of the population. There is a huge power in the awareness that everybody has the right to the city. The combination of scientific and popular knowledge provided by this pilot project is able to propose feasible strategies to address local problems without a defined hierarchy36. This fusion can bring innovative and transformative projects into the cities and use reflection and action with collaborative diversity of expertise37. The power and the results of these new insights are timeless and can be spread among several groups of people to keep the energy rolling towards transforming the prevailed struggles38 and produce less unjust cities. “This is an effort in counter-alienation and in constructing ‘knowledge democracy,’ necessary for survival in the present ambiguous and violent contexts of many nations”39.

33 Fals-Borda, Action and Knowledge, 9.

34 Fals-Borda, Action and Knowledge, 136.

35 Fals-Borda, Action and Knowledge, 139.

36 Rendon in Mitrasinovic, Concurrent Urbanities, 101.

37 Rendon in Mitrasinovic, Concurrent Urbanities, 112.

38 Fals-Borda, Action and Knowledge, 38.

39 Fals-Borda, Action and Knowledge, 153.

Icons in this section by Iconoclassistas and The Noum Project

Given their formal education and middle-class origin and aspirations, the external animators tend to go through many tensions in their work with the people, for example, comparisons with peer groups, middle-class lifestyles, demands of the family and careerist tendencies. These factors make it difficult to retain many of the external animators for long, resulting in a high turnover35.

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FIRST DAY OF CLASS

INTRODUCTION VIDEO 70

PILOT PROJECT: CLASS TAKEAWAYS DIARY Having the proposal drafted, João presented the project to the school in the end of 2015 to invite the students. In the beginning of 2016, with the program made more detailed by me and Joao together, the project was presented to the coordination of the school, to the teachers and to the parents, in order to have their opinion and support. Starting in February of 2016, we have been prototyping the program at JMJ school, always registering the experience to help us reflect on our decisions and make the necessary improvements through the year and to take the outcomes of this pilot project into other schools in the city.

These classes takeaways contain the activities that worked and did not work while working with the students: the challenges that we faced as facilitators and outcomes that the students were able to produce with my reflection on the results.

Below each class day is described and at the end of each part of the first phase of the program, there is an analysis and conclusion evaluating the process.

PART 01 _Virtual city Feb 3rd

Place: Computer room

Intro For the first class the students were introduced to the program schedule and to the participants. They were asked to record a video introducing themselves and sent me the videos so I could get to know them. Most of the students were able to express themselves very well orally and they took care of making a good video, looking for a silent place to record it or a nice scenario in the school. I answered them with a video explaining the good decisions that they have taken and how they can improve for their next videos taking care of some details that were not observed in the first one. On the lef, there are some pictures of the class.

Feb 5th

Place: Computer room

The first class the students were introduced to SimCity and they also made relations comparing the virtual city with their own city. They are aware of the main goals of the program and want to relate the topics.

Feb 11th

Place: Computer room

Setting the stage - day 2 Some students were still solving some issues with the resources available. Some were still figuring it out if they wanted to participate in the project. Definitely Carnival week it is not a time to solve or produce anything in Brazil, basically the year only starts after it. For the skill set they learned what is a time lapse, how to make one. They also learned how to record and take a screenshot so they can

Icons in this spread by The Noun Project

Setting the stage - day 1 Basically the day was an informal conversation about the game, students had trouble with the software, how to install, how to make the computer works. Any methodology has its flaws and definitely this one would face some obstacles.

João also taught the students some basic tools in the game: how they work, how to visualize them and how they are named. João also compared the tools in the game with the stakeholders in the city, such as the “constructing water pipes would be similar to what CAESB (Sanitary Agency in Brasilia) does and is responsible for”.

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use these as visual resources for their future projects.

Feb 16th

Place: Studio

Work Session - day 1 This was the first class in which I could actually participate online through Skype.

Some students that have been more responsive and involved with the project were assigned to give support to the other students who have been having trouble understanding the game. We keep warning the students about their duties and responsibilities. We used one of the students’ results to show good ways of producing narratives about their cities for the final product. They had a presentation about what the first outcome should be about and look like with the main questions that must be answered by their video. We also started to use the game to connect with the reality, we used the 18 icons from SimCity (roads, zones, power, water, sewage, government, waste disposal, fire, health, police, education, mass transit, parks, culture, trading, mining, gambling, electronics, drilling) to build a Challenge-Solution-Intervention panel so students could start posting their challenges and solutions that they have already faced producing their cities. This panel is a visualization of the complexities addressed by the students so far and it will be a collective construction during the next classes. In the next weeks, it will be used to make the connection between the virtual city and the real city. At the bottom right, there is a picture of the panel they did, it is interesting to notice that the feature with the most issues in their virtual cities was zoning.

Feb 18th

Icons in this spread by The Noun Project

Place: Studio

72

Work session - day 2 A few minutes before the class started, João sent to the students the from “About your virtual city”. The answers were sent in 20 minutes and followed

by João in class. Through Google Forms, the answers were turned into data and the graphs were automatically produced and showed to the students. The goal was to show 2 aspects simultaneously (1) the content of the form which brought information about how they were facing the challenge of constructing and managing a city; (2) the different shapes of data visualization, like bar or pie charts. While analysing the data gathered, several questions were asked and the students actively participated. Through the discussion questions like “what is the city for?” or “which are the its main characteristics?” were raised and the debate took most of the time of the class. In the last 30 minutes, we presented a basic tutorial of photo composition, giving the students the guidelines for the assignment related to the basic skill set. The students had to take a picture from a scenario or object from their daily life following the basic rules of composition of images. They also sent an audio explaining the composition elements that they used for the picture and telling a narrative about how that place or object is related to their life. The goal of this assignment is not only to help the students to make good visual pieces, but also to test the quality of the recordings on nonprofessional equipment, so we can use them for the next assignments.

Feb 23rd

Place: Studio

Feedback + Work Session - day 3 The class started with an analysis of the assignment that they had from last week.

I made a sequence of slides with the pictures with comments on the images and audio. It was evaluated the quality of the equipments, the ability of the students

INTRODUCTION TO SIMCITY

WORKING IN CLASS AND BUILDIN THE PANEL 73

LUÍS EDUARDO

CAROLINA ALVES

GUILLHERME LOPES

ISABELLE THINASSI

74

MATEUS RODRIGUES

WILLIAM CARRIAS

to express themselves through image and/or speaking, and the composition of the image with the narrative: how they were complementary or not, the positive aspects and the main flaws. In general it was a nice exercise and presenting the outcomes was a fun experience to get closer with the students, even though I am far away. They also participated by giving their opinions, but the facilitators spoke more this time. Later the students had more time to keep working on their individual project: producing their cities on SimCity.

Feb 25th

Place: Studio

Work Session - day 4 Today is the final work session day before they finish with SimCity. We had a conversation about strategies of building a narrative of their own virtual cities and we recapitulated the questions that must be answered by this video. The video should contemplate the following aspects: (1) introduction with your name and what the video is about, (2) which were the processes and the decisions you took so the city got to the way it is, (3) what did you learn or discover about how the cities work, (4) which are the most interesting aspects of your city, (5) which goals you were able to achieve and which you did not achieve.

They watched one tutorial about Windows Movie Maker and we sent several other links with resources to help them to research further so they can produce a video as the outcome of this first part of the program, due next class. They also were instructed how to make a basic storyboard to help them build their videos.

While talking about their virtual cities, the students were discussing about (1) the relationship between the size of the streets with the constructive potential and value of the land, (2) how the infrastructure of the city evolves accordingly to its economical growth, (3) how to make the commercial areas grow, (4) how they had to balance the industrial and residential areas, (5) how to distribute parks and the relation of them with the land value, (6) how education brings economical value to their cities. They were always touching on the point of how the challenges faced by their cities could not be solve in one single way, the solutions are complex and are related to other issues.

March 1st

Place: Studio

Presentation: Outcome 1 Today was the presentation of the videos produced by the students about the cities that they have made in SimCity in four blocks. Each block had 5 videos between 3 to 4 minutes and around 15 minutes for discussion. They talked about technical aspects of the videos they have made, including audio and image quality, video editing and script. While comparing their projects with each other, they pointed out the positive aspects and the main flaws. The students were also pushed to talk about the cities that they produced, comparing the challenges that they faced and overcame while simulating being a mayor of an imaginary city.

In general the outcomes were really balanced in quality, among the 21 videos produced, just a few had some serious problems, like not making much sense

Icons in this spread by The Noun Project and Iconocrassistas

There were discussions about the challenges that they have faced producing their virtual cities in class and Q&A sessions about the software to make the video.

The students who did not achieve or were far from achieving the goal of at least 50,000 inhabitants in their cities had the opportunity to receive advice from the other students so they could achieve better results.

75

or having really bad audio/image quality. On the other hand a group around 4 students had really good videos, both in technical and content aspects. All the students showed interest and engagement to learn all the skills that made them able to produce their videos, which was demonstrated not only by the degree of their outcomes, but also through the discussion in class.

Conclusion and analysis About the experience in general This first part of the project can be considered successful. We started with 45 students and ended up with 23, which was our initial goal. We do not see this variation as a problem because it was a really large class, several students had signed up just to see what the program was about and it was not our goal to have so many students. The assignments had helped us to filter the group to have only students who are engaged and want to participate, and at the same time helped us to get closer and to know them better. The class discussions have shown the maturity of the students and that has surprised me. I do not remember having this level of understanding and dialogue when I was in high school, maybe because the school where I studied did not have open space or encourage the students to have this kind of debate. The fact that we have been delegating some responsibilities to them has also shown their proactivity. The final outcome reflects that the group has understood what the program is about and it is willing to give their best, even if they cannot be the best in everything.

Icons in this spread by Iconocrassistas

About the knowledge about the city Using SimCity has shown that it is more appealing to talk about cities when it is possible to visualize them working, especially in the case of high school students. Some bigger topics related to zoning or urban infrastructure sound really intangible, so simulating being a mayor of a virtual city helped to put all the students on the same page when it is a matter of giving names to things.

The students also understood through the game that there are several relations between different layers that compound the cities and that one decision taken to solve one issue can result in another issue or sometimes not be enough to solve that issue.

76

About the collaborative process I believe the game was a good decision to start the conversation on cities, but maybe having a moment when the students could build their cities in groups would be better. Firstly because some students did not like or did not have patience to play video games and had a hard time playing it. Secondly because they would first learn how to build their cities and then would have to deal with taking decisions in groups, which is another struggle on city management, usually there is no such thing as one person taking all the decisions in the city by himself/ herself. Thirdly, they could have more time to play with the game in class and help each other with the hardships in the game. They actually had several moments helping each other, but the group would push them to work more collaboratively.

Unfortunately, taking this decision of extending the time playing the game would throw off the curriculum for the whole year. Probably by the end of this year-long pilot project we will be able to revise some relations between activity and timing to make it more consistent.

About the right to the city In this moment, the idea of the right to the city was brought by students without being introduced to this terminology. The students wanted to make the virtual residents happy while building their cities and in order to achieve that they have to provide cities with adequate housing, good public services, infrastructure and nice having public spaces. These concepts were introduced so we could

get deeper on the challenges of the right to the city. They had the first approach to the hardships to provide what they believed was a good city to all residents, some students also tried to address social inequalities, but were not able to avoid rich and poor areas in their cities.

ARTUR VICTOR “It is a very interesting game for the project and for anyone else who wants to know how a city works in a playful way.”

GABRIELA GASPAR “What the most important thing I learned was that no decision is neutral, meaning, every choice that I have made influenced other issues of the city.”

GIOVANA ALVES “The most relevant aspect of the game is that the city works like a human body, you cannot have a problem in one point that does not reflect in another one.”

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“...In real life there are some politicians who seem to be playing SimCity. A guy who is poorer and lives in Sol Nascente [biggest favela in Brasilia], another guy [government representative] goes there and destroys his house.”

by Luis Eduardo

“We don’t have to plan a city just for profit, but a city where we can live in. It’s not for future revenue, not thinking only about money.”

by Carolina Alves 78

PART 02 _Unpacking: from the virtual city to the real city March 3rd

Place: Studio

Part 1 wrap up + Unpacking - day 1 The class was structured in different moments: a. Wrap up debate about the presentations from the last class. b. Video explaining Reverse Engineering as a method to understand through dissecting. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_ continue=4&v=lOf5kqilcSE). c. Challenge-Solution-Intervention panel revisited with discussion. d. Video about the challenges in the real Brazilian cities produced by TV Futura, a Brazilian educational channel. Link: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=bzZ4m7Uke8c. e. Discussion about the challenges in the virtual cities and the real cities.

In the first moment, the students were questioned about what they have learned in the game that they did not have time to think before or did not know about how the cities work. Some of the answers listed by a student on her notebook were: • cities are interrelated with each other.

• it is not possible to please all the inhabitants.

• for one problem, there are several solutions.

• sanitation, health and environment are extremely interconnected.

• each person is a universe in him/herself and there are a lot of people living in the cities.

• the city is like a human body, everything is connected.

In the second moment, we watched a video about reverse engineering. Reverse engineering is a strategy used to deconstruct something that you do not understand, so you can understand each piece and how do they work together.

Methods and concepts like observing, taking notes, questioning and not takings thing for granted, mental mapping, testing and feedback were introduced.

After the break, we watched the small documentary called “Which are the challenges of the Brazilian cities?” and we had a discussion comparing the challenges of the real cities in the documentary with the challenges of the virtual cities, mainly focusing on the issues that a computer simulation cannot address and are the most complex ones: the human relations in the city.

March 8th

Place: Studio

Unpacking - day 2 Today we prepared a spreadsheet to be collectively filled up by the students as our Challenge-Solution-Intervention final version of the matrix. The groups were split by the facilitators accordingly to the skills that the students have shown until now so we had balanced teams. For all of us, it was a hard exercise to summarize the knowledge that we have gathered from the game in a visual

Icons in this spread by Iconocrassistas

Thirdly, we revisited the Challenge-Solution-Intervention panel, that was collectivelly built in the wall of the class, reading what was posted and adding other new observations with the whole class together. It was a really hard exercise, specially because each feature of the panel had several other relations with other features. We were able to finish discussing only about the roads and the zones of the virtual cities. Anyhow the discussion and the points raised by the students were really interesting.

79

and concise way. Not only the facilitators, but also the students are aware of how complex the points that were raised as challenges or solutions from the game are, and how much more connected with each other they are than what a spreadsheet is able to show. Anyhow, it was a way to extensively list all the points so we did not leave any relation unaddressed when simulating with the game, and to have an idea of how they are connected. Doing this using markers and post-its was not enough.

The themes from the previous panel were divided in four main groups: urban design (zoning, roads and parks), urban infrastructure (sewage, water, energy and trash), urban services (fire service, health, education, police and transportation), exploration and production (exploration and extraction of minerals, trade, electronic industry, culture, gambling). Firstly, the students had to list the challenges related to their theme. Secondly, they respond to the challenges answering how interfering on their theme would help solve the issue. To be able to do that we used an online spreadsheet on Google Docs, each group had at least two computers to populate with the information. While doing the activity we had ups and downs of energy in the room, but the students understood what the activity was about.

We finished the class with 57 challenges pointed out by the students with an enormous number of interventions in different systems in the city that could bring solutions to these issues. For example, when the students had issues with a huge number of deaths, they were able to point out interventions on areas such as zoning, roads, sewage, water, trash, fire service, health, education and transportation to solve this situation.

March 10th

Place: Studio

Unpacking - day 3 The students had basically three main moments of the class: a. Revising the Challenge-Solution-Intervention matrix. b. Discussing about the outcomes of the matrix. c. Discussing about the issues around urban land and the social function of the urban property.

They had around 40 minutes to fill the matrix up with the missing relations pointed out by me and Jo達o. They were also asked to revise the text for consistency and simplicity of language. We turned the matrix into a graph showing the challenges that need more interference to solve and the areas of interference that would solve more challenges.

Icons in this spread by The Noun Project

A section of the matrix made by the students is on the right page.

80

DESENHO URBANO

areas of interference

VIAS

ZONEAMENTO

NÃO HÁ ESPAÇO PARA VIAS MAIS LARGAS.

DESAFIO 2

A DENSIDADE DOS EDIFÍCIOS É BAIXA.

EVOLUIR AS VIAS.

DESAFIO 3 E 71

ENGARRAFAMENTO DAS VIAS.

MELHORAR AS VIAS E DIMINUIR OS CRUZAMENTO S.

DESAFIO 4

TRANSPORTE PÚBLICO LOTADO.

AUMENTAR A DENSIDADE DAS VIAS

AUMENTO NAS ZONAS RESIDÊNCIAIS

DESAFIO 7

DESVALORIZAÇÃO DE ÁREAS RESIDENCIAIS.

DESAFIO 8

FALTA DE ESPAÇO PARA AS CONSTRUÇÕES.

DESAFIO 9

CUSTO ELEVADO DE MANUTENÇÃO DOS PARQUES.

DESAFIO 10

FALTA DE ÁREAS PARA PESSOAS DE CLASSE BAIXA.

EVOLUIR AS VIAS

FICAR LONGE DE ÁREAS POLUENTES.

POLÍCIA

EDUCAÇÃO

SERVIÇO DE BOMBEIROS PARA A REGIÃO

SERVIÇO DE SAÚDE PARA A REGIÃO

EXPLORAÇÃO E PRODUÇÃO TRANSPORTES

EXPLORAÇÃO E EXTRAÇÃO

COMÉRCIO

ELETRÔNICOS

CULTURA

JOGOS

ADICIONAR PONTOS DE POLÍCIAIS NO ESCOLAS EM PARADAS DOS CENTRO ÁREAS DE RESIDENCIAL RESIDENCIAIS MEIOS TRANSPOTE PÚBLICO

CRIAR UNIVERSIDAD E/FACULDADE PARA A PROFISSIONA LIZAÇÃO DA POPULAÇÃO

INVESTIR NA CONSTRUÇÃO DE PARQUES PARA QUE A VALORIZAÇÃO AUMENTE.

1)AUMENTO DA DISTRIBUIÇÃO DE ENERGIA.2)CO NTRUÇÃO DE USINAS ELÉTRICAS LONGE DAS RESIDÊNCIAS

1) ADICIONAR 1) AUMENTO SANEAMENTO BÁSICO A DA DISTRIBUIÇÃO POPULAÇÃO; 2) LOCALIZAR DE ÁGUA; 2) FORNECIMENT AS ÁREAS RESIDENCIAIS O DE ÁGUA LONGE DE LIMPA REDE DE ESGOTO

1) FORNECIMENT O DE COLETA DE LIXO À POPULAÇÃO; 2) DEPOSITOS DE LIXO LONGE DAS RESIDÊNCIAS;

1)CORPOS DE BOMBEIROS PRÓXIMO A ÁREAS RESIDÊNCIAIS PARA A VALORIZAÇÃO DO TERRENO

1)POSTO DE SAÚDE PERTO DAS DIMINUIR A RESIDÊNCIAS CRIMINALIDAD PARA A E VALORIZAÇÃO DO TERRENO

NECESSITA DE VIAS EVOLUÍDAS PARA UMA BOA QUANTIDADE DE TURISTAS

1) CRIAÇÃO DE UM ARMAZEM COMERCIAL; 2) EVOLUÇÃO ESPECÍFICA DO ARMAZEM DE REMEÇAS NO ARMAZEM COMERCIAL

AUMENTAR A QUANTIDADE DE TRANSPORTE PÚBLICO PARA AQUELE LOCAL

ADIÇÃO DE ESCOLAS PARA A VALORIZAÇÃO DO TERRENO

ADICIONAR MAIS ÁREAS DE COMÉRCIO PERTO DAS RESIDENCIAIS

CONSTRUIR EDIFÍCIOS CULTURAIS

INSTRUIR A POPULAÇÃO COM INTUITO DE QUALIFICAR O PROFISSIONA L PARA SEU AUMENTO SALARIAL

1) SABER DEIXAR EM EQUILIBRIO A DENSIDADE DA POPULAÇÃO E A ÁREA RESIDENCIAL .

INVESTIR EM INVESTIR EM CULTURA JOGOS PARA PARA ATRAIR ATRAIR MAIS MAIS COMPRADORE COMPRADORE S E TURISTAS S E TURISTAS

INVESTIR EM PESQUISAS DA UNIVERSIDAD E PRA CRIAR REATORES MAIS EFICIENTES

COMPRAR ENERGIA DE CIDADES VIZINHAS

crossing the challenge with the area of interference = sollutions

CONSTRUIR PARQUES EM PONTOS ESTRATÉGICO S E COM MENOR CUSTO DE MANUTENÇÃO .

list of challanges

DESVALOZIAR ALGUMAS ÁREAS E CRIAR ZONAS DE CLASSE BAIXA.

FALTA DE COMPRADORES.

AUMENTAR A POPULAÇÃO COM A CRIAÇÃO DE MAIS ZONAS RESIDENCIAIS.

DESAFIO 12

POPULAÇÃO NÃO CRESCE (CIDADE EVOLUIDA NO MÁXIMO)

VALORIZAR AS ÁREAS E AUMENTAR A DENSIDADE DA ÁREA RESIDENCIAL .

DESAFIO 13

SOBREPOSIÇÃO DE VIAS, VIADUTOS ETC.

DESAFIO 26

ENERGIA INSUFICIENTE

DESAFIO 27

POUCO ESPAÇO PARA AUMENTAR AS CAIXAS D'ÁGUA.

DESAFIO 28

FALTA DE FUNCIONÁRIOS NAS UNIDADES DE TRATAMENTO DE ESGOTO

DESAFIO 32

DISTRIBUIÇÃO 1) AUMENTO FORNECER DE ENERGIA DA SISTEMA DE PARA A DISTRIBUIÇÃO ESGOTO À POPULAÇÃO DE ÁGUA; POPULAÇÃO

DESTRUIR ÁREAS ABANDONADAS E UM BREVE PLANEJAMENTO .

DESAFIO 11

ESGOTO QUE NÃO SUPORTA A DEMANDA

SAÚDE

INVESTIR EM TRANSPORTE PÚBLICO

FALTA DE TRABALHADORES ( CLASSE BAIXA ATÉ ALTA)

ESGOTAMENTO DE LENÇÓIS FREÁTICOS DEVIDO A ESTAÇÃO DE BOMBEAMENTO

BOMBEIRO

1) ADICIONAR MAIS VEICULOS DE TRANSPORTE; 2)ADICIONAR OUTROS MEIOS DE TRANSPORTE PÚBLICO

DESAFIO 6

DESAFIO 31

SERVIÇOS URBANOS LIXO

COLOCAR PARADAS ONDE TEM UMA MAIOR QUANTIDADE DE HABITANTES.

COMÉRCIO - TRANSPORTE EVOLUIR AS DE REMESSA INSUFICIENTE. VIAS

DESAFIO 30

ESGOTO

AUMENTAR A QUANTIDADE E A QUALIDADE DE TRANSPORTE PÚBLICO, OU DE MEIOS DE TRANSPORTES PÚBLICOS.

DESAFIO 5

FALTA DE ESPAÇO PARA NOVAS UNIDADES DE TRATAMENTO DE ESGOTO

ÁGUA

MELHORAR E DIVERSIFICAR OS MEIOS DE TRANSPORTE PÚBLICO

SABER SEPARAR AS ÁREAS INVESTIR EM RESIDENCIAIS PARQUES EM DE CERTAS CONSTRUÇÕES DETERMINADA S ÁREAS COMO DESPEJO DE ESGOTO E INDÚSTRIAS.

1) COLOCAR PARADAS ONDE TEM UMA MAIOR QUANTIDADE DE HABITANTES E PRÓXIMAS DO COMÉRCIO E INDUSTRIAS.

BOMBEAMENTO DE ÁGUA POLUÍDA

ENERGIA

1) PREVER ESPAÇO MÁXIMO ANTES DE LOCAR DEMAIS ELEMENTOS; 2) DEMOLIR ZONEAMENTO EXISTENTE PARA ALARGAR VIAS

DESAFIO 1

DESAFIO 29

INFRAESTRUTURA URBANA PARQUES

SEGUIR OS PONTILHADOS INDICADOS PELO JOGO AO CONSTRUIR AS VIAS.

1) MELHORAR AS USINAS JÁ EXISTENTES 2) VERIFICAR A LOCALIZAÇÃO DAS USINAS

PREVER ESPAÇO MAXIMO ANTES DE LOCAR DEMAIS ELEMENTOS; 2) DEMOLIR ZONEAMENTO DESNECESSÁRI O

CONSTRUÇÃO DE UMA ESTAÇÃO DE BOMBEAMENT O DE ÁGUA

MELHORAR AS AMPLIAR ÁREAS VIAS DE DE ACESSO ÀS UNIDADES DE ZONEAMENTO TRATAMENTO RESIDENCIAL

MELHORAR OU AIDICIONAR MEIOS DE TRANSPORTE PÚBLICO 1)AFASTAR A CAIXA D'ÁGUA OU A ESTAÇÃO DE BOMBEAMENT O D'ÁGUA DO SOLO POLUÍDO 2)CONSTRUÇÃ O DE UMA ESTAÇÃO DE BOMBEAMENT O DE ÁGUA

PREVER ESPAÇO MAXIMO ANTES DE LOCAR DEMAIS ELEMENTOS; 2) DEMOLIR ZONEAMENTO DESNECESSÁRI O EXISTENTE PARA AMPLIAR OS SERVIÇOS

1) NÃO COLOCAR AS BOMBAS DE ÁGUA PROXIMAS AO ESGOTO; 2) UTILIZAR ESTAÇOES DE TRATAMENTO DE ESGOTO

MELHORAR AS ESTAÇÕES JA EXISTENTES

SECTION OF THE MATRIX PRODUCED BY THE STUDENTS

MUDAR A ESTAÇÃO PARA UM LOCAL COM MAIOR DISPONIBILIDA DE DE ÁGUA

DESTRUIR CERTAS ZONAS RESIDENCIAIS, DIMINUINDO A DEMANDA DE

COMPRAR ÁGUA DE CIDADES VISINHAS

1) MELHORAR AS UNIDADES JÁ EXISTENTES 2) CONSTRUIR NOVAS UNIDADES 3)

UTILIZAR O TRATAMENTO DE ESGOTO DE CIDADES VIZINHAS

81

DESENHO URBANO

INFRAESTRUTURA URBANA

ZONEAM PARQUE ENTO S

VIAS

15

31

ENERGI ÁGUA ESGOT A O

9

7

11

12

LIXO

8

SERVIÇOS URBANOS

EXPLORAÇÃO E PRODUÇÃO

TRANS BOMBE SAÚDE POLÍCI EDUCA PORTE IRO A ÇÃO S

EXPLOR COMÉR ELETRÔ CULTUR JOGOS AÇÃO CIO NICOS A

8

7

8

28

21

7

16

5

9

4

DESAFIO 7

DESVALORIZAÇÃO DE ÁREAS RESIDENCIAIS.

13

1

1

1

0

1

1

1

1

0

1

1

1

1

0

0

0

1

0

1

0

DESAFIO 2

A DENSIDADE DOS EDIFÍCIOS É BAIXA.

11

1

1

1

0

1

1

1

0

0

1

1

1

1

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

DESAFIO 57

MUITAS MORTES

10

1

1

0

0

0

1

1

1

0

1

1

1

1

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

DESAFIO 58

POUCAS MATRÍCULAS NAS ESCOLAS

8

1

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

1

1

0

1

1

1

1

0

DESAFIO 63

SISTEMA CARCERÁRIO MUITO PRECÁRIO

7

1

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

1

1

0

0

0

1

0

1

1

DESAFIO 51

MUITA CRIMINALIDADE

6

0

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

1

1

1

0

0

0

0

1

1

DESAFIO 52

GRANDE QUANTIDADE DE INCÊNDIOS

6

1

1

0

0

0

1

0

0

0

1

0

0

1

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

DESAFIO 54

PROBLEMAS DE SAÚDE DEVIDO A POLUIÇÃO

6

0

1

1

0

0

1

1

1

0

0

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

DESAFIO 60

GERMES POR TODA À CIDADE

6

0

0

0

0

0

1

1

1

0

0

0

1

1

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

DESAFIO 64

POLUIÇÃO DA ÁGUA CAUSANDO DOENÇAS

6

0

0

0

0

0

1

1

1

0

0

1

0

1

0

0

1

0

0

0

0

DESAFIO 76

FALTA DE COMPRADORES

6

1

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

1

0

1

1

1

0

0

DESAFIO 77

MUITA POLUIÇÃO DAS USINAS

6

0

1

1

0

1

0

1

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

1

0

0

0

0

DESAFIO 11

FALTA DE COMPRADORES.

5

0

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

1

0

0

0

1

0

1

1

DESAFIO 37

ENERGIA POLUIDORA

5

0

1

1

0

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

1

0

0

0

1

0

0

0

DESAFIO 56

FALTA DE ESPAÇO NOS HOSPITÁIS

5

0

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

1

1

1

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

DESAFIO 33

ACUMULO DE LIXO

4

0

1

0

0

0

0

0

1

0

0

0

0

0

1

0

0

1

0

0

0

DESAFIO 38

MATERIA PRIMA QUE SE ESGOTA NAS USINAS ELETRICAS

4

0

0

0

0

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

1

0

0

1

1

0

0

0

DESAFIO 39

ENERGIA LIMPA QUE NÃO SUPREM A DEMANDA

4

0

1

0

0

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

1

0

0

0

1

0

0

0

DESAFIO 5

COMÉRCIO - TRANSPORTE DE REMESSA INSUFICIENTE.

4

1

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

1

0

0

1

0

0

0

DESAFIO 53

OS BOMBEIROS NÃO CONSEGUEM CHEGAR AOS INCÊNDIOS

4

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

1

0

0

1

1

0

0

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0

0

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DESAFIO 66

MUITOS INCENDIÁRIOS

4

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

1

0

1

1

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

DESAFIO 78

FALTA DE PROFISSIONAIS PARA PRODUÇÃO DE ELETRÔNICOS

4

0

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

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DESAFIO 82

EVOLUIR A TECNOLOGIA PRODUZIDA

4

0

1

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0

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1

0

0

DESAFIO 26

ENERGIA INSUFICIENTE

3

0

0

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1

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DESAFIO 28

FALTA DE FUNCIONÁRIOS NAS UNIDADES DE TRATAMENTO DE ESGOTO

3

1

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

DESAFIO 3 E 71 ENGARRAFAMENTO DAS VIAS.

3

1

0

0

0

0

0

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DESAFIO 32

ESGOTO QUE NÃO SUPORTA A DEMANDA

3

0

1

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0

0

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0

DESAFIO 4

TRANSPORTE PÚBLICO LOTADO.

3

1

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

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0

DESAFIO 41

MUITA POLUIÇAO NO SOLO EM VIRTUDE DO CANAL DE DESPEJO DE ESGOTO

3

0

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DESAFIO 55

DEMORA DAS AMBULÂNCIAS

3

1

0

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DESAFIO 59

TEMPO DE ESPERA MUITO ELEVADO QUANTO AO TRANSPORTE PÚBLICO

3

1

1

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0

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0

0

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0

DESAFIO 6

FALTA DE TRABALHADORES ( CLASSE BAIXA ATÉ ALTA)

DESAFIO 67

LOCALIZAÇÃO DAS ESCOLAS NÃO ATENDE TODA A POPULAÇÃO

DESAFIO 1

NÃO HÁ ESPAÇO PARA VIAS MAIS LARGAS.

DESAFIO 27

POUCO ESPAÇO PARA AUMENTAR AS CAIXAS D'ÁGUA.

DESAFIO 29

BOMBEAMENTO DE ÁGUA POLUÍDA

DESAFIO 30

FALTA DE ESPAÇO PARA NOVAS UNIDADES DE TRATAMENTO DE ESGOTO

DESAFIO 31

ESGOTAMENTO DE LENÇÓIS FREÁTICOS DEVIDO A ESTAÇÃO DE BOMBEAMENTO

DESAFIO 35

EXPLOSÃO DAS USINAS DE ENERGIA NUCLEAR

DESAFIO 36

ARMAZENAMENTO DE LIXO CHEIO

DESAFIO 40

CENTROS DE COLETA DE LIXO E RECICLAGEM NÃO SUPREM A DEMANDA

DESAFIO 65

SECTION OF 0THE0 MATRIX 1 0 0 1 0 SIMPLIFIED OF 0 0 0 0 BY 1NUMBER 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 RELATIONS 0 0 0 0

1

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Transforming the0 spreadsheet into a0 visual, it 0was0 interesting 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 to 0see 0that 0the 0 3 0 challenge 1 0 0 0 by0 the 0students 0 0 0 0 0 1 cities 1 0 was 0 the0 devaluation 0 0 3 biggest faced on the virtual 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 of2 residential areas.

The0 features that showed more potential as0 interference 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 areas were: zoning, education, transportation and commerce.

0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 2

0

1

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We cloud the of the challenges raised by0 the1 students.

0 did0 a tag 0 0 0 with 1 0 text 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 also 0 0 word, 1 0which 0 0 0 0that 0 is repeated 0 1 0 the 0 0 0 is shortage 0 0 2 The biggest also is0 the0 word most, 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 2 (falta in 0Portuguese):

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

2

0

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INCÊNDIOS CAUSADO POR FESTAS

2

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

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1

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1

0

0

0

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DESAFIO 68

FALTA DE MÉDICO NOS HOSPITÁIS

2

0

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DESAFIO 79

ESTRUTURAS CULTURAIS MUITO CARAS

2

0

0

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0

0

0

0

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1

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0

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DESAFIO 81

SUPER LOTAÇÃO NAS USINAS DE PETRÓLEO

2

0

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0

0

0

0

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0

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0

0

0

1

1

0

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DESAFIO 10

FALTA DE ÁREAS PARA PESSOAS DE CLASSE BAIXA.

1

0

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

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0

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DESAFIO 12

POPULAÇÃO NÃO CRESCE (CIDADE EVOLUIDA NO MÁXIMO)

1

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1

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DESAFIO 13

SOBREPOSIÇÃO DE VIAS, VIADUTOS ETC.

1

1

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DESAFIO 34

MÁ DISTRIBUIÇÃO DA ÁGUA

1

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DESAFIO 42

CANAIS ENTUPIDOS DE ESGOTO

1

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DESAFIO 61

FALTA DE QUALIFICAÇÃO PROFISSIONAL

1

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DESAFIO 62

POUCAS VAGAS NAS ESCOLAS/UNIVERSIDADES

1

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DESAFIO 69

DIFICULDADE NOI DESENVOLVIMENTO DE TECNOLOGIAS

1

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DESAFIO 70

DIFICULDADE EM ADICIONAR UNIVERSIDADES

1

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1

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DESAFIO 8

FALTA DE ESPAÇO PARA AS CONSTRUÇÕES.

1

0

1

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DESAFIO 80

POUCO LUCRO COM SALÃO DE JOGOS

1

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1

DESAFIO 9

CUSTO ELEVADO DE MANUTENÇÃO DOS PARQUES.

1

0

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1

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TAG-CLOUD WITH 0 0 0 0 0 THE 0 0 0 0 0 0 RAISED 0 0 BY0 THE 0 CHALLENGES 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 STUDENTS

After that we had a discussion with the students about the outcomes of the activity, their impressions and the methodology of reverse engineering. They have made complex relations that for us showed a successful approach to the matrix as a methodology to compile and visualize the discussion that we have been having with the students in the past weeks. The students concluded several things, like: • The fact that commerce is important to the cities as people are not producing everything they need to live anymore.

• If the city works as a human body, the transportation is like our blood and it is essential to keep it working.

• Education is essential to bring awareness to residents to make informed decisions and avoid issues like fires in the houses or spreading diseases.

• Education is also a tool to bring capital to cities as there is more value aggregated to the labor force and what they produce.

As the challenge that had most relations with different urban systems was the devaluation of residential areas, we showed the students two videos about the complexity behind the land value in the cities and how this issue had serious consequences to the cities’ residents in Brazil. The videos are ‘The city is the class battle’ by Erminia Maricato (https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=9R4S6ZaDniU) and ‘How to ensure a city for everyone?’ by the Brazilian channel TV Futura (https://youtu.be/P3SiczvTrUI).

The students were asked to reflect on the differences between being the real city and the virtual city and the answer was clear: the simulation does not take in consideration the fact that there are human beings living in the city, and these human beings have needs, expectations, dreams, etc. They raised arguments such as (1) the decisions in SimCity are top-down, (2) some policy-makers seems to be playing SimCity while managing the cities we live in, (3) the right to the city is not part of the game, and (4) there is no ‘social function’ of the land in the game as we have in our law.

Conclusion and analysis

It is interesting to face the other side, my whole life I have been a student, and it is the first time that I have to plan the classes and make them pleasant. I remember when I was in High School sometimes it did not matter if the teacher was great, I was tired and I just did not want to pay attention or participate. This was also a challenge that I faced while I was working with CUP in South Bronx. The students commented that they hated the activity of the matrix because it was boring, but the discussions that were backed up by the points raised by the matrix were really interesting to them.

About the knowledge about the city After producing the Matrix, all of us were finally able to visualize the relation between the features and the challenges that exist in the cities. It was really interesting to have the topics like zoning being discussed in class without being pushed by the facilitators who are professionals in the field. We did not want to

Icons in this spread by Iconoclassistas

About the experience in general This phase has shown that keeping the high energy is a challenge to achieve in a classroom. The discussions, the video and the working moments had their ups and downs in this phase. Although it is an elective class, it is still a class, happening in the school environment with students wearing uniforms and sometimes the students are tired, and all the effort that was put into making the class did not matter.

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force the students to talk about zoning, even knowing the importance of it on the discussions about the city.

Together with the students, we understood that the simulation is limited and not able to reproduce all the challenges existing in the real life and the decisionmaking on the game is strongly top-down and relies only on the will of who is playing.

About the collaborative process Proposing and making the matriz took a lot of time from me and Jo達o in order to make sense of it, and to be able to effectively gather the data and the relation that we wanted to visualize. Although it was also hard for the students to understand and be able to collaboratively populate it with the information required, it was possible to be effective only because it was a collective format to summarize so many relations that were being raised since the beginning of the program.

Facilitators and students could revise together the text and agree on the relations that were made by the groups. It was a hard exercise that students did not enjoy, but I believe it was extremely important for the process of dissecting the city.

The debates were really insightful. All of us, students and facilitators, could voice our ideas and agree or disagree with each other politely, which I believe showed to the students that it is possible to have people who do not necessarily agree, but can listen to the different opinions to find a common ground to take democratic decisions. I seriously hope the students can take this moment for their lives, and we aim to repeat these debates, so they can understand the importance of the dialogue for democratic processes and how hard they really are.

About the right to the city As in this moment we discussed the flaws of the game, we talked about (1) how some important concepts of participation, citizenship and right to the city are also part of the discussions on the real cities, (2) how the cities are places of social struggles and conflicts, and (3) how the urban land is a product that has its value connected to several aspects. With these discussions the students were introduced to the comprehensive concept of the right to the city. We discussed the several ways of people who are claiming and trying to achieve their right to the city, that it can be through housing, mobilities, jobs, education, heathy, culture, among others. We expect the students to keep using the lenses of right to the city on the next phases of the project in order to find ways on how it can be brought to daily urban practices.

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PART 03 _Real city: Present and Rewinding March 15th

Place: Computer room

Skill set 2: Basic online mapping Today the students had their first class getting in touch with the investigations in the real city. For that they had a class about online mapping as a tool for research and investigation. In the first moment, it was explained to them the importance of knowing what you are doing before starting field research, to do previous research about the place you are going, to know with whom you are talking and which are the goals of that. There was also a conversation about the fact that several students have been late or not explaining absences, so we asked if there was anything happening about the project the students should tell us, but nobody said anything.

Than JoĂŁo showed the students the new features of Google Earth like the isometric views and briefly explained to them how that images are done by Google and how GPS works. We refreshed their memory about the meaning of latitude and longitude, the geographic coordinate system and quadrants. When the students opened Google Maps and learned about the edition tools, they started to click and make their maps, so JoĂŁo gave them 10 minutes to map whatever they wanted and load the map on the shared folder. During this activity, the students also learned the difference between a .KML file and a link.

The features from the matrix that we decided to map in the neighborhood around the school were: commercial, residential and industrial zones, parks, electricity, water, sewage, trash, firefighters, health, police, education, transportation and culture. While the students were mapping, their work was being projected so the class could follow. One of the students could not find the data online, so she called the Water Agency to get the information and this initiative was really important to show the students’ interest. The student who was producing the map on trash management in the city also called the city company responsible for that to get the information.

The map with electricity systems had more information about the percentage of electricity that each of them provided to the city when you clicked on the icons, and we asked the students that they could improve their maps using this strategy. Later we will make these maps available online.

March 17th

Stakeholder value web In the beginning of the class the students were introduced to the theme of the class: they were going to talk about the stakeholders in the real city and how these parts are related with each other. The students were divided in four groups and each of them had to produce a poster about the following topics: education, transportation, trading and zoning. In the first moment, they had to list the stakeholders related to that topic and they had 10 minutes for that. Then they added attributes for these stakeholders, if they were for-profit or not, public or private, state or federal scales, and so on. They had 15 minutes for this. After that the students were asked to add relationships and flows of money, goods, among other things, between these stakeholders. Finally they all stuck their posters on the wall, each group presented their understandings and we had a discussion about it.

The group which talked about trading focused on large scale instead of talking

Icons in this spread by Iconoclassistas

Place: Studio

85

MAP ABOUT EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS MADE BY JULIA VALENÇA

MAP ABOUT CULTURAL SPOTS MADE BY LARISSA TEIXEIRA

86

STAKEHOLDER VALUE WEB CLASS

STAKEHOLDER VALUE WEB CLASS

87

STAKEHOLDER VALUE WEB CLASS

STAKEHOLDER VALUE WEB PRODUCED BY SAULO FEITOSA REVISING THE FIRST VERSION MADE BY HIS GROUP 88

about the scale of the city. They focused mainly on international trading. João did not intervene on that, and they explained the topic even if it was not the focus of the activity. The groups that explained education and transportation understood the activity well and did a great job. We all discussed about what they forgot and what we have learned.

The final group presented the zoning, and it was really interesting seeing the students struggling with the theme. Most of them did not know the stakeholders and how they related, although they understood how important zoning is to people to understand about that. One of the students made a comparison saying that if the city is like a human body and the features are the organs, the zoning would be the skeleton structuring the system. The facilitators explained some of the doubts that they had about the zoning, and the students were asked to list the questions that they had so we could discuss later.

One of the students from the group of education got so excited about the activity that he reworked the graphic in order to make it more complete and robust. We did not ask them to do it, he decided to work by himself and the result was really good and it is on the bottom left page.

March 22nd Place: Online

Map revision Students received tips to improve their online maps and did the activity at home as João could not be at the school. The maps are ready to be published as important information about the neighborhood of the school.

March 29th

Place: Online

Map critique and revision The class had to be cancelled because of a personal appointment João had. In order to keep the students working and learning from each other we assigned each student with a different student’s map, so they could see each others’ maps to critique the quality of the map and the potential informations that could be added. All of them had done the activity and the reports were sent back to the authors of the map with comments from myself. The students were also instigated to develop questions about information that it is not necessarily mappable, but is still relevant to understanding the themes. These questions were the start for the investigation phase.

It was also during this day that João and I decided to reduce the meetings with the students to one time a week. Unfortunately, even having the approval of the school to have two meetings per week some students were having trouble reconcile the program with their other activities. The program is ambitious and it takes time to work on it. It would be better to have fewer meetings then no participants and consequently no project at all. We decided to give a step back so we could keep moving forward.

March 31st

Place: Studio

Urban investigation - day 1 The class today was the beginning of the investigation phase, we grouped the questions raised in the last activity for the students by four main topics: urban design, urban infrastructure, urban services and urban production. We also

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rephrased some of the questions to help them understand what is a strong question for investigation. It took some time to have the discussion in class and split the students into four groups according to their interests. We explained to them that the phase now is to use what they learned about complex relations in the city and the communication tools to investigate and communicate their findings by the end of April.

The focus should be to produce knowledge about the area around the school and our neighborhood. After the discussion, which honestly I thought was going to be longer, the students had four bigger topics to investigate: the urban design group would like to understand how Taguatinga started, the urban infrastructure group wanted to learn about the electricity systems in the neighborhood, the urban services wanted to research how to educate local population to get proper health care, and the urban production theme wanted to understand how culture is produced in our neighborhood. They have brainstormed bigger questions and some minor questions related to what they are interested to understand.

For the skill set session we told the students how to geotag pictures on their phones so they can map their investigation and we had a simulation session of interviews. During the interview session the idea was to have the students simulating with each other: how to approach strangers, authorities and specialists; how to differentiate questions to get quantitative or qualitative data, what it is the importance of each; how to address the right question to the right person and not lose time or opportunities. I have had this activity with the students from CUP and unfortunately the activity did not work the way I planned, because I was not in person to simulate with the students and I could not listen to them properly as the audio was not working well. Anyways we were able to start developing the questions to investigate under the umbrella of the main question and what kind of information the students will search for in the following weeks.

April 5th

Place: Studio

Icons in this spread by Iconoclassistas

Urban investigation - day 2 It was like a traditional studio class in design school. The groups stayed working together with the support of the facilitators. The students developed the forms to investigate the current view of people on the streets is related to their topic. During the whole afternoon we developed strategies to approach people, and how to be precise with questions in order to not leave them open to misinterpretation. We talked about the differences between, the potentials and the flaws of open questions and yes-or-no or multiple choice questions. We also talked about their goals with the forms, how to make relevant questions for their goals, how to phrase the questions in a way that would actually have different points of view being represented.

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As, unfortunately, safety is not the strongest attribute of Brazilian cities, the students also received advice to stay in safe places and groups, avoid empty or dark areas, not to use or expose electronic devices or call attention for thieves or burglars. Each group picked an area to research in the neighborhood of Taguatinga so they did not overlap interviewers and we could know where they were going to be.

The students also start to define where to get the information on their thematics that does not come from the streets. They listed potential stakeholders to interview, places to visit for field research, and data that can be found online. The groups also developed online forms with the same questions to spread to friends and family to have robust data for the research.

WORK SESSION ON THE FINAL OUTCOME

WORK SESSION ON THE FINAL OUTCOME 91

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GETTING READY FOR FIELD RESEARCH 93

April 7th Place: Streets Urban investigation - day 3 The support that the program has been receiving from the school has been fundamental to the success of it. All of the students received from the school kits with bag, identification, notepads, pens and other accessories for the field research. After more advising from the coordination, the students went for field research and by the end of the day sent messages saying that it was tiring, but a lot of fun. Unfortunately, most them did not feel safe enough to take pictures while working, and the others forgot to do it. The discussion about the experience and the results will happen on April 14th with the students.

March 8th

Place: National Museum Auditorium

Urban investigation - day extra As some students wanted to talk with the secretary of urban planning and understand better how the city is shaped by policy-makers, we alerted them to an open seminar that would happen at the National Museum auditorium with Architecture students and professionals. As it was a last minute event, only 8 students were able to go to meet with city-planners and bottom-up urban practitioners. They had the help of Joao, Nilva (school coordinator) and Luanna (student advisor) to get there. They came back really excited with what they saw and being able to participate on a professional event with discussion with community members.

April 12th

Cancelled class

Urban investigation Due to a personal problem the class needed to be cancelled because Jo達o could not be present. For this day, we decided to talk first with the students if they preferred to meet on Thursday or if they preferred to have an online class given by myself guiding them through the activities. Most of the students voted to postpone the class to Thursday and to have both me and Jo達o present. As some students could not participate on Thursday, I helped them online to work on some of the activities that had been planned for this week, so they would not be behind the other groups next week. They started to compile the data they gathered on the streets on spreadsheets and to make a map with the places they did their research.

April 14th

Place: studio

Urban investigation - day 4 Even having the problem of changing the class day at last minute, only four students missed the class and it was not because we changed the day. We planned to start the class with a moment of conversation about the experience on the streets talking with people. This was one of the moments I missed the most when I worked on City Studies with CUP, because as a short program there was no time for it.

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We started the conversation asking them about the experience in the street and if the advice we gave beforehand was useful for their work. It was a really nice conversation exchanging the experiences the students had in the streets. They said they could not make the interview at the mall because the security said they need an authorization to do it, so they went to the central square. As the buses took forever to arrive, they discovered the bus stop a great place to do several interviews as most of the people were just waiting.

They had some surprises while asking questions of people, for instance the group that was researching about the local production of culture discovered that there were several people that had never gone to the movies or did not even remember the last time they had been to the movies. They were interested by the reaction of people running away of them, asking the questions back and trying to start a conversation, and people afraid of giving their name, email or number. They also have got surprised with people excited about helping them and asking to participate on the interviews.

We raised the importance of the activity to be able to get outside the computer to see how things work on a daily basis and how the diversity of people living around us is enormous. One group was really excited as they have found a person originally from Portugal and another from Lebanon.

The group that was researching about the health system said that several people who had never used the public system or had used it a long time ago had a really bad impression about it, and are more mostly influenced by what the media says.

The interviewees that had used the public system recently said that “it wasn’t the best thing on earth, but it is good”. The group said they went to the streets expecting people just to say bad things about the public health system, but it was nice to get other points of view and rethink their opinion. They said people are used to just complaining about anything that is public and not helping it to get better. “It seems that actually there are people provoking the tension in public hospitals, yelling at the security, for example”, said one of the students.

For the group researching the history of the neighborhood they have got really excited about talking with the elderly to get their opinions about the city. While for this group, people were critical about how the city is, for the group who did research on the electrical system they were impressed by the fact that most of the people actually did not care much or had no opinion about the state-owned electricity infrastructure. Another issue that was raised by this group, was having the impression that most of the people that they talked to have not finished middle school.

We also talked about the experience going to the event on Friday and seeing the population and the architects discussing how to make the city a better place.

They got really interested in participating as volunteers on the events to promote change on open areas in extremely low income neighborhoods.

After the break and the discussion, they worked on writing the data from the community research to spreadsheets so they could analyze the quantitative data. They learned how to simplify the data so it could be more easy to read and operate the spreadsheets. They also had the results of their online research to compare the data. They did the activity while learning how to use Excel to make the formulas to get data related to variables of the research, which was one of the skills to be learned in this phase.

Icons in this spread by Iconoclassistas

The students said that they did their best not to lecture the person they were interviewing to influence their opinion and mess with the results of the research.

They also really like the exercise and the experience of talking with strangers, to overcome their shyness. One of the students said that while he was interviewing a resident about Taguatinga he was just saying bad things about the neighborhood, then when he asked “if you could move, where would you like to go?” the interviewee said that he would live in Taguatinga. Among other funny conversations with residents, the students could explicitly see that people are not consistent in what they want.

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WORK SESSION ON THE FINAL OUTCOME

WORK SESSION ON THE FINAL OUTCOME 96

April 19th Place: studio Urban investigation - day 5 During this class the students continued working with the spreadsheets from the field research, some of them were having issues filtering their data to visualize their findings. João was mainly responsible for this first section of class, giving the students support on their doubts about the spreadsheets.

Later we presented to the students the parameters for the next outcome of the program: a video with the urban investigation relating the neighborhood where they live with the thematic that they have chosen. We gave the instructions so the students would be able to build a narrative using the skills that they have learned through the classes with the findings, research and discussions that we have been doing. For this second half of the class the students worked on the storyboard following the instructions of the minimal content that should be part of what they want to tell. The narrative should have the following parameters: • Introduction of their theme.

• Who are the stakeholders related to their theme.

• How the theme relates with the urban space of the neighborhood/city.

• Which were their findings with the field research related to their theme.

• What stakeholders or specialists think about the theme.

• What did they learn from the project.

These points were revised step-by-step, checking what each group has achieved or could research to complement what they have found so far. We continued working taking their doubts on this final outcome so they could build a narrative for their investigations: checking which information they had and what they needed to confirm the next week. High school students need serious guidance otherwise they get lost easily, do not pay attention or produce.

Initially the students had 40 minutes to start organizing the information gathered during the week about their topic in order to answer the first two bullet points of the presentation: what is their topic about and which are the main stakeholders.

After that moment, while the students were working, João talked for 30 minutes with each group about what have they have done up until that moment and the next steps to get their videos done by the next week. The groups with the themes of the local production of culture and electricity in the city were really well organized, with a defined script, strategies to make and edit the images.

Both groups showed maturity to deal with any obstacle, and to get their best done while using creativity to produce their video. The group of culture also was able to schedule several interviews with local artists to add to their research.

Unfortunately, the group researching electricity, besides having a lot of material from their own research, was not able to go foward with the interview with a specialist or stakeholder in the area.

The group that is doing research on the local healthy system in the middle of the process changed their focus from prevention through awareness to treatment, and João had to push them back to the first approach. This kind of change in the work process is common and the facilitator has to attempt not to let the work topic lose the focus of the project, that is to inform citizens in order to empower them to take their own decisions. The group has good intentions, but has been having some issues on the process. I believe that maybe the lack of understanding of the facilitators on the topic is a problem to provide better

Icons in this spread by Iconoclassistas

April 26th Place: studio Urban investigation - day 6

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guidance on the process. Next week we will see if they will be able to build the narrative.

The group that is responsible for researching the local history was not organized at all, their work was way behind of the other groups and the students have not done much to keep producing and researching outside the class. They explained the script of their video to João and accordingly to him it had a lot of humor, but not much relevant information and took the topic in a really naive way. Because of that, João decided to give more attention to the group in order to push them to be productive. They watched and discussed the documentary “A cidade é uma só” (The city is only one) from Adirley Queirós. The documentary talks about the families that were moved to the satellite towns during the construction of Brasilia in order to keep the poor people far from the Plano Piloto. Accordingly to João, watching the documentary followed by the discussions provoked the students and they started to have a more critical point of view of the history and the planning of Taguatinga as a way to keep Brasilia “beautiful” and without poor people. They were able to rewrite the script and João believe that they have great ideas on their hands and expect that they will be able to make it happen.

It is important to be specific about the tools to the students in order to get what is expected, definitely having both facilitators in class would be the ideal for this moment. Expecting that all of them will be able to solve any issue by themselves does not take in consideration the maturity differences between the students.

Also, the deadline for the phase of the project is overlapping with the finals week, so this must be revised for next project in order to not overwhelm the students.

They will present next Tuesday, May 3rd, and after the feedback they will have one more week to improve their videos.

May 3rd Place: studio Urban investigation - final Today the students presented their final outcomes about the investigations on the real city. The Internet at school was really bad and because of that I lost several moments of the conversation. I believe that inside the framework we have had in the project so far they did a great work and for one day of class many things happened at the same time, so I will list the plan for the class and then describe what happened:

• Watch two videos and discussing them: evaluating content and format.

• Watch more two videos and discussing them: evaluating content and format.

• 20 minute break • Program evaluation: answering the online form evaluating the program until now and an open conversation so the students could say openly their opinion about what they have learned so far and what they would like to learn.

We were expecting that the outcomes that the students would present were going to be ongoing outcomes. We expect that with the feedback they can evolve their videos with the information needed to build a more cohesive and relevant narrative to share with the community. We started watching the videos done about the electricity and about the history of the Taguatinga.

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WORK SESSION ON THE FINAL OUTCOME

INTERVIEW WITH STAKEHOLDERS

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Video about the electricity system in the city: Members: Carolina Alves, Luan Lucas, Maria CecĂ­lia and Mateus Rodrigues.

The first group has been really organized since the beginning of the project and followed the sequence of information we expected to have in the video that was presented last class. They have shown an amazing ability to edit videos and get their things done well and on time. They were the only group that uploaded the video before class and have always been really responsive to the activities that are proposed. The narrative was cohesive and they used also other video techniques that were not introduced by the facilitators due to time constrains. They were really direct to the points we have been talking about in class and were supposed to be explained by the video, but they forgot to use creativity to tie the narrative together better. They also were not very critical about their findings and they were informed on how they could approach the topic of infrastructure in a more bottom-up format in order for the citizens to feel more empowered to take their decisions. This group also was able to schedule several interviews with specialists in the field that would make their project more robust, but unfortunately the interviews are for next week, so they will be part of the revision of the outcome, together with the critical approach. Below are some frames of the video produced by the students.

Discussion about both videos It took time for the students to start talking. All of them were really tired of working on the videos during the whole weekend and until late night. This is something that really needs to be revised in the project in order that they do not take more assignments home that they can handle with their daily activities. In this case, it would be better dividing the activities in class so they do not leave everything to the last minute as most of students do (including my friends in Design and Urban Ecologies).

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We had to reinforce that this presentation was just the primary review and we aim to keep evolving the videos for the presentations at school and at JMJ school convention that will happen in August. During the conversation we spoke that maybe it would be more interesting to the project to have trailers for their videos

Video about the history of Taguatinga: Members: Artur Victor, Guilherme Lopes, LuĂ­s Eduardo, Matheus Luiz and William Carrias.

As me and JoĂŁo are both passionate about this topic it was really interesting to see the students struggling to build this narrative. Their first problem was to get the material. This group of students is participative and creative, but they leave everything for that last minute. Their topic is not easy to deal with leaving things to be done at the last minute, and they lost great opportunities to gather rich content. I believe also it lacked a more detailed methodology on how to approach the topic, which left the students a bit lost. They react really well to what is proposed, but they do not have the natural proactivity that the group researching about electricity had. They could not find information online easily about the foundation of Taguatinga and as they left it for the last minute, they did not use the research they had done at the community, nor did they have the time to organize themselves to interview anyone. However, they said they had material for a video-documentary about the city of 15 minutes and they had to cut a lot to have just 5 minutes to present in class.

The video used several historical videos and audios from the construction of Brasilia and the students were really critical about what happened with the people who moved to Brasilia trying to find a better place to live in the beginning of the construction of the city. They gave a sensationalistic tone to what is said to people about the city and what they called the truth, they even did a joke taking the mascara of Lucio Costa, the urban planner of Brasilia, to show who he really was and made him look like Darth Vader. This opened the debate for a long conversation on what happened in the history of our country to get to what happened in the construction of Brasilia and different narratives behind it. Below are some frames of the video produced by the students.

to share on social media, but also to have documentaries that they can add all the information that they found important to the project.

Technically both groups tried to do their best in the framework of being high school students who just got introduced to media production. Definitely the sensibility to be able to transform a narrative into a video format takes time. Both groups improvised techniques and did research to fulfill what we were not able to address in class or they got interested on doing.

For content the students in class got really interested in what was explained and affirmed. They learned things they did not know before and agreed with the advice that me and JoĂŁo gave to strengthen their storytelling. We had to stop abruptly the conversation in order to move to the next video.

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Video about the health system Members:Ana Carolina Lemos, Ana Caroline Souza, Isabelle Thinassi, Giovanna Santos, Saulo Feitosa and Taylor Drumond.

This video was confusing because they tried to address all the points we gave to them last class to support their storyboard, but without building a cohesive narrative. Again I believe that it is a lack of involvement of the facilitators with the topic to guide the students better, to understand what they were trying to say. They showed interest in doing something engaging with images and interviewing people on the streets and stakeholders, but it needed more time to mature the narrative and to design better what they were trying to say. They showed ability to talk and explain in front of the camera too. Unfortunately the video ended up being confusing, but this group of students was always really interested in improving and probably for the next cut I will help them make sense and actually inform the community about the positive and negative sides of the health services in the city so people can take informed decisions. Below are some frames from the students’ video.

As the group that was going to present next was having problems rendering the video, we jumped to the conversation about the video that was presented.

Discussion The conversation was mostly focused on the format of the video, but when it started the conversation about the inequalities between the public and the private systems of health the students did not come back to the topic and started a long conversation about inequalities in society, especially coming back to their findings about the history of Taguatinga and the people that were moved there. The group that did the research explained more things that they could not add to the video to support their arguments. It was a moment that we lost the focus, despite the topic being so relevant, but then it was time for the food and it calmed it down.

The school provides food every afternoon for the students who stay participating in the project, and this is something extremely important to the future of the project: always having breaks and snacks to keep the good mood and energy rolling.

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Video about the local production of culture Members: Gabriela Gaspar, Giovana Araújo, Giovanna Karolinne, Julia Valença and Larissa Teixeira.

This group did an amazing video, as I could not watch the video with the class because of the internet, I was just listening to what was being screened, later they sent me the file for me to watch. They have shown maturity to organize the material, the narrative, to get interviews with stakeholders and to make sense of what they were saying. They struggled to shorten their narrative to 5 minutes because they got a lot of material. They used techniques that were not taught in class, but they decided to learn by themselves and did a great job. For such a short period of time, as they put everything together during the weekend, we were really impressed. Unfortunately, they had trouble rendering the video and the final section did not work. Below are some frames of the video produced by the students.

Discussion After the warm up talking about the social inequalities in our city, talking about the production of culture was not easy either. One of the interviewees of the students, a local artist that sells his pieces to big real state developer corporations, said that art is not a priority because people need to have food and health first and primary needs. This statement became a really long discussion about the role of art in our quotidian lives. Some students, agreeing with the artist, were seeing art as only the formality of pieces in the museum, and should not be the priority when there are other urgent needs to be addressed. For other students, they were thinking of art as part of human beings and it would represent our culture independent of financial resources provided by laws or government.

Most of them agreed that without an understanding of art it can hardly be appreciated, and they believe that education would be the primary step to people understanding and producing any kind of art. The conversation got really messy again. We gave our position that art should not be seen only as something erudite, but it is part of our life and thinking outside the box. Besides the fact the conversations do not have a conclusion, they have been showing that the students are open to share their points of view and to respect each other. We have been repeating this to them, and how important it is to listen, to disagree and argue without being disrespectful.

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This process is extremely important to them to be able to build democratic processes. Nowadays in Brazil, people are more concerned about “showing” what they “know” or their opinion, but nobody is interested in sharing and building together. Conversations continue in our minds and they will able to reflect on what all of us said to rethink their opinions. Real change happens when a person is exposed to a different point of view and stops to think about it instead of yelling at each other, especially when a point of view differs from what has been repeated by everybody else and is not immediately absorbed.

As on of the students said in the conversation: “The knowledge (saber) overcomes the prejudice” Luis Eduardo.

As all the conversations ran longer than expected, we have to cut the topic and ask the students to do the evaluation forms at home and we had a small discussion about how the program has been going in these past 13 weeks.

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Conclusion and analysis About the experience in general: In order to achieve better results from the outcomes, technically and content wise, it would be really important to have me there to give support to the students together with JoĂŁo. The project is too ambitious to be run by only one person. In addition to that, people are different and have different potentials to be explored in order to be able to show their greatness. More than one facilitator in class who have complementary skills would cater to the differences between the students and they would feel more supported.

The students who participate and are interested in this kind of approach usually are the ones who get to participate in more activities in the school. I used to be like this, so I understand their complaints when they they are getting really tired, so we need to find ways of getting the activities done in class. In addition to that, the years of the students to be invited for the program need to be revised next program-year; the students in the last year are really overwhelmed with the fact that they will leave school in the next months. Maybe seeing ways of having them participating, but more in the sense of helping them to find their passion before getting into university.

About the knowledge about the city and the right to the city: It was a great start and I am glad the students realized it is just the beginning and there is a lot more information to keep dig into when we talk about cities. All of them were really impressed by the history of Taguatinga and the narrative of the people who were settled in the area. This knowledge is key to change people’s perspective about the injustices behind the construction of Brasilia and to make them see the consequences of these injustices in our daily life. It is also key to push people to do something and stop continuing watching passively their right to live in that place being taken away from their hands.

Through this part of the project they also were exposed to the different narratives that compound our environment and the politics behind it and the understanding is an ongoing process. I hope they keep searching for answers because the questions will keep changing and the answers too.

About the collaborative process: This moment of the project was definitely the most successful in the sense of collaborative processes. The students did most of the activities in groups and they also had the opportunity to talk to people from outside the classroom. The collaborative went beyond the walls of the school and for the next phases of the project we want to keep pursuing this.

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STUDENTS’ FEEDBACK + EVALUATION FORMS We were able to have 40 minutes of conversation about the program. In general the feedback was really positive, for me, surprisingly positive. The students really like what they have been doing, learning and sharing in class. The main complains were having more homework and dealing with the pressure of getting into an university at the same time they are participating in the project. When they have an important assignment for the program like this video, they have not been able to manage the time to do everything in class and get overloaded with homework. The students from the last year are also feeling a lot of pressure to define their future for next year and it is really hard for them to justify not studying for ENEM or PAS (the two tests they have to do to get to universities by the end of the year).

During the conversation students raised points that they have learned through the program like:

• They are getting more critical approaches and questioning things instead of taking them for granted.

• They are caring about the cities as collective spaces, that what is public everybody’s is responsability, not only the government’s.

• Sometimes some things that we talked about in the program were part of

tests in school, but most of the knowledge that is shared they believe is important for their future professional life and mainly for being more active citizens.

• For some of them the program has helped to push them out of the comfort zone, making them work on things that they have not worked before and researching things that they did not know before.

• To work together is nicer than working alone, they can share thoughts, ideas and opinions.

• They are doing the program because they really like it, and some of them just recently discovered that they will receive some extra points in class for participating in the program. While in class it is not always something that they are interest about.

One of the students even said that usually if he did not have the program, he would be at home doing nothing or sleeping and now he is having these activities to make something more productive and interesting with his time. Another student said that she has been getting more from the project than from the regular class curriculum.

On the forms, out of the 20 students in the program, 15 answered giving feedback, after we insisted a lot.

Initially they had parameters to evaluate how they felt about the program in general. In a scale from 1 to 5 they had to say if the program was: interesting, challenging, different, boring, hard, annoying and important. In general they think the program is very interesting, quite challenging, very different, a bit boring, quite hard, a bit annoying and very important. I was trying to measure the feeling from them, so we were able to see that even liking the program and believing that it is important to them, they sometimes feel bored or annoyed, which is fine and can be improved, I believe specially making it more dynamic.

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When the students were asked which part of the program they liked the most:

33.3%

All of the parts

13.3%

Part 02 _Unpacking

46.7%

Part 03 _Real City

6.7%

Part 01 _Virtual City

V U irtu R np al A eal ack City No ll ac Cit ing y t n e ivit ie s

And the one the liked the least:

20%

Part 01 _Virtual City

73.3%

None of the parts

6.7%

Part 02 _Unpacking

This is really successful for me and represents that the students have been being really honest in our conversations in class: they are excited about the program and understanding their city and a few had some trouble with the video game.

When we detailed which activity they like the most in each part of the program, the activities that were the ones most enjoyed by the students were:

• For Part 01 - Virtual City: Playing SimCity. Two other activities were well evaluated: Photography and Video Editing to present their virtual cities.

• For Part 02 - Unpacking: Debates about the differences between the real

city and the virtual city. In this moment I was surprise because I thought they would give a bad evaluation to the activity of building of the Matrix of Challenges, but it was not as bad as I expected.

• For Part 03 - Real City: Do community research. Other two activities: interviewing stakeholders and producing the final video were well evaluated too.

In general the activities that were not that pleasant to all of them were related to dealing with data, like filling the matrix with information or transform the community survey in numbers. This result is not surprising when we are talking 107

about adolescents. After that they had two open questions, asking: 1. Which activity should have more time dedicated in the program?

2. Which activity should have less time dedicated in the program?

For the first one there were several answers, but definitely they want more time for community surveys and interviews, and to put what we have been discussing into practice. For the second question most of them said “I do not know” or “None”, but some comments were interesting, saying that there is kind of a focus on Architecture, as it is the field of the facilitators, so to try to include more points of view. This comment is pertinent even in my program at Parsons: Design and Urban Ecologies. And two comments on getting lost on the conversations, another thing that also needs to be revised and not leave lose.

When asked if they think the activities proposed were adequate to what was explained in class, 13 of the 15 students said ‘yes’. This is surprising because honestly I believe not all the activities had enough time in class for them to develop their outcomes, and definitely this is something I believe needs more methodology and dedication from the facilitators. When asked if they would recommend the program to a friend all of them said yes.

Finally, they had 3 qualitative questions.

1. How the project changed your perspective in relation to the city? (This was the same question I did to the students in International Community High School).

2. From the things that we learned, which ones do you believe were the most relevant ones?

3. Leave a comment if you want.

The answers were really inspiring and showed that the program has been able to achieve the goals to make the students look around them with other eyes.

Several answers said that the program helped the students to be more critical and to not take things for granted. They start to observe more at their city, how it works and how people who live in the cities are actors of this environment. Below I am translating some quotes: “My vision has more criteria [to evaluate] everything. I could analyze that behind a city there is a whole procedure in order to make the things flow and who change this is the population, which should care not only about their own home, but also care about the Common Home. A progressive world relies on the relationship among the citizens.” “[the program] changed the way I see everything around me. I have never felt that I belong to Taguatinga, or something like that. Today I see that the city belongs to me and I should enjoy it.”

“It [the program] had changed my vision of world showing that the cities are much more complex that just constructions and agglomerates of people.”

For the second question: From the things that we learned, which ones do you believe were the most relevant ones? I honestly was expecting them to talk more about the skills together with the knowledge shared. Although most of the answers are about the knowledge gathered about: the place where they live, how it works, the complex layers of things and people that are part of the cities, its history, their feeling of belonging, their role as citizens and also being responsible for the place where they live. This again was really inspiring to keep going with the 108

program. Below I am translating some quotes: “How to make a map, a video, an audio, the learning from the debates, how to make a spreadsheet, that work with the big paper (I forgot the name), because it was a new way of organizing stuff.”

“The historical context, the experiences and the different opinions of people, a different vision that I have never stopped to think about.”

“To get deeper on knowledge about the everyday life in the city we live is important to progress, because we need to analyze the problems and we realized how knowledge is the base of a collective transformation.”

And finally when we asked the students to leave a message if they wanted, most of the comments were really excited about the project. The messages were really grateful for being able to participate in the program and to have this opportunity.

They reinforced that they are getting in the messages, so we need to really push them to work in class to avoid homework. Below I translated some messages: “The program rules, you rule, we all rule!”

“I would like to thank you for your achievement with us. The program is a large door to the knowledge and to build a critical and correct vision of the city and the world. What we acquired during the meetings and practices, help us both in our personal and academic lives. It is gratifying to participate in the project, it is fulfilling to go to meetings.”

“This program is an unique opportunity in my life. Independent of the process I know I will become a better citizen, more active one. I am really grateful for participating in this. I believe this is the future of the classroom: you learn together with the teacher, each of us sharing the knowledge and getting into an outcome. I believe this program is the first step for a Revolution, hahaha.”

Besides the exaggeration that it is typical at this age, I feel really proud and inspired by these students who have been giving what they can to collectively pursue a better city where they live. I cannot wait to be there together with them and be able to be more active and continue learning with them.

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CONCLUSION I know what it is like to be from outside the square. My childhood I lived in Valparaiso, a city that stays in the outskirts of Brasilia. Outside that square that I showed in the maps previously. I know that Brasilia goes even beyond the borders I have been showing, but unfortunately if I touched also on this topic about the discrepancies of Brasilia, I would need to write a PhD. I came from the boarder, Tijuaha is for San Diego what Valparaiso, Aguas Lindas, Planaltina de Goiais, among others are to Brasilia.

This area around the borders of Brasilia (or Federal District) has half of all the homicides in the whole state of Goias, to which this area belongs. Around cities with money there will be people who struggle daily to survive, to catch the drops of the wealthy ones. My family was not poor, I saw my parents doing what they could to give us the best they could. I saw around me friends with families who struggled even harder. My parents never hid the injustices of the reality from me either. I remember, once in 1997, my father picked me up at school to show me members of MST marching from more than a thousand kilometers to get to Brasilia to demand justice for the ones who were killed in Carajás fighting for agrarian reform.

For a long time in my life I always asked my parents why we could not live in Brasilia. I had always to explain my identity to other people. Am I from Brasilia? I lived almost half of my life in Valparaiso, which is not Brasilia. Then I move to this new settlement of small farms that later turned to be horizontal condos. Initially it was called Taguatinga, than it was Aguas Claras, than it was Arniqueiras. I changed the address several times without moving out of my house. Still, it was not Brasilia.

“I live in Brasilia”, I said.

“Where?”, they asked.

“In Taguatinga (or Aguas Claras, or Arniqueiras)”, I replied.

“But this is not Brasilia, it is a satellite town”, they told me.

I am not a satellite citizen.

Now we are 3 million brasilienses, born there or not, who are looking for our identity. We claim our right to Brasilia. Our right to this city. Our right to housing, to urban mobility, to social mobility, to good jobs with good salaries, to culture, to music, to art, to education, to public healthy system, to identity, to diversity, to sanitation, to urban infrastructure, to have good public spaces, to celebrate, to be proud of who we are and where we live. We are not just settled, we live here and living in a city demands more than what has been provided so far.

There is a long way ahead for us, but there is a potential for the practices of the right to this city to produce new formats of urbanization. In these ways, neighborhoods can get together to build the ties that are necessary to turn them into communities. Brasilia must include its citizens and the diversity that exists among them. It is time through these urban practices to raise awareness of our role as citizens to participate in the construction a collective city.

There is a lot of work to be done in order to get more equity in the cities, but it is not impossible. The building of awareness and identity takes time and it is important to focus on the generations that are coming. I believe in the power of awareness, because it was being exposed to other points of view on daily things that I changed my perspective. I believe in the freedom that awareness can provide when you are able to take conscious decisions. I believe that it is important to bring the awareness about the right to live in the cities to people, so they can battle for better conditions that they have not been exposed to. I believe that youth has energy that is needed to envision a collective future for Brasilia.

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This proposal is just a pilot project among a diversity of approaches that are happening, are needed and will happen in order to change the top-down narrative that is imposed on the citizens of Brasilia. It is a tiny seed of hope for a different future. I expect that spreading the urban pedagogies to public schools will give a broader perspective and deeper meaning to this program. It will also give more people the power of awareness so as to change their own narrative in the urban space. Together we will voice our struggle and fight for what has been denied since the foundation of this city: the right to Brasilia.

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BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES Cohn, Sergio. Paulo Freire. Rio de Janeiro: Azougue, 2012.

Cruz, Teddy. Concurrent Urbanities Designing Infrastructures of Inclusion. Edited

by Miodrag Mitrasinovic. New York: Routledge, 2016.

Fernandes, Edesio. "Constructing the `Right To the City' in Brazil." Social & Legal Studies 16, no. 2 (2007): 201-19. Accessed February 2016. doi:10.1177/0964663907076529.

Fernandes, Edesio. "The Challenges of Reforming the Urban Legal Framework: A Critical Assessment of Brazil’s City Statute Ten Years Later." In Fostering Development through Opportunity, Inclusion, and Equity, 279-91. Washington, DC: World Bank, 2013. Accessed February 2016. http://elibrary.worldbank.org/ doi/abs/10.1596/978-1-4648-0037-5_ch14.

Fals-Borda, Orlando, and Md Anisur Rahman. Action And Knowledge: Breaking the Monopoly with Participatory Action Research. New York: Apex Press, 1991.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the City. New York: Continuum, 1993.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 2000, Gaber, J. “Simulating Planning: SimCity As a Pedagogical Tool.” Journal Of Planning Education and Research 27, no. 2 (January 2007): 113–21. doi:10.1177/0739456x07305791.

Gaspar, Christine. Concurrent Urbanities: Designing Infrastructures of Inclusion.

Edited by Mitrasinovic Miodrag. New York (N.Y.): Routledge, 2016.

Harvey, David. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution.

New York: Verso, 2012.

Hehl, Rainer, Martin Dumont, and Zoi Georgiou. Minha Casa- nossa Cidade: Innovating Mass Housing for Social Change in Brazil. Berlin: Ruby Press, 2014.

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Holanda, Frederico Rosa Borges De. Brasília: Cidade Moderna, Cidade Eterna.

Brasília: FAUnB, Faculdade De Arquitetura E Urbanismo, Universidade De Brasília, 2010.

Holston, James. "Free the Spirit of Brasilia". University of California, Berkely, 2009. Accessed February 16, 2016. http://indiancities.berkeley.edu/2011/ speaker_content/docs/Holston_Free_the_Spirit_of_Brasi-lia.pdf Holston, James. The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Hehl, Rainer, and Marc M. Angelil. Minha Casa--nossa Cidade: Innovating Mass Housing for Social Change in Brazil.

Marcuse, Peter. "From Critical Urban Theory to the Right to the City." City 13, no.

2-3 (2009): 185-97. doi:10.1080/13604810902982177.

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Ribeiro, Marcelo Gomes. "Território E Desigualdades De Renda Em Regiões 112

Metropolitanas Do Brasil." Dados [online]. December 2016. Accessed February 2016. doi:10.1590/00115258201562.

Rich, Damon. "On Education, Pluralist Planning, New Institutions and Language."

Interview. An Architektur: Produktion Und Gebrauch Gebauter Umwelt, September 2008.

Rich, Damon. Finding the Civic in the Situation. PDF. New York.

Rich, Damon. "Spread the Word." Residential Architect. November/December 2006. Accessed February 16, 2016. http://www.residentialarchitect.com/ practice/spread-the-word_o.

Rendon, Gabriela. Concurrent Urbanities: Designing Infrastructures of Inclusion.

Edited by Mitrasinovic Miodrag. New York (N.Y.): Routledge, 2016.

Yamamoto, Karina. "No Brasil, Apenas 8% Têm Plenas Condições De Compreender E Se Expressar - Notícias - UOL Educação." UOL Educação.

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APPENDIX I: CASE STUDY TAKEAWAYS Below are the main observations that I have done daily in the classroom with the students from the City Studies program. I believe they were helpful to reflect about and make the decisions for my own practice. The main topic of these two weeks of classes was Human Right for Immigrants.

Day 1 The first activity called “Do now” was kind of too much pressure as a first contact, they had to answer a question without knowing what was going on. Later, introducing what the program is about and who are the people involved helped to make what was going on clearer. Than there was an ice breaker. Ice breakers that bring personal approaches like ‘say your name and your favorite food/music/ sports…’, help to give more confidence to the students to participate and to recognize each other.

I could observe that simply pushing students to show their abilities and creativity is too vague, it is important to give tools for that. Things like props were able to break the ice so students could start the conversation.

It is important to keep the high energy while controlling the noise, in general the students were respectful with us and each other. I saw that you should not scream with the students at all.

Day 2 Meredith and I agreed that working in two in the class is easier, while one is giving the instructions, the other one can be giving the material to the groups.

Also can be a nice way to complement information that was not given if one has forgot, or to observe some mistakes to communicate to each other to try to avoid them. As far as possible, I am trying to do the same through Skype with João, we complement what were are saying and we can correct each other’s mistakes after the class.

It is helpful for the students to visualize what the activities that they are doing are about. Showing some examples of other final outcomes of the project, for instance, is a way to materialize this confusion and when Meredith showed to the students they have got more excited. I could observe also that it is positive avoiding vague/open ended questions so it does not create confusing or boring moments, once that it is a hard way to get into a conversation.

The students had an activity of making collages to express the issues faced by immigrants. Collages can be a nice activity for students to express themselves once that they feel comfortable doing it, but the prompt must be clear. Also listening to podcasts or music related to the topic while producing something visual is a valuable idea. Meanwhile the students are working it is important to remember them about the time for the activity.

It is really hard to get the students to be critical and show opinions, we do not know if it is because they have not actually thought about the topic or if it is because the truly believe on what they are saying. In some cases, the students have had such an oppressive background in their countries of origin, that for them the American system makes them feel really free. It was interesting to get this point of view in the process. It is a huge challenge to push people to be critical about something without compelling your own opinion.

Day 3 I was not present, but Meredith was happy with the students participation on this day and how they started to get more critical on the topic of Human Rights for Immigrants.

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Day 4 Initially the students were invited to brainstorm yes-or-no questions to make to residents about immigration issues. Later the questions were read out loud and collectively rephrased to be clearer, in addition to that some questions were discarded as they had same idea as other ones.

They also simulated how to interview people on the street with me playing a random person to be asked. I believe this activity was really important and should be elaborated for a longer time, it is a good way to get students into the same page about how to interview people and how to approach strange in the street, while discussing their points of view with each other before actually going to make the community survey. In one of the simulations, a student came after me and said “Miss, I’m doing a research about immigration� and I ran away, all the students laugh and talked about the issue of undocumented people and this kind of approach would not be helpful. The other simulation the student asked me in English and I answered in Spanish that I did not understand English, so the students spoke about the language barrier on their neighborhood and how they could plan beforehand to avoid this situation.

In the end, each group received tasks to be assigned by each person. The tasks that each student should perform in the groups during the field research were not clearly understood by them.

Day 5 At the first moment, it was messy to split the groups as last class there was no much attention to the splitting group moment, the tasks and so on. The students were identified with tags names to help identifying them. Each group received several clipboards with the questionnaire and a paper that the interviewee could allow the students to take pictures while they were interviewing. The questions were developed on the day before.

Each group had a completely different experience on the interviews and they did not have time to share among themselves, what I believe it would be a compelling moment.

My group was anxious to fill the form, but in the time available we were able to interview only 5 people. We all felt it was fast and we could have worked more.

I believe for our program in Brazil, something between 1:30 and 2 hours will be nicer, more time for research, more time to get to know each other. Yes or no questions, when critically built are really effective for fast survey on the streets.

Some of the other opinions that people gave was really nice too, so it would be nice if could have recorded so we could quote some of them.

Day 6 The students interviewed a community organizer on immigrations rights called Tania Mattos. The interviewee was really insightful and interesting, with consistent data about the topic, unfortunately the class is too large and not all the students were interested on the activity at the same level or had an interesting task to participate of the interview.

The students with the task of being journalists had an extremely important responsibility on the success of the activity. They were really good interviewers, with well done follow up questions, and paying attention to what was being said. The students who were photographing the interview would have a better performance if they were given advises of how to photograph and make better images. Just a few students got excited about making drawings during the 116

interview.

Day 7 In the begging of the class, students had to brainstorm what they have learned on the activities about immigration during the past days. Again the students did not show much interest on the activity.

Later they were asked to divide in two groups to prepare for the debate, half of them were going to be against immigration rights and the other one would be pro-immigration rights. It was a big struggle for the students against immigration rights because they are immigrants, and it is a challenge to say something that they actually do not believe in and to defend something that they are victims of.

I tried to make them have fun with this and deeply think about counter arguing their thoughts. It is a really hard task.

Day 8 To help the students in the debate, Meredith decided to approach the topic in a different way that the day before. The students instead of being against immigration rights, they were going to defend the national security. So they had to defend how it is necessary to secure society and how freedom should be controlled to achieve that. It was also a challenge for them, but the debate raised relevant questions, points of view and was really fun.

On the other hand, clearly some students did not care about about what was going on during the whole week, but at least they did not bother the ones that were interested. As a project like this has its approach inside the regular curriculum, the activity was mandatory to all of the students who were in that class, and it does not necessarily mean that it would be interesting to all of them. In the case of Our Common Home program, as the students decided by themselves to participate we expect that will be easier to get them involved and engaged.

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