São Paulo Calling – Jornada Da Habitação

'São Paulo Calling - Jornada Da Habitação', Ocak - Temmuz 2012 tarihleri arasında 6 ay boyunca sürecek sergi, etkinlik, atölye ve tartışmalar bütünüdür.

Stefano Boeri küratörlüğünde ve ‘A Secretaria Municipal de Habitação da Cidade de São Paulo’ desteğiyle gerçekleşecek gezici serginin ilk ayağı São Paulo Kültür Merkezi.

Sergi São Paulo ile birlikte; Roma, Nairobi, Mumbai, Medellin, Moskova, Bağdat ve Bangkok şehirlerindeki informal yerleşim alanlarının da niteliklerini, farklılıklarını ve ortaya çıkış nedenlerini keşfe çıkacak.

Bu süre içinde São Paulo’nun merkezi ve her ay farklı bir favela bölgesini gezecek sergi, favela bölgelerinde gerçekleştirilecek etkinlikler ve atölye çalışmalarıyla yerleşim alanlarında yaşayanların günlük yaşantılarına ve pratiklerine dikkat çekecek. São Paulo’dan seçilen favela bölgeleri; São Francisco, Cantinho do Céu, Bamburral, Heliopolis ve Paraisopolis. Kentsel ve politik uygulamaların değerlendirilmesi ve yeni uygulamaların tartışılabilmesi için her favela bölgesinde konferanslar gerçekleştirileceği gibi, çeşitli etkinlik, konser, spor karşılaşmaları ile de bölge halkı ve katılımcı grupların etkileşim kurabileceği karşılaşma alanları oluşturulmaya çalışılacak.

São Paulo Calling Manifesto
Today, more than a billion people on Earth live in informal settlements: slums, favelas, working class suburbs, shanty towns, townships.

And to this, in the next 50 years, will be added another half a billion inhabitants.

The population size and geographic extension of these informal settlements is now such that it is no longer possible to consider them an involuntary appendage or degenerative excrescence of our metropolis and cities. On the contrary, in every place of our planet, informal settlements have become a fundamental part of the contemporary city.

The now indisputable development of informal settlements in the body of our cities today poses some dramatic problems of government to administrations of big metropolis.

How can you face health and public order emergencies that these realities show?

What public policies are able to compensate for the lack of basic infrastructure in these settlements (roads and sewers), public spaces (squares, schools, hospitals) and services to citizens?

How can you solve the problems of congestion and lack of public transport?

What interventions can help face the problem of low quality construction materials and the constant risk of landslides?

How is it possible to reconstruct in these settlements a sense of belonging to the whole urban system avoiding the prevalence of a feeling of resigned exclusion?

Since 2005 the administration of São Paulo, has chosen to take the risk of stating that the informal settlements and slums are not a degenerative disease of the contemporary city, but the consequence of the excessive speed of migration processes against the slow urban policies. That the slums are part of the urban reality of São Paulo.

This simple approach has opened a new perspective in governing urban growth of São Paulo, according to which we must not eliminate the informal city or cancel it, but we can and must instead work to improve it.

The projects undertaken in recent years by the Housing Department tell an incredible journey through the streets of São Paulo, between the houses and with people who live and care for this gigantic city.

A daily work, made of small steps, experimentation, but also knowledge of what is the soul of the territory, convinced that the understanding of the complexity and richness of a place is the first step to a correct political action.

Curated by Stefano Boeri and promoted by the Housing Department, São Paulo Calling is the project that will take us between January and June 2012 to compare the policies undertaken by the Municipality of São Paulo and those prepared by other metropolis that, in different and distant parts of the planet, are facing today the big governing problems of the informal settlements.

For six months, a traveling exhibition will explore the characteristics, the differences, the causes of the informal settlements of Rome, Nairobi, Medellin, Mumbai, Moscow, Baghdad and Bangkok.

At the same time 6 workshops to be held in São Paulo, in the districts of São Francisco, Cantinho do Céu, Bamburral, Heliopolis, Paraisopolis and the center will highlight practices and direct life experience of the inhabitants.

Convinced that self-determination of needs and entrepreneurial self-organization is the first thing to consider and provide incentives for a correct political and urban action, every month a slum from São Paulo will listen to lectures and debates of international guests and accompany them with street markets, festivals, music and soccer tournaments, not only to bring closer those who talks to whom lives in the city, but also because the three million people living in informal settlements are active protagonists of transformations and theorizations.

Laboratories and research on São Paulo Calling began to highlight some important common themes to the informal settlements in the world today that can be summarized in eleven points in a first draft of a manifesto.1

1) The slums are the metropolis
3.000.000 people live in the informal settlements of São Paulo. 8,000,000 in the slums of Mumbai; 2,500,000 in those of Nairobi.

The informal settlements are not an alien, strange body, but they are an important and constitutive part of the contemporary city.

2) The slums are fast
The informal city is the city that is growing faster than the capacity of the public administration to plan the development.

3) The slums are necessary
The informal settlements are the primary form of access to urban life to thousands of migrants and farm workers, are the physical location of an unstoppable flow of urbanization that every year moves millions of inhabitants of the planet from the countryside to cities.

4) The slums are small towns
Often distant from downtown, the slums are isolated, autonomous, distinct systems, transforming the urban system to which they belong into a unit composed of ‘many small towns’.

5) The slums are never the same
Each slum has its own characteristics, its language, its activities, its music, its ritual, its aspiration.

Each one follows its organization logics and identity.

6) The slums are dynamics urban areas of production and trade
In the slums, the survival needs and the absence of relationships and regulations may encourage the widespread development of small craft businesses and service to the citizen that replace the public welfare and nurture a molecular market of products.

7) The slums represent a self-organized model of knowledge economy
You can live in the slums with little and choose to learn.

Every idea can become a profession and creativity produces economy.

8) The slums represent a new model of urbanization and social interaction, dense and molecular.
The informal settlements have a unique physical structure, composed of thousands of small buildings clustered.

A compact, small, intimate structure where every corner is life.

Intimacy means that everyone knows of everyone’s life, to be intimate with their neighbors for better or for worse.

9) The favelas are an ideal space for -legal and illegal- forms of self-organization
The favelas host and often protect legal and illegal forms of self-organization of settled communities. Religious associations, business community, but also criminal organizations that manage the illegal drug markets. The degree and nature of these forms of self-organization can increase the degree of protection and closure of informal settlements.

10) The slums continue to change
The slums are constantly changing, evolving.

They change and grow, satisfying the changing needs of individuals and families that live there.

They reveal a history of incremental development, configured through the biography of every migrant, every family, every community living there.

11) A viral city
The slums are an eco-city, which never irreversibly changes the territory.

But they are also viral cities, occupying every free interstice and that transforms the space of the third landscape in a bio human nature: each space is invaded, there are no gaps in which the city can slow down, breathe.

The slums are therefore an essential part of the contemporary city.

The informal settlements are not temporary but they tell a part of the city that already exists.

Architecture, social networks and economic activities are hopelessly entangled, like the roots and branches of a forest.

Improving them does not mean thinking a new model of city, but help a branch to grow so that the others will grow.