Muros

de ar
Brazilian
Pavilion
2018

Walls
of air
Muros
de ar
Commissioner
João Carlos de Figueiredo Ferraz
Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

Curators
Gabriel Kozlowski
Laura González Fierro
Marcelo Maia Rosa
Sol Camacho

Organizer
Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

with the support of

Ministry of Foreign Affairs / 
Embassy of Brazil in Rome
Ministry of Culture / Funarte

support

realization
Brazilian
Pavilion
2018

Walls
of air
President of the Republic
Michel Temer

Ministry of Foreign Affairs Ministry of Culture

Minister of Foreign Affairs Minister of Culture

Aloysio Nunes Ferreira Sérgio Sá Leitão

Secretary General Executive Secretary

Ambassador Marcos Bezerra
Abbott Galvão
Undersecretary General for
Internacional Cooperation,
Trade Promotion and
Cultural Themes
Ambassador Santiago Irazabal
Mourão
Director of the
Cultural Department
Minister Paula Alves de Souza
Mariana Ribas
director of the department of
international promotion
Secretary Adam Jayme Muniz
National Foundation
for the Arts
Funarte Chairman
Stepan Nercessian

Head of the Division of Cultural Executive Director

Promotion Operations
Counsellor Gustavo de Sá
Duarte Barboza
Reinaldo Verissimo
Visual Arts Center Director
Francisco de Assis Chaves Bastos
(Xico Chaves)

Embassy of Brazil in Rome

Ambassador
Antonio de Aguiar Patriota

Minister-Counsellor
Fátima Keiko Ishitani

Head of the Cultural Sector

Secretary Alexandre Siqueira
Gonçalves (in memoriam)
Fundação Bienal de São Paulo
Founder
Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho
1898–1977 · Chairman Emeritus
Management Board
Tito Enrique da Silva Neto ·
President
Alfredo Egydio Setubal ·
Vice President
Lifetime Members
Adolpho Leirner
Alex Periscinoto
Álvaro Augusto Vidigal
Beatriz Pimenta Camargo
Beno Suchodolski
Carlos Francisco Bandeira Lins
Cesar Giobbi
Elizabeth Machado
Jens Olesen
Julio Landmann
Marcos Arbaitman
Pedro Aranha Corrêa do Lago
Pedro Paulo de Sena Madureira
Roberto Muylaert
Rubens José Mattos Cunha Lima
Members
Alberto Emmanuel Whitaker
Ana Helena Godoy de Almeida Pires
Andrea Matarazzo · on leave
Antonio Bias Bueno Guillon
Antonio Henrique Cunha Bueno
Cacilda Teixeira da Costa
Camila Appel
Carlos Alberto Frederico
Carlos Augusto Calil
Carlos Jereissati Filho
Claudio Thomas Lobo Sonder
Danilo Santos de Miranda
Daniela Villela
Eduardo Saron
Emanoel Alves de Araújo
Evelyn Ioschpe
Fábio Magalhães
Fersen Lamas Lambranho
Geyze Marchesi Diniz
Heitor Martins
Horácio Lafer Piva
Jackson Schneider
Jean-Marc Robert Nogueira
Baptista Etlin
João Carlos de Figueiredo Ferraz
Joaquim de Arruda Falcão Neto
José Olympio da Veiga Pereira
Kelly Pinto de Amorim
Lorenzo Mammì
Lucio Gomes Machado
Luis Terepins
Marcelo Eduardo Martins
Marcelo Mattos Araújo · on leave
Marcelo Pereira Lopes de Medeiros
Maria Ignez Corrêa da Costa Barbosa
Marisa Moreira Salles
Miguel Wady Chaia
Neide Helena de Moraes
Paula Regina Depieri
Paulo Sérgio Coutinho Galvão
Ronaldo Cezar Coelho
Sérgio Spinelli Silva Jr.
Susana Leirner Steinbruch
Victor Pardini
Audit Board
Carlos Alberto Frederico
Carlos Francisco Bandeira Lins
Claudio Thomas Lobo Sonder
Pedro Aranha Corrêa do Lago
International Advisory Board
José Olympio da Veiga Pereira ·
President
Susana Leirner Steinbruch ·
Vice President
Barbara Sobel
Bill Ford
Catherine Petitgas
Debora Staley
Eduardo Costantini
Frances Reynolds
Kara Moore
Lonti Ebers
Mariana Clayton
Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
Paula e Daniel Weiss
Sarina Tang
Board
João Carlos de Figueiredo Ferraz ·
President
Eduardo Saron · 1st Vice President
Lidia Goldenstein · 2nd Vice President
Flavia Buarque de Almeida
João Livi
Justo Werlang
Renata Mei Hsu Guimarães
Ricardo Brito Santos Pereira
Rodrigo Bresser Pereira
The 16th International Architecture Exhibition proposes a
pertinent reflection about the multiplicity of forms that the
concept of Freespace can take in architectural thinking
and design.
A knack for proposing current themes, such as the
one for this architecture exhibition, and for pondering
alternative forms of existence are characteristic of
Fundação Bienal de São Paulo and the reason behind its
organization of Brazilian participation in the Italian event.
Artistic expression is not the exclusive domain of the
visual arts; a huge diversity of fields produce sensitive
manifestations of their work. Fundação Bienal finds
itself, therefore, in a special position to activate, through
the exhibitions and activities it organizes, connections
between different fields of human endeavor.
The dovetailing of vocations that motivates the
collaboration between the two institutions also extends to
other cultural agents, equally committed to the issues of
our time, which are a part of a global network cultivated by
Fundação Bienal.
Among these partners are the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs and the Ministry of Culture, with whom Fundação
Bienal has organized Brazilian participation in the Venice
Architecture Exhibition since its 6th edition, in 1996, and in
the Venice Art Exhibition since its 32nd edition, in 1964.
We know that Brazil’s participation in the 16th
Architecture Exhibition—a truly free space in which to
discuss the building of the future of our cities—will be the
source of dialogues that will contribute to the sensitive
education of emancipated individuals.

João Carlos de Figueiredo Ferraz

President of Fundação Bienal de São Paulo
 Ligia Nobre Lula Buarque de Hollanda Escola da Cidade, Sao São Paulo Tereos
Tereos Sol Camacho
collaborationstructure
collaboration structure
osa
Paul a Lemos ia R
Jonathas de Andrade ngoni Ma ro
Iris Kantor Rafael Mare n dation elo er

i
o u c Fi

wsk

CURATORS
F r
e Mesquita Haddad Ma
Nicol as Andr le
sz
erra

lo
i zá
Ivan Padovan ssi Olivia
S
p or
t

Koz
Alves Ro sup on
ua + Oco lherme
GrGru.a Luis Gui aG

riel
ulo a n s ur
e Lata ao Pa erm rees
on e Alin 760, S
ã
an Z
il b
rioio
r La
Wolfens

Gab
Helena Cota Nitz er
in aga x xtte a
Duarte lÿyss o Tom a rcy s sEE ur
Gabriel anccisisA
All
ia Ke
ik
el D õõee lt
FFrran L id res igu ç
aç
Soa M a
eell Cu

e
edo oa . .RR da

rt
eles Mac lli ess isist
t
ardo

na
ssiadis n o

P
Meir Edu Raf
a e
el a
P
MMi
ni ri
Cildo

al S
Anasta

Fu

ome
a S. té

REALIZATION
oxios no an
o is
EEuuddió gi d ilva Ma in
Bog rr

n
s aS
ello

sy in R
Se

Bie
onc t ina tod M
Fran
ça Vasc Cris ber ts do iro
o gis r

o
bete ássio R na de

ã
Elisa C
ilha Cás
s io olo o cu

daç
Le

Embas
tan Ge SP Es
n
Quin UU ou
is a

Fun
ino lina FA
lo yd
Aqu aro do pa SP Ba

mo
ardo
C
ayc
e
Qu
a UU He

Brazil
Edu aC FA ar

co
ia yd
olin de

ni
ad Ha

ilo
Car ida

o
ri er or

ot
agn

eF
Iglio bC hl

an
M
aW ee He

Sc
ilo La

ep

sm
Dan bar

ff
ad er a

us

a
Bár s id ain ur

l ak

rae
da

ts
ar
Gi
t
nta eC

Duarte
al R en

CURATORIAL TEAM
il

dinator
itec
Ch
u

aF
d

aG
Vid iM Re aV él
ont n
ok en ng

rin
sP to h

bar
An

h
ave bo uc c
A ic

ata

: arc
Ch si
n L
ar ur

abriel
ia

Bár
ma ti ,Z
ist

m
Cel net os ic

C
M

team: coor
tr

da
To t d H
ar cia Pa

team
rol ET

Ni

in
Ca so

Ca
ah

G
As e

n
li ur

Ye

va
a&

ma
bo ct

Al
c

y
sE ite

r
iec

ill
be
rlo

rt
l ch da

em
Re
Ca Vig

Zil
Ar ra

be

o
h
th
ia ue g

Ro

o
an
cíl te 7

ow
yq

lu

nW
e
Ce In K2

z
pt

ab

han
t
a

Wo
ta i

l
Ni
Tr r M

lis

Lee
eC
hu
an tu io
oS

ston
ite

C
hie
ud

aE
e

Jae

ects
br

rac
un

to
qu St

sien
nS

Lab
Br No

op
s

st Watch

RESEARCH GROUPS & INSTITUTIONS

ite
Ar

Nexo Jornal
ris

Data Zap
a

o
ia S
uiz

y
qu
os

Proj
oll

Yi-H
to

apping
Ma

P, B
ina
aL ur

Ar
s

ite

Ma
An to M

C
ist
e

o
n

qu
ol

SA+
Sa m

e
sm

VIVA
Se

c
Cr
p

Ar
os

re
ró

ren
ni

M
AA
sd ys

ba
et

lobal Fo
MIT
n
ue sa

AS
Ur
,M

ita

Cl a
rig

.a
es

SP

+H
ol

SP

ru
d
Ro s+

p
UU

ra
ro

/G
AA
ro nt

FA

et

o
va ta

SI

G
la

tes
Ál ul

da

oÉ
el
ns

s+
E

s
ec
UM

ar

dr
co

eto
in

oV

uit

.
rt
,L

Pe
ch

Arq
uit
s

ma

rq
ar

dr

ura
to
se

er

Arq
ite

Pe

s
ano
re

iteto
u

itet
DP

ura
u

Sa
rq

h Zero
i Hir
+F

ojects
V
aA

rqu

o Brajovic
an

uitet
JD

outdoor installation
rqu
H
Un

rm

and
.+

sil A
e

ini A

+ Alep
rq

s Arq
ss

ro

+C

cted pr
Be

AA
st

Bra

r
ca
o

ano

olda
an

LL
i

arde

Atelier Mark
rg

en

PARTICIPANTS
baum
iki
Sé

Al

Hir
uj

B
s

ll: sele
Bern
de

ue
Bo

Rosen
rsi
rig
ipe

rik

Co
aff
l

od
Fe

na

ll a
ea C
nR
iz

Ke

open ca
Lu

are
an
lso

jan
Eli

io V
Gi

dad
ta D

rdes
auz

Had
Crip

fé
Dr

bre
a Caf
erna
udio

serio

ak

rviews

COLLABORATORS
ry
ato No

Risé

Ailton Kren
dio B
Cl a

Carl

multidisciplina
Antonio
Cl au

io Don

committee + inte
Anton
 partnership team: interns Pedro Vada, coordination Manoela Medeiros Marc Angélil

Newton Massafumi
Júlia Tiemi Marcius Galan

Fu
MIT SA
+P Marcos Rosa

nd
Pedro M. R.
Sales

aç
Lariss

ão
MIT a Guim Beatriz
Mauro Resti
ffe
MIS

Bi
arães Dias

e
TI B Paulo Oren

n
r azil Luiz stein

al
Jo Filip Bruna Mel anie
nnaa March Smith

ddee
tthh e Ra iori
aan mpa
m n zio Giulia

SSPP
FrF

COMMISSIONER
edd Nat Ribeir Paulo Ta
iiaa arna hal
ia L o Nicolá
s Robb vare s
knlk
spu inl ima Isab io

Ar
aprp Ra el a M

c
orae

h
tonr fae
lM Kar s Pablo

Ins
Philip

Da
ter igl ime Lope Yang
s Th Zah z Luz

ily
iat er

titu
al ti Ma

t
iss rília Paul

o
ra
aB Ser o Na
ur Ma ra zare

de
sil
th Raine
gi teu r Heh
sL Ped l
Pe

Arq
osc ro V
dr
oH h i itor

. do
QG .N Bra Raq

lo
ndã uel
o

B
IS or Ren

c
c be ata Roln

a
Pe on r to Luc ik

ras
Ma
as

la
dr su

il
Riv

rt
lta

rc
oC

ex
Rod

in
am nt ane

h
rigo

C
i
ar Ne

W
te

u
Ago

b
go uen

r
Ru stin

ct

eig
sch

iti
no ho

e
wa

boo
r

ato
PR Lag nd Ser

on
O om er g

CLDT
rs
io C
D Tu

gr
pr

k gr
ars ast
U ca

a
in C Vie ino el a

ap
t ni

website
O
TI

h
ira Vic
O

i
sh

pe
N

c
tor

hic
m
ro
op de

de
et
Ca

a
l
in rva

Eu
l

des
lh

sig
te

w
oP

ig
oi

n
pr
rv int

n
o

or
ie

in
mm
k
Co

Lig
ws

ag
&

ia
le

tin
i
n

ph

Create - Soluções Web

n

P
ti

d
vo wo

ys
p
An

i
ed

Pao
eS
rk

as

l
c
aA EN

A
ro
sh

.r.

ra

Ada
a
se

l
lt TR op

D
du
M
be E s

lba
Ac
a

e
lm
bl
r
rg

ce

Albe
m
o
y
ia

r
,c

Carl
d
n

eve

del

e
e
Jo
oo

etr

rto

s
aM

do

Daniel
,
an

ls
rd

iu
rce

en

Gerard
Bar
in rsoe

Ju
aM

o
asr

eg
at

Mar

G
u
io

ar
scbh

t
lia

rio

Escr
t
n

Truyo

Jean Craiu
i
et

ra
rceo

ín
t

ord
na
n

ib
ens

ls
Al

à
B

in
an

el
,i c

ez
duil

a
u
ex
a
ntg

Simon de Jong
t
ian
oo

Mi

ls
an

el
nst

io
ca
de st +

di

ch

n
rso

aM

Na
rd
rP tro

na

el
Cl

i
ti

ul
au ili ireie

th
s s
s

Za

St
on

le

Mariona Mayol Battle

l
di
o

i
r

ep
lia
Ac
Fl

Ph
a
io

Pe
av

ly
io

nie

Arq
oto
ric
C

g
o
M
od

Mur
Ma

Fut

Ma
au

ra
do

Im
r
rq
u

ilo
ro

ph

m
in
uro
O

ue

a
Re

y&
sc

Sal
sn

ar

igra
itz

Carmen
D’Im
k

aza
Ri

Vid
Oi
y

Preta Fe
r
ca

eo
wa

tion
d

Silva
R

perio
o
od

Cássia Fellet
d

rreira

Juliana Caffé
Wor

Angela Quinto
eO

rig

Ta n
st

oL

eh
os

ksho
Ze
ou

aK
ro

ule
uz

p (wit
rL
nie

h
c

6
o

ima

3
w Ba
cc

Immig
hin

rant
Part
icipan
ts)
Constructing Gabriel
the proposal Kozlowski,
for the Brazilian Laura González
Pavilion Fierro, Marcelo
at the 16th Maia Rosa,
International Sol Camacho
Architecture
Exhibition at
the Venice
Biennale
This publication summarizes the exercise
of exploration, discussion, debate, and
exchange conducted among the four
curators and hundreds of collaborators
to create a project that reaches
beyond the exhibition at the pavilion in
the Giardini.
Our aim was to use the platform of the
Venice Biennale—a moment of intense
dedication, when similar questions are
simultaneously discussed around the
world—to broaden a conversation and
its possible repercussions beyond the
particular point of the exhibition. This
is also why this publication is presented
in a format unlike that of the traditional
catalog, different from what is displayed
on the walls of the pavilion; it rather
offers the possibility of an immersion
into the theme.
The concept and title Walls of Air was
conceived as a response to the theme of
Freespace proposed by curators Yvonne
Farrell and Shelley McNamara in order to
provoke questions about: 1. the different
sorts of walls that construct, on multiple
scales, the Brazilian territory; 2. the
borders of architecture itself in relation
to other disciplines.
Therefore, a reflection began on
how much Brazilian architecture and
its urban developments are, in fact,
free. Without the ambition of reaching
an answer, but hoping to open the
conversation to a large and diverse
public, we chose to shed light on
processes that often go unnoticed due
to their nature or scale. The immaterial
barriers built between people or
neighborhoods, and the processes of
urbanization in Brazil on a continental
scale are examples of questions
we considered.
To discuss these ideas, it was decided
to present existing projects as well
as to develop research to create new
content. This bilateral structure is also
reflected in the spatial occupation of the
Brazilian Pavilion, a building designed by
architects Mindlin, Palanti, Amaral and
Marchesin in 1964.
Francis Alÿs
The Leak (São Paulo), 1995
Documentation of an action
(São Paulo)
Manoela Medeiros
Fronteira [Frontier], 2017
Excavation on wall and coating
First room: Projects
The projects were selected through an
open call, an unprecedented initiative in
the history of the Brazilian representations We mapped the contemporary movements
at the Venice Biennale. Since the beginning, of immigration, the search for refuge,
we understood the extreme importance
of this open call because, although widely
practiced in other countries, it had never
occurred here. We saw this process as the
first step, within our reach, to democratize 03 – Material Flows
Brazil’s national representation at
this exhibition.
The open call resulted in 289
architectural and urban projects, a
satisfactory number. From those,
seventeen projects were selected. The
selection aims to present works that
allow for an understanding of new and
contemporary ways of relating with the
city through the intermediation of design—
considering architecture as a tool for
harmonizing urban conditions that seem
incompatible at first. The last chapter of
this publication presents details about
each of the projects selected, including
location, architect, and the arguments
for selection.
Second room: Cartographies
The content was created based on
the widest possible understanding of
architecture, relating the discipline to the access and to the biomes that cut through
various fields and forces that make up the
contemporary physical environment.
We organized the research in ten broad
approaches/lines of study, with the aim
of revealing, on different scales, a new
perspective on the proposition of Freespace We researched the location and foundation
from the point of view of the ongoing
processes of urbanization in Brazil:
01 – Crossbreeding
Beginning at the global scale, we gathered
data on Brazilian architects who study
or work abroad to get a better look at
this expanded territory of contemporary
architectural practice; we sought to
understand the foreign influences and
exchanges that are continuously modifying
local practice.
02 – Human Flows
and the internal migration in Brazil to
spark a conversation about the country’s
permeability to this global dynamics.
Besides the flow of people, we also sought to
understand the movement of commodities,
analyzing the link between the country’s
large infrastructures, the production and
transportation of commodities, as well as the
scars that these flows leave on the territory.
04 – Fluid Landscape
To explore the relationship between the
human and natural ecosystems, we traced
a parallel between natural elements
of the landscape—like the geographic
conformation of Latin America, the
humidity of the atmosphere, and the
movement of the winds—and the impacts
of the country’s urbanization in order to
encourage architects and urbanists to seek
a holistic understanding of the place in
which they operate.
05 – The Map Is Not the Territory
We “redrew” Brazil’s immense political
borders, relating them to the possibilities of
them, in order to show the difficulty of
reaching—or even understanding—them
with precision.
06 – Succession of Edges
dates of the 5,570 Brazilian cities,
underscoring the continuous process
of the construction of an almost entirely
urban country.
07 – Geography of the Real Estate
Market & 08 – Inhabiting the House or
the City?
We analyzed the main dynamics
responsible for the configuration of the
 free
How frank is the exchange of Brazilian architects with the world?

How open is Brazil to the reception of immigrants?

How sensitive is the urban environment to the movement of commodities?

How unregulated is the relationship between human and natural ecosystems?

How unimpeded is the access to the Brazilian border?

How detached from a cohesive vision of Brazil has the urban formation of the country been?

How unobstructed is the agenda of the real estate market against that of Architecture?

How generous are the Brazilian housing programs in offering the right to the city?

How unrestrained is the trespassing of limits between disparate urban fabrics?

How liberating can Pixo be in revealing the city’s power logics?

above mentioned cities, showing the vast
machine of the Brazilian real estate market
and the intense impact of the Minha Casa
Minha Vida [My House My Life] program,
the initiative that built the largest number
of low-income dwellings in the country.
09 – Solid Divisions
Going down to the scale of the city, we
examined the real, physical walls that
divide the urban landscape and reinforce
Brazil’s socio-spatial segregation.
10 –The Encryption of Power
Reaching the scale of the building, we
studied the phenomenon of ‘Pixo’—pixo
tagging as a tangible representation of the
wall as a space of confrontation.
To research each of these approaches—
and achieve our goal to involve a larger
and more diverse team in the process
of constructing the exhibition—we
set up a multidisciplinary board and
invited various outstanding agents and
professionals from different fields to
participate on it: filmmakers, historians,
real estate developers, activists,
artists, businesspeople, geographers,
anthropologists, physicians, public
managers, mathematicians, lawyers,
‘pixadores’, and data scientists.
With one representative per theme, the
multidisciplinary board was tasked with
guiding the team throughout the research
and point out sources and paths for the
use of the data and the development of the
ideas. Part of this exchange was recorded
in interviews, which are published
here. They were planned and edited in
collaboration with Coletivo Entre, from Rio
de Janeiro, and recorded with the generous
support of Arq.Futuro.
In parallel with this, we probed the
national scene in search of researchers
and professionals with works relevant to
these ten approaches, and invited more
than twenty specialists to write an essay
exploring each of them more in-depth.
Some of them worked alone, others
involved their research groups (academic
or private companies) in the task. From
Brazil’s North to South, this group of
people produced essays that reveal the
countless ways of understanding the walls
that shape our country, thus reflecting on
the meaning of Freespace.
In addition to the consulting and
exchange with these professionals, we
organized work dynamics involving
more than sixty immigrants, a workshop
with master’s students from the
School of Architecture and Planning of
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT), and, above all, the rigorous data
mining carried out by our team of young
architects: based in São Paulo, Rio de
Janeiro, New York, and Boston, who
dedicated themselves exclusively to
lending consistency and precision to
the research.
The result of this complex constellation
of people, who worked for six months,
is presented in the Brazilian Pavilion in
the form of ten large-scale cartographic
drawings, reproduced in miniature for
this publication. Measuring 3 × 3 meters
each, they were created specifically for
the exhibition Walls of Air, and provide a
detailed cartography of the ten approaches
that seem relevant to us in the practice
of those responsible for constructing the
physical environment, whether they are
architects or not.
10 scales
10 approaches
10 ways of understanding architecture
and relating it with other disciplines
The choice of a cartographic language
to present this research was one of the
most emphatic decisions of our exhibition
design. The choice was made in part
with the aim of escaping from traditional
exhibition models, saturated by realistic
images (photographs, renderings, etc.). On
the other hand, it also aimed at combining
the use of drawing—the architect’s main
tool to represent space—with advanced
geo-referencing tools.
Marcius Galan
Seção diagonal
[Diagonal Section], 2008
Installation view of exhibition
Lula Buarque de Hollanda
Fragment of the installation
O muro [The Wall], 2017
 The large-scale format of the panels 200 people who believed in our idea and
refers to the immeasurable extension of the are extremely grateful for their confidence,
Brazilian territory, the fifth largest country in certain that we have taken advantage
the world, and sheds light on the hundreds of this opportunity to unleash a wave of
of layers that the research reveals. They are discussion about architecture as an agent
narratives within narratives. for transposing or revealing some of the
At the same time that they offer new pressing issues affecting our country and
ways of understanding the information our profession. We hope that this book will
presented, the drawings bear a carefully be the beginning, and not the end, of the
articulated aesthetics which, in a certain conversation about our Walls of Air.
way, refers to the idea of painting and a
relationship with the world of the visual
arts, impossible to ignore in the context of
the Venice Biennale.
This final link was strengthened by
inviting Brazilian and international artists
who produce works in Brazil to participate
in this publication. The selection of these
artists and artworks constitutes a group
of people and works that are sensitive
to the same themes that concern us at
this Biennale. Artistic and documentary
photography, video, performance, digital
collage, sculpture, and painting are the
mediums used to promote a conversation
about tangible or invisible barriers; the
clashing between nature and construction;
the divergences between the policies,
planning, and the realities of housing, as
well as the wounds resulting from projects
carried out according to economic logics
distant from the scale of the human being.
These critical works reveal a generation
that considers the physical space as
being indissociable from their work, and
resorts to artistic practices to express
their concerns.
Finally, installed at the entrance of
the Pavilion, an outdoor piece, by Atelier
Marko Brajovic, wraps-up in an even more
tangible way the idea of breaching frontiers
with the redesign of a city fence into
public furniture.
Following the initial decision of
Fundação Bienal de São Paulo of having
four curators, the guiding principle for
the development of this project was
the idea of work as a collective effort.
Writing this text just a few weeks before
inaugurating the Brazilian Pavilion in
Venice, we look at each of the more than
Cildo Meireles
Através [Through], 1983-1989
Installation view
1. Carchitects
rossbreedings: Brazilian
abroad 4. Fencounter
luid landscape:
between human
and natural ecosystems
32 Introduction
34 Nicolás Robbio  130 Introduction
statements 132 Carolina Caycedo
36 Brazilian architects abroad 136 Helena Wolfenson and Aline Lata
interview interview
42 Claudio Haddad 142 Antonio Donato Nobre
essays essays
48 Eduardo Aquino 148 Paulo Tavares
Aquilá (HereThere): the making The floods, the droughts
of another map 154 Álvaro Rodrigues dos Santos
58 Ana Luiza Nobre Architecture, urbanism and geology:
The houses of Brazilians: architectural, an indispensable combination
migratory and symbolic flows between
Brazil and Portugal

5. Ta retraced
he map is not the territory:
border

2. Hofassimilation
uman flows: the dilution
barriers through cultural 166
168
Introduction
Runo Lagomarsino
172 Paulo Nazareth
72 Introduction interview
74 Rivane Neuenschwander 174 Ailton Krenak
interview essays
84 Carla and Eliane Caffé 180 Gabriel Duarte
statements The horizon is just the beginning:
88 A reflection on the 9 de Julho borders, cities and identities
Occupation, in São Paulo 190 Celma Chaves Pont Vidal
essays The multiple Amazon and
92 Ana Carolina Tonetti and Ligia Nobre the meanings of frontier
Counter-conducts: politics of
architecture and contemporary slavery
100 Paula Miraglia, Gabriel Zanlorenssi
and Rodolfo Almeida
Immigration to Brazil in seven graphs
6. Snarratives
uccession of edges:
on the building
of an urban country

202 Introduction

3. Material flows: physical

imprint of commodities
exchange
204

208
Jonathas de Andrade
interviews
Luiz Felipe de Alencastro
212 Antonio Risério
110 Introduction essay
112 Melanie Smith 218 Iris Kantor
114 Cassio Vasconcellos Imaginary lines, walls and
interview mobility: continental borders in
116 Sérgio Besserman the Luso‑Brazilian cartography
essay
122 Philip Yang and Marcela Ferreira
Cities and the trail of commodities
7. Geography of the real estate
market: controversies
between the agenda of capital
9. Solid divisions:
borders within the city
and that of architecture
228 Introduction
230 Renata Lucas
236 Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca
238 Mauro Restiffe
interview
244 Claudio Bernardes
essays
250 Danilo Igliori and Sergio Castelani
Space and market: a reflection on the
real estate geography and economy
of cities
256 Eudoxios Anastassiadis
Time for us to tear down this wall
8. Ithe
nhabiting the house or
city? the impact of the
Minha Casa Minha Vida
housing program
266 Introduction
268 Tuca Vieira
270 Carol Quintanilha
interview
278 Drauzio Varella
essays
284 Elisabete França
Ways of living in the 21st century:
my home is my city
292 Raquel Rolnik
The urban invisibles and the walls that
confine them
298 Marc Angélil and Rainer Hehl
Minha casa, nossa cidade: on the
micropolitical transformation of
housing provision in Brazil
308 Introduction
310 Antoni Muntadas
312 Pedro Victor Brandão
interview
318 Gilson Rodrigues
essays
324 Marcos L. Rosa
Contesting urban borders:
cultural practices, design and the
construction of urban situations
330 Rodrigo Agostinho
Bridging and breaking down barriers
338 Bruno Santa Cecília
Building free spaces
346 GRU.A + OCO
Cutting, filling and boring
10. Tdisobedience
he encryption of power:
and
exclusion in the city
360 Introduction
362 Ivan Padovani
368 Pablo López Luz
interviews
372 Cripta Djan
376 Kenarik Boujikian
essays
382 Paulo Orenstein
The probabilities in pixo
392 Victor Carvalho Pinto
The city and the law: the role of law in
the recovery of lost urbanity
398 nsdc installation outside
the Brazilian Pavilion
Atelier Marko Brajovic
402 The edges of objects
Selected projects from the open call
444 Bibliography and image credits
454 General credits
1
Crossbreedings:
Brazilian architects
abroad
How frank is the
exchange of Brazilian
architects with
the world?
In the early 20th century, sociologist Georg
Simmel famously defined the social
character of the traveler as someone
constantly in-between, near and far,
whose main quality comes from outside
of the place they occupy.1 The traveler
is constantly negotiating their identity,
caught between the assimilation of the
new and the alienation from the familiar.
As designers of space and, increasingly,
of connection networks between spaces,
the architect-traveler undergoes a kind
of “crossbreeding” that raises questions
about the permeability of the discipline
to new architectural and cultural
influences. Which walls are breached once
immigration movements become part of a
discipline often closed and self-referential?
This chapter looks at the benefits of global
practices—which historically are not
strange to the profession in Brazil.
From its beginnings, when the
profession was being structured in Brazil,
local architects and urbanists were highly
influenced by “imported” practices. Three
moments were of special interest: the large
income of foreign professors during the
implementation of the first architecture
school in 1816 in Rio de Janeiro; the
immigration of European professionals to
South America during and after the great
war years—the German Franz Heep; the
Polish Victor Reif; and the Italians Lina Bo
Bardi, Giancarlo Palanti and Gian Carlo
Gasperini, are examples of this moment;
and finally the period after the military
dictatorship, when various architects and
professors—like Vilanova Artigas—returned
from exile bringing with them the most
diverse set of references.
The movement of architecture students
and professionals abroad, motivated
by better opportunities of career
development, recently grew in Brazil. At
an educational level, federal initiatives
fostering study-abroad-programs through
institutional partnerships between
universities have been one of the main
factors stimulating the flow of a skilled
portion of the population outside of the
country, especially in the past two decades.
Notably, the Ciência sem Fronteiras
[Science without Borders] program,
created in 2011 and implemented in 2012 as
a joint initiative of the Ministry of Science,
Technology and Innovation (MCTI) and
the Ministry of Education (MEC), aimed to
provide scholarships to Brazilian students
in different levels of their higher education
during a 4-year span.2
Focused on areas of knowledge
associated with science and technology,
the program’s goals are listed broadly
as fostering the exchange of abilities
between Brazilian and foreign students
and researchers, inserting Brazilian
institutions and scholarly production in
the international scientific panorama,
and attracting highly qualified science
personnel to Brazil. More than one hundred
thousand scholarships were granted for
the duration of the program, of which over
70% went to students completing their
undergraduate education. While the focus
of the program was not directly related to
the study of architecture, it is important
to recognize its role in encouraging the
enrollment of Brazilians students in
institutions overseas. Between 2012 and
2015, Brazilian students went from the 11th
to the 6th largest international presence
in higher-education institutions in the
United States.
While Science without Borders
continued to support graduate and post-
graduate programs, the cost of its full
implementation was said too high for the
country, which was swept in an economic
recession at the beginning of 2015, as
Claudio Haddad remarks in his interview,
the program was not completely adjusted
to the economic reality of Brazil.
In the context of this global trade
of scholarly and cultural outlooks, the
theme “Crossbreedings” exposes locales
of concentration and absence of such
exchange. In that sense, this chapter aims
to understand the impact of these policies
and trends on architecture and design
professionals, presenting a quantified
reading of the presence of Brazilian
architects in cities around the world. The
information presented is a result of data
sourcing within specialized institutions as
well as an open data collection platform
organized in the website developed for
this exhibition.3
The falling GDP, increasing credit
restrictions, and spiking inflation that
characterized the economy in 2015 had
a direct impact on the journey of many
“crossbred” architects. In her essay, Ana
Luiza Nobre discusses the role of domestic
architecture as fundamental to the influx of
Brazilians into Portugal. Suggesting a kind
of reverse flow to that of the colonial times,
or even in recent years when Portuguese
architects were looking for work in
architecture offices in São Paulo and Rio de
Janeiro, the architectural reality of Brazilian
interiors is taken to Europe through a
population that, by switching their places
of abode, carry Brazilian domesticity to
Portugal, and vice-versa.
With almost ten thousand new
graduates per year and the challenges
of their insertion in the labor market, the
analysis of the “architect-traveller” seemed
pertinent for our professional group. The
research, illustrated in the map, reveals the
inclination of such group towards cities
within the United States and Europe—
almost 88% of them studying or working
in these geographies—demonstrating,
besides the ease to access, a matter of
preference linked to cultural inspiration and
references for Brazilian architects.
As in the subjective borders from
Nicolás Robbio’s artwork and in the
speculative Americas suggested by
Eduardo Aquino’s essay, Brazil is depicted
through subjective experiences of
different countries, cities, citizenships,
cultures, and histories. The lines merge
and disappear, at times suggesting the
immaterial reality of the borders, at times
suggesting alternative geographies. At
the end, Brazil also becomes a product
of the crossbreeding of experiences.
Ultimately, as the architect-traveler
transforms the perception of their place of
origin, they carry with them the idea of a
“crossbred Brazil”.
THE MAP
The Crossbreedings map presents
the results from data sourcing within
specialized institutions as well as Walls of
Air’s open data collection platform. The
map privileges the American continent and
the Western portions of Europe, where the
exchanges have been larger in number.
The spikes in these areas represent the
number of Brazilian architecture students
received by foreign universities between
1998 and 2016. The data was collected from
the main Brazilian governmental agency for
international scholarly exchanges (CAPES).
International institutions are also listed
along the circumference, where diagrams
sort the number of incoming students by
year. The year of 2012 is emphasized in red,
marking the start of the Science without
Borders program.
In the Brazilian territory, each spike
represents the number of registered
and active architects in Brazilian cities,
according to the information provided
by the Brazilian National Council of
Architecture and Urbanism (CAU). The
corresponding diagram shows the ratio
between male and female professionals
in the 400 cities registering the largest
number of professionals.
1. See Simmel, The Stranger.
Available at: www.infoamerica.org/
documentos_pdf/simmel01.pdf.
Accessed on: April 10, 2018.
2. See Ciência sem
Fronteiras. Available at: www.
cienciasemfronteiras.gov.br/web/
csf/o-programa. Accessed on:
April 10, 2018.
3. Available at: www.murosdear.
org.br.
Nicolás Robbio
Plano expandido (Questões ao traçar
uma linha) [Expanded Plane (Questions
when Drawing a Line)], 2016
319 pieces of wire
Brazilian 36
architects abroad

To make a more sensitive and tangible reading

of the ways in which Brazilian architects
and urbanists are active abroad, we sought
professionals who at some moment (or
various) have experienced the practice of
the profession outside the country. The
contact with outstanding Brazilian architects
in other geographies was made through
recommendations by the network of
collaborators of Walls of Air. The selection
focused on professionals who approach the
practice on multiple fronts and in a wide range
of contexts: architects who are active in North
America, Europe, Africa and Asia, in different
fields—photography, research, curatorship,
art and design. It was requested that they
reflect on the question: “How did your
personal displacement allowed for another
understanding of Brazil and how did this
experience defined a new position relative to
the research and practice of architecture? “
One highly significant aspect observed in
their answer is that the difference between
their Brazilian training and the realities they
are immersed in abroad does not constitute
any sort of barrier or limiting factor. On
the contrary, practically all the architects
talked about enrichment and opportunities
for personal and professional growth. For
them, living and working in a place that was
different from their origin also allowed them
to gain a new scope in their reflections and
feelings in relation to Brazil.
Combining this with the knowledge
related to their architectural training and their
experiences in Brazil, the statements can
provide us with insights regarding our role
and goals as professionals. With a Brazilian
essence that could never be set aside, each
one of these collaborators briefly alludes to
the significance their Brazilian background
has for them. While they are responsible for
bringing small pieces of the country abroad,
they are also pushed to go beyond the Brazilian
specificities. By broadening their horizons, they
help lead ours to new corners of the planet.
“One’s place of birth is the place where
life makes sense. Besides our birthplace,
there are places we adopt as our own. The
privilege of having spent most of my adult
life in various places outside Brazil has
allowed me to become a citizen not only of
one country, but of various cities, including
São Paulo, Grenoble, New York, Florence,
Tokyo and St. Louis.
As an architect, this is an extraordinary
experience. It has allowed me to concretely
understand that each society creates
its own spaces, the raw material of the
architecture and the city. More than
another view of Brazil, this humanistic
perspective has confirmed values and
practices that I learned in my academic
background and in my initial professional
experiences, which I continued to develop
and expand in other countries.
In the last two decades, my professional
practice has been concentrated on
education, research and artistic practice.
I teach design and history of architecture
and the city, I write, design and organize
exhibitions. The many years that I have
dedicated to researching and writing about
the life and work of architect Lina Bo Bardi
have been my self-education on Brazil and
on the broad significance of architecture
as a cultural representation and a place for
the practice of daily life.”
Zeuler Lima, Ricardo de Ostos,
Saint Louis, United States London, United Kingdom
“Why work abroad? Firstly, I moved to
London in order to study with some of
the architects I used to read about in
my university library in Belo Horizonte.
Secondly, to my total surprise, I realized
that I myself could have an international
career in the context of practice, curating
and teaching. My experience abroad
enabled me to pursue the architecture
I wanted to practice—experimental and
innovative—while being independent
minded. My international experience
enabled me to value both what Brazilian
architecture is, and what it could be.
In other words, my main lesson from
living abroad is perhaps to invest in and
investigate the near future despite the
acute social problems in my home country.
To dream about alternatives is not a luxury,
but a necessity if we want to change our
reality today.
For many years I have been inspired both
by Brazilian culture and its environmental
challenges. In our current work we have
been inspired by Amazonian culture.
One of our ongoing commissions is
to design a Forest Research Centre in
Bangladesh where we utilize lessons from
the Amazonian environmental context
translated into the global-warming-affected
coast of our project site. If innovation is also
an archaeological exercise, I am very happy
to borrow a couple of dreams from the Rio
Negro. Why not?”
“The first months outside Brazil are a
mixture of stupor and incomprehension.
Place onto a plate the icons of modern
architecture, add a model of the city
always focused on the public environment,
unhealthy apartments, a good wine, and
throw in a dash of the inevitable wish
to disseminate Brazilian architecture
(“Hey, European, where I come from the
marquees are flooded with landscape!”).
Since in Europe there is no place for an
ample marquee, the landscape does not
invade any space, and few understand
Brazilian architecture, it helps to be from
a country that “does not go out of fashion.”
The doors are opened without needing to
show much of a resume; and knowing how
to face challenges is part of our pedigree,
which allows us to adapt, to face the
economic crises and to switch from one role to examine and interrogate architecture.
to another: architect, urbanist, landscape
designer, translator or photographer.
As it is difficult to explain the power of an example, through an invitation from Lina
Oscar [Niemeyer], Lina [Bo Bardi], Paulo
[Mendes da Rocha] or Rino [Levi], few
people understand what this challenge of
returning to the essence of architecture
means. Within this panorama, the
photography of architecture that I propose “Parallax” concept.
in Europe is strangely melancholic and
solitary. In my work it remains implicit that
that leafiness or that concrete from the
other side of the Atlantic are unachievable
in old Europe.”
Flavio Coddou,
Barcelona, Spain
“I was raised within the framework of
Brazilian modernists, as I was part of the
family of Olavo Redig de Campos, who
exposed me to architecture.
In 1974, while studying architecture
during the period of Brazil’s oppressive
military government, I moved to Canada to
continue my studies. There was a freedom
of movement within the social structure and
in the teaching methodology at the Faculty
of Architecture, University of Toronto,
which offered a dynamic exploration within
the institution. Faculty director George
Baird had important connections with
like‑minded architects and theorists in
New York and London; in effect, it was a
borderless cultural environment.
It was here that I developed a critical
theoretical tool I call “Architecture Parallax”
This was applied to my ever-present and
strong connection to Brazil. In 1984, for
B. Bardi to curate an exhibition at Sesc
Pompeia in São Paulo, the contact with this
disrupted metropolis—the collapse of the
depth of field at its best—has generated
on-going research and work through the
Developing projects and teaching in
Toronto, Stuttgart, Guernsey, Barcelona,
London, Montreal and São Paulo
are a critical part of my practice—an
architectonic and social navigation through
urban and architectural situations.”
Alexander Pilis,
Montreal, Canada
“Soon after I graduated in architecture
from USP, the crisis of the Fernando Collor
government arose and there was not much
work around here. It was 1991. I decided to
move to Japan, which was experiencing
its economic bubble. Living in Tokyo,
I worked for some years in an architecture
firm. But I liked working with art and
slowly left architecture to be an artist.
I stopped designing a physical world, but
my artworks have always been influenced
by architecture and urban planning. The
main character in my paintings is the
interior settings, buildings and landscapes, then to Guinea‑Bissau, where I began an
whether imaginary or real. The years went
by, and to widen my horizons I moved to
New York. These personal moves enabled
me to gain a better understanding of
Brazil. The distance from my country of
origin allowed me to reflect on my cultural
background and to think about how my
worldview was constructed. I do not regret
having left my country as a young man.
Thanks to the education and the cultural
heritage acquired in Brazil, I had a solid
basis for achieving an international career.” and intangible social processes. The
Oscar Oiwa,
New York, United States
“As an architect and urbanist specialized
in popular housing, informal urbanization,
urban design and the urbanization of
favelas, I came to work with inequality
in the city, using my knowledge to help
those who have been excluded from
public policies, to encourage access to a
dignified dwelling, to quality architecture,
to a residential space where one can begin
to live with full citizenship. A pioneering
work with the squatters’ invasions and
camps that began with the construction
of Brasília brought me to Holland and
international career that brought me to
more than thirty countries. In those years,
I resided in Holland, Guinea-Bissau, Egypt,
Kenya and Saudi Arabia, and worked
with a certain frequency and continuity
in countries such as Bulgaria, Moldavia,
Cuba, Bolivia and Brazil, as an international
consultant. My identity and cultural base
were fundamental for interacting with a
diversity of social, political and economic
contexts, and to better understand tangible
foundations constructed in my interaction
with the excluded population in Brazilian
cities became a comparative advantage in
my professional activity in other countries,
helping me to contextualize and deepen
my search for adequate solutions, in a
constant exchange and learning process.”
Claudio Acioly,
Nairobi, Kenya
“I always had the spirit of a traveler and Planned and designed with creativity,
pioneer, which made me leave Brazil adapted to the urban context and
in search of new experiences, without pertinent to the real estate situation, these
imagining that I would wind up developing developments become true landmarks in the
my career abroad. After a period of city, attractive destinations for work, leisure,
four years in London, where I was a housing and—why not?—urban spontaneity.
postgraduate student at the Architectural I have been active in our firm, Girimun
Association School of Architecture and Architects, since 2009, designing projects
worked as an architect in large firms, in that promote a blending of scales,
2002 I took up residence in Hong Kong, requiring solutions of urbanism, urban
which I consider the capital of Asia. design, architecture, interiors, graphic
It is here that large projects and design, signage and branding, all in a
creativity have been applied to important single design and at the same time.
issues in the big contemporary cities, In recent years, we have been seeking
such as infrastructure, urban mobility and to collaborate on projects in Brazil,
accessibility. A combination of economic understanding that our experience is
power, large investments in infrastructure, extremely relevant in the search for ideas
demographic pressure and high density and solutions for the large Brazilian
have created an environment conducive to urban centers.”
urban development and to the appetite for
carrying out large projects.
Since then, my fascination for the
city and my creative interest have been
focused on the realization of projects
that incorporate and put to the test a
number of principles: the mixture of uses
in the districts and blocks, the synergy
between buildings and the activities they
host, as well as the integration with the
city’s transport network. These are the
so-called transport oriented mixed-use
developments (TODs).

Mauro Resnitzky,
Hong Kong, China
“During an exchange in Porto in 2001, the
opportunity to travel and to explore the
architecture we had only seen in books
and magazines could not be missed by
someone who was traveling to Europe. The
few days I spent in Holland were impactful:
a great period of the SuperDutch!
The freedom and experimentation that
guide a large part of the contemporary
Dutch production have always been
extremely attractive, motivating young
foreign architects to explore this thought
open to countless design options. For their
part, the architectural culture of Brazil
and Portugal made us think in a linear way,
seeking the best solution, when not the
only one! The big dilemma.
The vision of architecture throughout
these years of practice – and dilemmas
along the way – working in Europe, Asia
and America have made me perceive the
foundation of my first years of work in Brazil
and the years well spent studying in Rio de
Janeiro and Porto. Studying the architecture
that garnered Brazil worldwide recognition
in this field, and understanding, being
critical and appreciative of its contemporary
production, are the legacy that I have and
which allow me to work as a professional in a
world where architecture is facing questions
of globalization and identity.
For the last 13 years I have been working
as an architect at the Mecanoo architectural
firm, in the small city of Delft, located 15
minutes from Rotterdam, where I live.”
Rodrigo Louro,
Delft, Holland
“Moving away from your own point of
reference is an act of rupture in time and
space. The very idea of country changes
in the memory of your existence in a given
place at a given moment. The change
in location leads to a distancing in your
perspective and allows you to become
immersed in new social and professional
dynamics. The distancing allowed me,
first of all, to observe the value of the
social relations in Brazil, characterized
by empathy and generosity, but also by
inequality and informality – almost like a
metaphor for the Brazilian geography and
landscape: generous, vast, diverse and
contrastive. As I faced new professional
paradigms, I could observe the value of the
technique and aesthetics in the Brazilian
context, characterized by lightness and the
generosity of simple but rigorous lines that
integrate function and form with economy
and expression. The transposition from one
country to another takes place through a
process of synthesis and adaption. This
synthesis, in my professional experience,
is a result of these observations about
Brazil: a constant search for meaning and
for human and social value in the practice
of teaching and research in architecture
and urbanism. This transforms into a
search for lightness and precision, for
balance and the rigor of the line and for an
understanding of the landscape (and its
dynamics) as a natural and a cultural place.
In short, the search for the essential and for
the fundamental act of the design.”
Taneha
Kuzniecow Bacchin,
Delft, Holland
interview: 42
Claudio Haddad

Claudio Haddad (Rio de Janeiro-RJ,

1946) is an engineer and economist.
He holds a degree in mechanical
and industrial engineering from
Instituto Militar de Engenharia
and a PhD in economics from the
University of Chicago. He has also
served as director of the Banco
Central, professor of economics
at Fundação Getúlio Vargas, in Rio
de Janeiro, and partner at Banco
Garantia. He is the founder and
chairman of Insper.
Walls

What are the main barriers to a broader

exchange of knowledge between
Brazil and other countries in terms of
university education?
The barrier is the result of various things,
starting with people, as a result of the
low quality of elementary education.
To get a better idea, only around half
of our 18 years-olds have completed
their secondary education and, of
these, only 10% possess math skills
considered minimally adequate by the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation
and Development (OECD). Of course Brazil
always has people who excel, but given
the country’s size, you would expect
much more in terms of educational level,
academic exchange, scientific research,
published works and so on.

Evidences

What has the program Ciência sem

Fronteiras [Science without Borders]
represented for Brazilian academia,
for example?
I believe that Ciência sem Fronteiras was a
well designed program and had a positive
impact. Unfortunately, perhaps it was too
ambitious and this held the program back.
However, it was a good idea and should be
continued on a more realistic scale.

Side effects

What do these educational intersections

with other countries mean for the
Brazilian economy and culture? What
is the effect of breaking down the
barriers between disciplines, in a
broader context?
In Brazil, our economy is still very closed
off. Not only in terms of ideas and
exchange, but also international trade.
This exchange of ideas is very important
for the country’s development, as well
as for the development of people. There
is a lot to do, primarily in university
education. Our education is built around
silos. People study certain things with
little interconnection between the various
disciplines and schools. In architecture,
more than other disciplines, this is
absolutely essential. Architecture cannot
focus only on form. It must consider
a series of other things: physical and
economic feasibility, as well as the
cultural, artistic and aesthetic interaction
of the project with the rest of the
community. This has to form the basis of
our schools of architecture, engineering,
economics and so on.
At Insper, we started with a clean
slate. There are no departments, instead
we have programs—in engineering,
economics and business administration.
Engineers are involved with projects from
the beginning, and theory is taught along
the way; it is Project-Based Learning.
Engineers must also worry about not only
physical feasibility, but also economic
feasibility, and whether the project is of
interest and desirable for society and
the environment.
Behavior and micro-politics
How is knowledge accumulated
individually during exchange abroad
and disseminated to others? How does
individual experience influence the
behavior of the community?
Evidence shows that interaction
between qualified individuals is
fundamental for the dissemination
of ideas, knowledge and productive
activities. And this occurs in a cumulative
manner, through what we call externalities.
Not only does a group of trained
professionals create more than the sum of
its parts, but this expands into a support
network composed of less qualified
professionals, which benefits the entire
community. Those who do exchanges,
when they bring back new knowledge and
practices from abroad, serve as a catalyst
for this virtuous cycle.
experience in the discipline
What strategies do you use to overcome
the barriers of social inequality through
your work in the Brazilian educational
system, at Insper, for example? How
is education related to what you call
social capital?
Most inequality is the result of problems
in education. The overall low level of
education is especially advantageous for
those who excel and attain a higher level
of education, given our regressive system,
in which public education is inferior in
quality to the education offered by private
schools. A student who has money to
spend on private education up through
secondary school can then enter a public
institution, which is free. While people
who don’t have this opportunity, with a
public education of inferior quality, have
to attend and pay for a private institution,
although there are programs such as
FIES, a student loan program. At Insper
we want to be an inclusive school: we
have a scholarship fund so that every
talented young person who passes our
entrance exams can study, regardless of
their income or means. This is essential
for making us a school not just for the rich,
but for all of those who wish to enter. This
really makes an impact on the education
of competent citizens, not only in terms
of knowledge, but in terms of other skills:
critical thinking, teamwork and a series of
other things.
Content in education is a necessary but
insufficient condition, because you have
to combine this education with citizenship,
resulting in a mixture called social capital.
This is what we try to do at Insper: learning
is not just about subjects, but also other
competencies and skills and, also, values.
Transformative potential
What’s the outlook for public education,
given the current investment cutback in
the sector? What other intermediation
or investments could contribute
to universal access to education,
promoting both education in Brazil and
educational exchange?
Brazil spends a reasonable amount on
education compared to other countries.
The problem is that it spends it badly,
since public spending is generally lacking
in terms of effectiveness. There are
schools that spend little and produce
excellent results, and vice versa. It is not
spending that will raise educational levels,
it is spending better. Education in Brazil
is fundamentally a problem of leadership
and management—there are various
barriers that make it difficult to do so. I’m
always in favor of the government working
with the private sector. It’s one thing
to establish rights in the Constitution
which are valid—everyone needs to
receive an education. However, it is not
necessarily the government that has to
supply this good. This can be supplied by
the private sector much more efficiently,
and of course it must be regulated
and monitored. With public-private
partnerships, for example. How can this
student be better served? It doesn’t
matter if it’s the government or the private
sector as long as it’s more effective.
A for-profit school can certainly
accomplish its educational mission.
Today, in our case, we also want to
include research, which is the creation
of knowledge. Theory, in a more applied
manner, through debates, discussions,
seminars, manuscripts. For-profit
research is a much more complicated
proposition. First, why would you create
knowledge for society if you need to
generate results for shareholders? Second,
you are very much tied to your own budget.
As a nonprofit, we follow the model of
private American institutions: we are
very involved in raising funds from third
parties, we interact a great deal with the
community, donors, financiers, people
that help us in various ways. Our objective
is, 400 years from now—like Harvard,
which is now 400 years old—to continue to
offer education and create knowledge of
the highest possible quality in Brazil.
This map was developed and designed in collaboration with
Mapping-lab (www.mappinglab.me) for this catalogue to highlight a
layer of the main exhibition map Crossbreedings.
Brazilian architecture students
exchange
(launch of the mobility program
“Ciência sem Fronteiras” in 2012)
2007 - 2011
2012 - 2016

- students + students
Aquilá Eduardo 48
(HereThere): Aquino
the making of
another map

ARCHITECTS HAVE ALWAYS TRAVELED

I prefer the world

without territories
only the accidental relief1 1. Dora Ribeiro, Olho empírico.
Lisbon: Babel, 2011, p.83.
The definition of “local” is being completely transformed,
a challenge given the tangled complexity of contemporary
urban life. In theory, architecture is the physical expression
of a specific location, of a single place. If art and writing
are forms that can be identified, apart from locality,
because of their reproducibility, architecture is, inversely,
always attached to a specific geographic location. The
experience of architecture and its territory goes beyond
the purely visual and is, by its own nature, less so or even
non-transportable. Architects adopt their medium by
investing in modes of reciprocity and communication.
What happens when architects move away from their
original environments? What processes of transformation
occur with transnational architects, dispossessed of a
sense of location/roots?
Traditionally, architects have always traveled.
The practice and study of architecture involves
traveling and exploration of new places and different
cultures. Migration, an act in favor of the dissolution
of borders, has been crucial for the experiences of
architects, from Le Corbusier to Lina Bo Bardi, from
Mies van der Rohe to Zaha Hadid. In architecture, the
idea of traveling has always been associated with the
evolution of ideas. Alternative modes of investigation
and exploratory practices transcend geographic limits.
Research, criticism and teaching of architecture welcome
a constant renewal of modes of navigation, in this era
of abundant transnational flows.

2. Guillermo Gómez-Peña,
“Tratado da cultura livre”, in The
New World Border: Prophecies,
Poems and Loqueras for the End
of the Century. San Francisco:
City Lights Books, 1996, p.6.
3. Lina Bo Bardi apud Marcelo
Ferraz, Lina Bo Bardi (Literary
Curriculum). Milan: Charta,
1994, p.12.
CONTIGUOUS CIVILIZATION / SINGLE HORIZON
The work of an artist is to force open the framework
of reality and introduce unsuspecting possibilities
into it. Artists and writers from all over the continent
are currently involved in redefining our continental
topography. We envision better maps. We envision a
map of the Americas without borders, an inverted map
or one where the borders are organized organically, by
geography, by culture or imagination, and not by the
capricious fingers of economic domination.2
Gómez-Peña proposes a redefinition of our continental
topography, an issue that is gradually gaining momentum,
as the world deconstructs and redefines its borders.
Starting with my own displacement from São Paulo to
Winnipeg, some lingering questions: can we consider the
identity of the Americas as a whole, as an uninterrupted
and continuous territory? Can we consider the territory
of the Americas as a contiguous civilization, combining
collective expressions, from Patagonia to Nunavut, from
Trindade and Martim Vaz to Cape Prince of Wales? Is there
a genuine American sense of identity associated with the
idea of a New World? Could we use art and architecture as
a way to examine this existential contiguity?
Aquilá (HereThere) proposes another map, based
on personal experience; an experimental map of the
Americas, in which São Paulo is found alongside Manitoba
based on an imaginary cartographic folding, a fictitious
encounter between South and North, and producing an
autobiographical geophysical theme: São Paulo-Manitoba
(spmb). The map of the Americas is folded over so that
these two places gradually come together, until they
dissolve into a single horizon.
THE BUILDING OF ANOTHER MAP
What I can say is that there are no Tupiniquins; there
are Brazilians. Of course, I said that Brazil is my
country of choice and, as such, it is my country twice
over. When we’re born, we have no choice, we are
born by chance. I wasn’t born here, I chose this place
to live. That is why Brazil is my country twice; it is my
country of choice, and I feel like I’m a citizen of every
city, from Cariri to the Triângulo Mineiro, the cities of
the interior and border towns.3
[…how does one design a new map? what is the map of
the one that went without ever having been? and by going
there, has one approximated much more to what it has
always been? here/now, there/then? and space-time, 50
which of the two prevails? which is the best design? and
the new map? how can one design a new map of time?
how can you design a path that you’ve never been on? …is
there an architecture of the present, an architecture that
comes from the action of the architect and not the built
object? what does the architect do? what is an artist if not
the one who translates the world? what is a poet if not the
one who is dedicated to space-time? architecture as a
poetic gesture, as a return to drawing, by an architecture
that returns to the question of space, which lightly touches
the earth? an architecture without the built object? an
architecture of betweens, an architecture of beyond,
immaterial and intangible but present? a geography of
flows, a displacement from within through the distance…]

THE SOUTH, OUR NORTH

Our North is the South. There must not be a North for

us, except in opposition to our South. That is why we are
now turning the map upside down, so we now have a
true idea of our position, and not as the rest of the world
wishes. From now on, the tip of the Americas insistently
points to the South, our North. Our compass too: it will
tilt irreversibly and always to the South, toward our pole.
When the ships sail from here, traveling North, they
will be traveling downward, unlike before. Because the
North is now below us. And when we are face‑to‑face 4. Joaquín Torres-García,
with our South, the east is on our left. This is the Historia de mi vida. Barcelona:
adjustment needed so we now know where we are.4 Páidos, 1990, p.234.

The famous upside-down map of South America by

Torres‑García formalized an autonomous-regionalist
vision, a position based on an ideology that held South
America in supremacy over the peoples of the North. As for
the similarity to the Anthropophagic Manifesto, today this
dichotomy appears a contradiction, in an age of shocking
global cannibalism. The dynamics of power have moved
from the local domain to a neoliberal and virtual domain
characterized by an ideology of capital. Supported by new
globalizing flows and complexities, it promotes the growth
of a tangled web that replaces a simple line with two poles.
In a world without maps, the new nomad navigates without
leaving home, or the office. It moves continually between
the center and the periphery, as a simulator of these
new conditions, under which the act of migrating dons
ordinary garb. Coming and going is no longer exclusively
for immigrants; there is, simultaneously and repeatedly,
the coming and going of everyone. When you leave is when
you arrive, everywhere is nowhere, etc.

5. Dora Ribeiro apud André Luis
Batista, Não pergunte: Uma leitura
da China poética de Dora Ribeiro.
Juiz de Fora: UFJF, 2017, p.43.
6. Hélio Oiticica apud P.
Bachmann, S. Neubauer,
A. Valentin, Hélio Oiticica in
New York. Bonn: Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG),
2017, p.23.
GEOGRAPHIES OF SUBJECTIVITY
My wanderings I am. And poetry is my fiction. I
want to see myself and others as human beings
free of nationalities… Travels are opportunities to
be immersed in the world, in its apparent diversity;
allowing me access to human experience and other
languages and cultures.5
The scale of the world is contained in the space between:
myself and the other. Geographies of subjectivity are
processed by pause, observation, poetry, and architecture
is the poetry of place. Both poetry and architecture
comment on reality through a relationship with the
world (without borders), benefiting a new universal-
subjective-collective space. The poet travels to cities
around the world (Ribeiro), or remains doggedly in one
place (Drummond), repositioning themselves, in this
case, through their imagination. The poet searches
for universality based on a personal moment—the
simultaneous pursuit of what’s between the I and the
other, but now without limit. Their motivations point to
a more generous question: what is the place of a poet in
the world? Travel breaks with disciplinary impediments,
indicating new practices. A voluntary distancing, an
openness to other subjectivities, other modus operandi.
WORLD-SHELTER
Here, I know more things about there than
you there.6
In 1971, Hélio Oiticica moved to New York, after becoming
frustrated with the military regime and the resulting
cultural confinement of Brazil. Due to the success of
his participation in the exhibition Information, at the
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), in 1970, he decided,
albeit illegally, on a change of surroundings. Immersed
in the world of New York counterculture, he witnessed
the conflict between capitalist domination and the
marginalized. The urban complexity between these
two worlds led Oiticica to refer to Manhattan as New
Babylon. But his marginal condition kept him in an
intense creative isolation. In his apartment on the Lower
East Side (Loft 4), he created six different spaces that he
called Babylonests: playground, kindergarten, library,
laboratory, motel, drug den and cinema. A university
campus contained in environmental capsules.
A synthesis of public and private life, according to
Waly Salomão, Babylonests erected a WORLD-SHELTER,
“a compact cosmopolitan city” invariably occupied by 52
characters that, paradoxically, experience urban isolation
within the collectivity that Oiticica created. It was in the
move to New York that the artist created his most intimate,
but nonetheless community-oriented, works, protected by
the habitual codes of formal art—a world-shelter.

INTERSECTIONS > PRODUCTION OF LOCALITY

The production of locality is a reminder that even the

most apparently mechanical forms of social order
that seem to function without design, contingency
or intentionality, but simply by the force of routine—
what we used to call habit—involve large amounts
of deliberate attention, effort and labor. Part of that
attention, effort and labor is involved in collective
ideas of what is possible. Therefore, for the local to
have some spatialized embodiment takes an effort
which transcends that very spatiality.7 7. Arjun Appadurai, Illusion
of Permanence. New Haven:
Perspecta, vol. 34, 2003, p.44.
For Michel Serres, knowledge is developed and
transmitted through multiple forms of intersection,
including what is now called transdisciplinarity. Art and
architecture and associated disciplines share scientific
analogies. Architects withdraw from the role of the author
to come together collaboratively; the architect-author
in danger of extinction. Design becomes the common
platform on which architects, artists, scientists, activists
and politicians gather to find a conceptual terrain before
working with the public domain. The opportunity for
transformation of the public domain occurs through
design efforts, then the need to assess the local, which
is only possible through scientific investigation. In the
feedback process, evidence of action becomes clearer
through critical distance and the adoption of collaborative
evaluation methods spanning many disciplines (different
visions of the world, different approaches, etc.), to achieve
a real possibility of local production as a form of resistance
to neoliberal globalizing forces.

PERIPATETIC

[…] walking culture was a reaction against the speed

and the alienation of the industrial revolution. It
may be countercultures and subcultures that will
continue to walk in resistance to the postindustrial,
postmodern loss of space, time and embodiment.
Most of these cultures draw from ancient practices—
of peripatetic philosophers, of poets composing

8. Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust:
A History of Walking. London:
Penguin, 2001, p.267.
9. Eduardo Galeano, De pernas
pro ar, trad. Sergio Faraco.
Porto Alegre: L&PM, 1999.
Our translation.
10. Michel Maffesoli, Sobre o
nomadismo: vagabundagens
pós‑modernas. Rio de Janeiro:
Record, 2001, p.70.
afoot, of pilgrims and practitioners of Buddhist
walking meditation—or old ones, such as hiking
and flâneury.8
Aristotle, the peripatetic philosopher, taught while
walking. In constant movement, a peripatetic is someone
who depends on walking to reflect. The word is derived
from the Greek perípatos, a colonnade designed for
walking; in this way it is a direct reference to architecture.
Aristotle based his thoughts on facts observed through
the experience of life: philosophy as a way of identifying
the reason behind things. Driven by this nomadic
exposure, the peripatetic architect moves through the
world discovering other ways of doing, communicating.
For the peripatetic architect, travel is essential material
for his practice. In the embodiment of travel, the
peripatetic architect becomes a producer, as a direct
result of displacement. To displace is more than just an
obligation: it is the survival of a critical-poetic imperative
of the process of becoming.
WORLD MAP
The Equator is not the halfway line on the world map,
as we learned in school. Over half a century ago,
German researcher Arno Peters discovered what
everyone had seen but no one understood: the king
of geography had no clothes.
The world map they taught us gives two thirds
to the north and one third to the south. On the map,
Europe is larger than Latin America, but, in truth,
Latin America is twice the size of Europe. India
appears smaller than Scandinavia, despite being
three times larger. On the map, the United States and
Canada occupy more space than Africa, although
they are only two thirds as large.
The map lies. Traditional geography steals space,
as the imperial economy steals wealth, the official
history steals memory and the formal culture steals
the word.9
As with Deleuze’s fold, the new cartography is imaginary,
belonging to all the subjectivities—to those that navigate
and to those that decide to remain harbored in just one
port. As Michel Maffesoli said, “The dynamism and the
spontaneity of nomadism lie in its contempt of borders
(state, civilization, ideological, religious) and the real
experience of the Universal.”10 In the new world map,
redesigned now based on different criteria, everyone lives,
everyone stays, everyone is universal.
[fig. 1] Joaquín Torres-García, América
Invertida [Inverted America], 1943.
Courtesy of the Estate of
Joaquín Torres-García.
[fig. 2, 3] Study for Aquilá (HereThere)
 ANTI-MAP

Here/there, indigenous people and immigrants

11. Guillermo Gómez-Peña, ibid.
share the same space, but are strangers. Here/
there, we are all potentially transborder dwellers
and cultural exiles. Everyone has been uprooted to
one degree or another and for different reasons, but
not all are aware of this. Here/there, the homeless,
the transborder culture and deterritorialization are
the dominant experiences, not just extravagant
academic theories.11

The here (does not) exist, nor does the there. Aquilá
(HereThere) is the anti-map, inventing a world of
intersections that are geographically impractical but
engaged in the phenomena of experience. Without
distinction: architects that stay, architects that go. All
the migrants, the poets, all the architects are itinerant
peripatetics, creating their own maps, maps of the world
as real as they are imagined. Another world—a dreamt
world that draws itself real.

Eduardo Aquino practices in the

interstices of art & architecture
under spmb [São Paulo-Manitoba].
In 2014 he completed a PhD at
FAUUSP working on a project about
beachscapes and was granted a
National Urban Design Award from
the Royal Architectural Institute
of Canada for Jiigew. He is
associate professor at the Faculty
of Architecture, University of
Manitoba, in Winnipeg, Canadá.
The houses Ana Luiza
of Brazilians: Nobre
architectural,
migratory and
symbolic flows
between Brazil
and Portugal
It was a dense dream, a profound ambition.
– Ferreira de Castro, Emigrantes, 1928
The Brazilian architectural world is currently experiencing a
generalized hangover after a period of euphoria that lasted
only briefly and left more sequelae then legacies. The severe
political-economic crisis that the country is going through
is notable in the shrinking of the architectural firms and
in the slowdown of projects and business linked with civil
construction. And the countless paralyzed construction
sites—among which that of the Museu da Imagem do Som,
in Rio de Janeiro, is probably the most eloquent example1—
are the concrete expression of the failure, in architectural
terms, of the sequence of international mega-events hosted
recently by Brazil. In this context, the same environment of
insecurity used as a justification by Temer’s government to
announce a politically suspect federal intervention in Rio
de Janeiro2 is also pushing Brazilian architects outside the
country, in a new migratory cycle.
The desire to take up residence abroad is not a novelty
for a social group that has financial resources and invests
in the residential space as a distinctive mark, the material
representation of a symbolic repertoire associated with
the celebration of its social status and way of life. But
while for a long time its favorite destination was Florida,
in recent years it has become Europe. “Brazilians Swap
Miami for Lisbon,” announced the Spanish newspaper
El País in May 2016.3 While Brazil was preparing to host
the first Olympics in Latin America, Portugal was thus
emerging as the dream destination of those who sought
a solution, through individual strategies, for a critical
state associated with unprecedented levels of corruption,
economic crisis, urban criminality and the precariousness
of public services.
58
1. The new building of MIS/Museu da
Imagem do Som, along the seashore
at Copacabana, is the result of a
controversial international design
competition in 2009, won by the
firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro. The
museum was conceived to be an
architectural icon of Rio de Janeiro,
and was to be inaugurated before
the Olympics. Due to the financial
crisis of the state of Rio de Janeiro,
however, the construction works
have been paralyzed since 2016, with
no resumption in sight.
2. In February 2018, President
Michel Temer announced a federal
intervention in Rio de Janeiro in
response to the chaotic situation
in the state’s public safety. This
measure, provided for in the 1988
Constitution but never used before,
means that the responsibility for
public safety is transferred from
the state to a military intervener.
This action unleashed a wave of
criticism, both for awakening the
ghosts of the military dictatorship
and for being a dubious political
maneuver deployed in a presidential
election year. And the situation was
intensified one month later, with the
assassination of city councilwoman
Marielle Franco, a fierce critic of
the intervention and the recently
nominated rapporteur of the
commission created to monitor it.
3. Javier Martí del Barrio,
“Brasileiros trocam Miami por
Lisboa,” May 8, 2016, in: brasil.
elpais.com/brasil/2016/05/05/
economia/1462480348_879062.
html. Accessed on March 1, 2018.

4. João Almeida Moreira,
“Portugal é a nova Miami para os
brasileiros ricos,” April 26, 2017, in:
www.dinheirovivo.pt/economia/
portugal-e-a-nova-miami-para-
os-brasileiros-ricos/. Accessed on
January 2, 2018.
5. In the press of both Brazil and
Portugal, it is not rare to find
references to Brazilians who have
acquired real estate in Portugal,
some of whom are widely known,
such as minister Gilmar Mendes
(Federal Supreme Court Judge
and a key figure in Operation Lava
Jato [Carwash]), physician Drauzio
Varella, various actors, actresses
and novela authors linked with
Rede Globo (such as Fernanda
Montenegro, Fernanda Torres,
Cláudia Abreu, Paolla Oliveira,
Giovanna Antonelli, Aguinaldo
Silva and Glória Perez), as well
as visual artists and musicians
(including Adriana Varejão and
Fafá de Belém).
6. João Almeida Moreira, op.cit.
January 2, 2018.
The other side of the Atlantic offered, after all, security,
quality of life, a mild climate, a common language and
history, facilities for obtaining a European passport,
and low taxes, compared to the rest of Europe. These
attractions were coupled with a very active real estate
market whose prices still remained lower than those
of other European capitals. Despite having risen 46%
between 2015 and 2017, the square meter of building space
in upscale areas of Lisbon, for example, is currently around
8 thousand euros, while in Paris and London it is around
18 and 27 thousand euros, respectively.4
It is no wonder that, in the growing migratory flow from
Brazil to Portugal, the emigrants’ plans nearly always involve
the acquisition of a property—a house or apartment—for
a personal residence, secondary residence or rental unit.5
The numbers are constantly increasing: between 2014 and
2017, the percentage of Brazilians among the foreigners who
most sought real estate properties in Portugal jumped from
6% to 10%. And since 2012, the number of so‑called “golden
visas” (Portuguese residence visas obtained by acquiring
real estate property worth more than 500,000 euros)
granted to citizens of Brazil jumped from 69 to 282 in just
two years (between 2015 and 2017).6
This phenomenon is part of a long and convoluted
history of architectural, migratory and symbolic flows
between Brazil and Portugal, which includes the violent
cycle of forced migration from Africa instated in the colonial
period, and the hasty move of the Portuguese royal family
to the Brazilian colony in 1807–1808. But the reversal of
the flow that has taken place in the last three or four years
corresponds to a curious coincidence: Brazil has entered
into collapse, while Portugal is giving surprising signs of
renewed growth. The year 2014 is a landmark in this sense: it
simultaneously marks the beginning of Operation Car Wash
in Brazil and the end of the troika period in Portugal. That
is, the beginning of the investigation of corruption schemes
and embezzlement of public funds that triggered the
current crisis in which Brazil finds itself—and, in Portugal,
the reversal of the austerity measures imposed in 2011 by
the triad formed by the European Union, the International
Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank.
WAYS OF LIVING
In September 2016, the Associação dos Profissionais
e Empresas de Mediação Imobiliária de Portugal
[Association of Real estate Mediation Professionals and
Companies of Portugal] released the results of a study
which many considered surprising: Brazilians surpassed
the Chinese as the nationality that was buying the most real
 60

0.40
nível 5.60 - topo cobertura
nível 5.20 - teto cozinha

2.20
0.30 0.20 nível 3.00 - teto sala
nível 2.80 - 1º pav.
5.60

nível 2.50 - teto cozinha

divisa

divisa
5.00
2.50

nível 0.00 - pav. térreo

0.40

nível -0.40 - teto garagem

2.80

2.40

nível -2.80 - pav. inferior

[fig. 1] Sábado magazine cover,

Lisbon, June 1, 2017.
[fig. 2] Sábado magazine cover,
Lisbon, September 15, 2011.
[fig. 3] Condominium at Cascais,
Bernardes Arquitetura, T2+1 house
model (section).
7. Lucas Rohan, “Brasileiros já
compram mais casas em Portugal
do que os chineses,” September
21, 2016, in: br.sputniknews.com/
sociedade/201609216375095-
brasileiros-imoveis-portugal/.
Accessed on January 25, 2018.
8. “Segmento de luxo com
dinâmica consolidada,” in:
Suplemento Imobiliário, Jornal
Público, January 21, 2018, p.3.
9. João Batista Jr., “Paulistas
compram 50% das unidades de
novo condomínio português,”
November 26, 2017, in: vejasp.abril.
com.br/blog/terraco-paulistano/
paulistanois-mudanca-portugal-
valor. Accessed on March 3, 2018.
10. Refer to Porta da Frente
Christie’s, which operates in
the luxury market in the area
of Cascais, Grande Lisboa and
Alentejo, and regularly holds
editions of the event in Rio de
Janeiro and in São Paulo, in
partnership with Brazilian real
estate and law firms. See www.
portadafrente.com. Accessed on
March 3, 2018.
“mediators,” as they prefer to be called—generally mention
11. Ibid.
estate in the country, behind only the French and English.7
Less than two years later, in January 2018, operators of the
luxury market were already announcing that the Brazilians
were their biggest buyers.8 The demand is so great that
some real estate offerings have been launched in cities
in the interior of São Paulo State.9 And in Brazil’s two
largest cities, since 2015 the event Real estate Investment
in Portugal has been held periodically, with support from
the Portuguese Chamber of Commerce and organized
by a Portuguese real estate firm affiliated with the global
network of the famous Christie’s auction house.10 But what
are these Brazilians looking for in terms of architecture?
A garage, 24-hour doorman, half-bath, suite, walk-in
closet, maid’s room, utility area, elevator and leisure area are
systematically demanded by those who do not want to give
up the socio-spatial practices typical of Brazil—even though
many are practically unthinkable in Europe, especially in
the historical centers of cities such as Lisbon or Porto. A
gap is thus revealed between the cultural model of origin
and the local context, which is passed on to the architects:
how to ensure garage spaces in cities where the car is not
prioritized or, at least, is forced to exist within more rigorous
limits than are normal in Brazil? And if the idea of a maid’s
room or utility area—legacies of the slavery introduced by
the Portuguese colonization, is out of keeping with European
culture, where to find equipment like a household laundry
tank, practically indissociable from Brazilian residences but
inexistent on the Portuguese market?
Meanwhile, in the streets of Lisbon, Porto, Coimbra or
Cascais, showcases full of rendered images of the latest
residential releases vie for the most prominent advertizing
spaces on downtown streets. The real estate agents—or
the preference of Brazilians for apartments in centenary
buildings that have been refurbished and delivered
practically finished, with built‑in cupboards and household
appliances. This is the case of The Cordon, an 18th-century
building in the historical area of Chiado, in Lisbon, which
had 42% of its one dozen apartments sold before the
refurbishing work started, 80% of the units were snatched
up by either Portuguese or Brazilian buyers.11 Or that of
Liberdade 203, located on the most elegant avenue in
Lisbon. There, the Brazilians are the majority among those
who have invested in the luxurious project by Portuguese
architect Frederico Valsassina, where the absence of
garage space was solved with a tunnel that leads to the
basement of a contiguous building.
Even so, wealthier owners often introduce alterations
in the designs, aimed at adapting them to their standards
of comfort and ways of life. Some buy two apartments
and hire an architect to unite them, which in some cases
 allows them to have two independent entrances, of which 62
one may eventually serve, even if not admittedly, as a
service entrance.
For those who prefer to invest in new buildings there
are undertakings like Nouveau Lisboa, a luxury residential
building launched in 2016 in Lisbon’s Avenidas Novas
zone, with 21 apartments ranging in size from one to
three bedrooms. This pompous name coupled with the
generalized branding of the renaissance of post-troika
Lisbon lends the project a sense of Brazilian comfort. Here,
“all the bedrooms have their own bathroom (ensuite) and the
social areas have half-baths,” and “all the apartments have
two parking spaces”.12 The larger apartments, with three 12. “Brasileiros investem 10 milhões
suites, also have a “gourmet balcony”. And the common de Euros nas Avenidas Novas,”
in: BPI Expresso, July 23, 2016.
areas include an outdoor pool and spa. The design is by
Brazilian architect Sidney Quintela, based in Salvador.
The general contractor and builder are also Brazilian.
Only 20% of the buyers are Brazilian, however. The rest
are Portuguese. Is this a sign that the Portuguese are
becoming enamored—once again—with typically Brazilian
ways of living? Or will the number of Brazilians wishing to
renew their customs abroad be greater than expected?
An agreement signed in 2013 between the Conselho de
Arquitetura e Urbanismo do Brasil [Council of Architecture
and Urbanism of Brazil] and the Ordem dos Arquitectos
de Portugal [Order of Architects of Portugal], authorizing
Brazilian urbanists and architects to exercise their profession
in Portugal—and vice versa13—opened a decisive door for the 13. “Acordo entre Portugal e Brasil
presence of Brazilian architects in Portuguese lands. And permite que arquitetos trabalhem
nos dois países,” November 26,
there was soon a reversal of the flow configured a few years
2013, in: www.caubr.gov.br/acordo-
before, when young Portuguese became a frequent presence entre-brasil-e-portugal-permite-
in Brazilian architectural schools and firms, and news began que-arquitetos-trabalhem-nos-
spreading of “the fantastic life of the Portuguese who went to dois-paises/. Accessed on August
Brazil” fleeing from the crisis.14 20, 2017.
Sidney Quintela, Thiago Bernardes and Paulo Jacobsen
are among the Brazilian architects who have developed 14. See “A vida fantástica dos
portugueses que foram para o
residential designs in recent years in Portugal. Some were
Brasil,” in: Sábado, September
carried out in partnership with local architects. And if the 15, 2011.
clients are not always Brazilian, the references to Brazil
are frequent. The design by Jacobsen Arquitetura for a
house in Algarve, for example, presents as one of its main
precepts, “applying authentic Brazilian architecture, one
of the client’s passions, in Portuguese lands”.15 In terms of 15. See “Memorial da Residência
image, this was translated into a light and spacious house RMA,” Jacobsen Arquitetura.
Accessed on March 10, 2018.
open to the outside, which incorporates materials and
elements charged with symbolism: large planes of glass, a
visible wooden framework, the extensive use of brise-soleils
and a car in the garage. And it sits on an isolated block that
recalls the pattern of gated condominiums in Brazil—an
aspect which, not by chance, is also found in the design

16. One of the projects is a house
in Lisbon, whose double façade
is marked by a curved outline
that is strange in the context, but
suggests a relationship—conscious
or not—with Alvorada Palace, by
Oscar Niemeyer, in Brasilia.
17. See Tabner de Moraes (1873),
cited in José Carlos Loureiro,
Paula Torres Peixoto and Patrícia
Mota Santos, Conhecer para
preservar: Casas de Brasileiro.
Porto: Afrontamento, 2017, p.174.
18. Interview with architect
Domingos Tavares by the author,
on February 2, 2018, in Porto.
19. See Jorge F. Alves (1994), cited
in José Carlos Loureiro et al. op.
cit., p.174.
20. See the profile of the failed
emigrant, translated literally in
the character Manuel da Bouça,
by Ferreira de Castro, himself a
Portuguese emigrant to Brazil,
who returned disillusioned
to Portugal after living in dire
conditions on a rubber tree
plantation in the Amazon forest.
Ferreira de Castro, Emigrantes.
Lisboa: Guimaraes, 1935.
by Bernardes Arquitetura for a condominium aimed at the
Brazilian financial elite in Cascais.
At least up to now, this production has taken place on
the fringe of the most prestigious circuits of contemporary
Portuguese architecture, at least in what concerns residential
projects. Apart from two projects now underway by the Aires
Mateus firm (for Brazilian clients)16 and one by Casa Quelhas
(Lisbon, 2010–7), resulting from a collaboration between
Paulo Mendes da Rocha and Inês Lobo (for a non-Brazilian
client), there is no news of such designs involving the
architects who have put Portuguese architectural production
into the international limelight today. But there are also
various Brazilian architects acting in the area of interiors,
such as Chicô Gouvea and Andrea Chicaro. And some
Brazilian builders, such as Osborne and Alcon.
BRAZILIANS AND “BRAZILIANS”
As surprising as it may be, the current phenomenon
is to a certain extent comparable to another one that
took place in the second half of the 19th century and was
architecturally translated into the so-called “houses of
Brazilians”. In this case, the term “Brazilian” did not mean
natives of Brazil, but rather the torna-viagem [“travel
returnees”], Portuguese immigrants who, around the end
of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th made a
fortune in the former colony, nearly always as merchants or
businessmen, and then returned to their country of origin
where they built or remodeled houses for the temporary
or permanent lodging of their families, seeking to express
their social and economic ascension. They were, therefore,
individuals known by a sort of double image: in Brazil
they were called Portuguese, and in Portugal, Brazilians.17
According to Domingos Tavares,18 these emigrants were
predominantly young males, under 18 years old and with
little schooling, who left rural areas and emigrated alone,
driven by the promise of social ascension and their desire
to escape from military service. Most of them began their
life in Brazil in unskilled positions.
Most of those who returned spent little time in Brazil—
around a decade, if that long.19 And although the number
who returned to their native land without a fortune is
probably much higher than those who became wealthy,20
they were pegged in the popular mindset as nouveau riche,
a stereotype fueled by writers such as Camilo Castelo
Branco, Julio Dinis and Ramalho Ortigão. This “Brazilian”
was ridiculed in political cartoons and literary narratives
as a badly dressed, fat, ambitious lout with very poor
taste, who sought to compensate for his background by
publicly displaying honorific titles such as the order of
 64

[fig. 4] ”Brazilian house” at Avanca.

Photo: Álvaro Domingues.
[fig. 5] ”Brazilian house” at
Póvoa de Lanhoso. Photo:
Álvaro Domingues.

21. The probably most notorious—
and scandalous—case is that of
Joaquim Ferreira dos Santos (Porto,
1782–1866), Count Ferreira. The son
of farm workers, he emigrated to
Brazil around 1800, made a fortune
in businesses that included slave
trading, returned to his native land,
and is celebrated until today for his
philanthropic works in Brazil and
Portugal, including the founding of
hospitals, churches and 800 public
schools in the North and South
of Portugal. See Jorge Fernando
Alves, “Percursos de um brasileiro
do Porto: o Conde de Ferreira,” in:
Revista da Faculdade de Letras:
História, II série, vol. 9, 1992,
pp.199–214.
22. Camilo Castelo Branco, Eusébio
Macário. Porto: Livraria Chardron,
n. d., pp.37–38.
23. Ibid., p.53.
24. Fundamentally in Minho, in
Douro-Litoral and in Beiras and
in the north of Mondego/Serra
da Estrela, regions where the
emigration to Brazil was most
intense and where there is the
greatest number of “houses of
Brazilians.” José Carlos Loureiro,
op. cit.
25. Cited in José Carlos Loureiro et
al., op. cit, p.179.
26. In an interview with the author on
February 4, 2018, architect Álvaro
Siza said that he had been born in
the group of houses called Sete
Casas [Seven Houses], on Rua
Brito Capelo, in Matosinhos – a
group that still exists and which
was built, according to him, by a
“Brazilian” in the early 20th century
as rental property.
27. Domingos Tavares, Casas de
brasileiro. Porto: Dafne, 2015.
commander, and constructing, besides his own house,
buildings with important civic and representative functions
such as hospitals, schools, churches, theaters and even
factories. Whether for charity, vanity or to cover a past of
activities that were not always noble or licit in Brazil,21 the
architecture produced on the philanthropic initiative of
these “Brazilians” was part of the process of legitimating
their social ascension and symbolically signifying their
return, whilst opening possibilities for transformations in
the surrounding urban spaces.
Concerning this social type, Camilo Castelo Branco
wrote: “there are so many Brazilians around… This year,
in Vizela, they were as numerous as the plague, they
went barefoot, in white trousers, with gold chains full of
things, very fat, some real big shots”.22 The same author
describes the typical house of this emigrant as “a mansion
of ceramic tiles the color of egg yolk, with a terrace on
the roof for four statues symbolizing the seasons of the
year, and, down below, two bronze dogs, atop each side of
the iron gate with a cast metal coat-of-arms and arrogant
prominences, between the two mastiffs with their razor-
sharp teeth, menacing, like all the animals of heraldry”.23
For as much as these narratives configured a stereotype
that was already being combated at that time by writers such
as Eça de Queiroz and Luís de Magalhães, they contributed
to the visibility of an architecture reassessed today as
heritage. An architecture that arises in areas of peripheral
urbanity located above all in the north of Portugal.24 In Porto,
so many of these houses were built that Magalhães Godinho
referred to a “Brazilian district” as one of the three zones
making up that city, in 1868.25 And we also find them in the
childhood memories of architect Álvaro Siza, born in a set of
houses built by a “Brazilian” in Matosinhos.26
In their extreme variety, these houses point to an
eclecticism seasoned by elements considered exotic
which, also according to Domingos Tavares, constitutes
a variant little explored by European architectural
romanticism.27 It is moreover a variant which that author
considers modern, for involving innovations in relation
to the standards then prevailing in Portugal. In general,
the distinctive features of this architecture—which in
Brazil would easily fall into the most generic category of
eclecticism—are considered broad façades with many
openings, a volumetry intercut into various parts, the use
of vibrant colors and, often, ceramic tiles on the façades,
coupled with verandas, imposing staircases leading up to
the entrance door, balconies, iron gates and grills, a great
variety of decorative elements and materials (earthenware
vases and statuettes, faience borders, stained-glass
windows), skylights, widow’s walks and turrets. And a
leafy garden with arbors, ponds and artificial caves, palm
trees and other tropical species. Their interiors left no 66
room for empty space: the richly ornamented furniture
was generally complemented by stuccoed ceilings, crystal
chandeliers, embroideries and glass with the owner’s coat
28. José Carlos Loureiro et al.,
of arms, as well as walls lined with velvet fabrics or covered op. cit.
with ornamental paintings.
In terms of their implantation, these houses tend 29. Miguel Monteiro,
to stand out from their surroundings, almost always “Representações materiais do
located on elevations or along roadsides.28 Their interior ‘brasileiro’ e construção simbólica
do retorno,” in: Neide Marcondes e
layouts were characterized by divisions and spatial Manoel Belloto (eds.), Turbulência
arrangements that introduced “a ‘Brazilian’ way of life in cultural em cenários de transição.
a bourgeois house”29—including larger rooms than those O século XIX ibero-americano.
of the urban residential houses that preceded them in São Paulo: Edusp, 2005, p.176.
Portugal.30 In regard to these, the “houses of Brazilians”
30. I am referring to the vertical urban
were distinguished also by a spatial distribution that houses, which in a certain way lend
revealed the hierarchical structures of the Brazilian social continuity to the urban houses of
context—like the frequent location of the service facilities medieval times with commerce on
and lodging for slaves on the lower levels, sometimes half the ground floor and living quarters
underground, problematizing the idea of the modernity on the upper levels, their interiors
divided into alcoves, and with narrow
associated with these houses. façades and few openings, aligned
If we observe the urban houses constructed by with the street and contiguous with
Portuguese in the same period in Brazil, we will find a the neighboring buildings. See
continuous process of influences and intercrossings, in Miguel Monteiro, op. cit.
which it is difficult to identify a point of origin.31 Even
31. Compare, for example, the
the ceramic tiles used in so many façades of “houses of “house of the Brazilian” built
Brazilians” were reintroduced in Portugal by their owners alongside the national highway
after having been brought to Brazil by the Portuguese in Avanca and the manor house
and adapted there to the covering of the façades, back in of Chácara do Viegas (1860-1), in
Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro. Or the
the 18th century.32 But the interesting consideration here
castle of D. Xica (1915), in Braga, and
is how much the architecture of the “Brazilians” conveys the Castelinho Valentim (1879), also
the Portuguese mindset about Brazil at a time when the in Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro.
economic depression in Portugal was combined with the
perspective of development and progress represented 32. See: Santos Simões, cited in
José Carlos Loureiro et al., op. cit.,
by the former colony, leading to a transatlantic migratory pp.183–4.
movement that was intensified after the abolition of slavery
(1888) and which reached its apex in the years leading up to 33. “All single people, between 18 and
World War I. In that period, the campaign was so intense that 45 years of age, who wish to go for
in 1890 an advertisement in the newspaper of Cantanhede, free to Brazil will be furnished with
fares on any of the steamboats of
a city in the district of Coimbra, announced free passage to the Mala Real Portugueza, Mala
Brazil “to all single people between the ages of 18 and 45”.33 Real Ingleza, and the Pacifico
But if the architecture of the “Brazilians” marked the company lines. They will prepare
cityscape of places like Porto with signs of modernity, documents to obtain passports,
what marks on the urban architecture have been made also for free. They will grant any
amount necessary to offset the 6%
in recent years, or will be made, by real Brazilians? interest. The agent in this district
What transformations are already visible, and what can is Francisco Gonçalves Salvador,
be expected from the transposition now underway, to from Oliveiros, parish of Cadima.
Portugal, in regard to the typical habits and ways of life of Those who want passage should
the Brazilian elite? contact the announcer, or the
announcer’s agent in Cantanhede
It is too early to reach any conclusions. But if this – the consultant José Fernandes
architecture bears relation to a new migratory cycle, we Monteiro. (Jornal de Cantanhede,
must also consider the already existing or future impacts n. 69, October 11, 1890, p.4).

34. “Ligação China-Portugal é
a nova rota aérea da seda do
século XXI,” in: observador.
pt/2017/07/26/ligacao-china-
portugal-e-a-nova-rota-aerea-da-
seda-do-seculo-xxi/. Accessed on
14/01/2017.
35. The controversy around the
railroad project mostly involved
its social environmental impact,
since it would cross indigenous
territories and preservation areas
in the Amazon forest. See Gerardo
Lissardy, “A polêmica ferrovia
que a China quer construir na
América do Sul,” May 19, 2015,
in: www.bbc.com/portuguese/
noticias/2015/05/150518_ferrovia_
transoceanica_construcao_lgb.
Accessed on January 14, 2018.
additional references
–– Domingues, Álvaro, A rua da
estrada. Porto: Dafne, 2009.
–– Figueira, Jorge, Arquitectanic. Os
dias da Troika. Lisbon: Note, 2016.
–– Leite, Carolina; Villanova,
Roselyne de and Raposo, Isabel,
Casas de sonhos: emigrantes
construtores no norte de Portugal.
Lisbon: Salamandra, 1995.
–– Monteiro, Miguel,
“Representações materiais
do ‘brasileiro’ e construção
simbólica do retorno,” in: Neide
Marcondes e Manoel Belloto
(eds.), Turbulência cultural em
cenários de transição. O século
XIX ibero-americano. São Paulo:
Edusp, 2005, pp.165-189.
–– Peixoto, Paula Torres, Palacetes
de brasileiros no Porto (1850–
1930). Do estereótipo à realidade.
Porto: Afrontamento, 2013.
–– Tavares, Domingos. Palacete
Marques Gomes. Porto:
Dafne, 2015.
–– Tavares, Domingos. Casas de
Brasileiro. Porto: Dafne, 2015.
of the flows that have arisen due to the increasingly
globalized commerce, within which Brazil and Portugal
assume strategic positions, as does also China. It is not
surprising, in any case, that one of the stockholders of the
international airport of Rio de Janeiro is the same Chinese
group (HNA) that in recent years also became a stockholder
of two of the largest airline companies of Portugal and
Brazil (TAP and Azul). The recent and simultaneous
investments by China in the airport sector of the two
countries indicates that a path is being constructed
between Asia and South America via Europe, a sort of
new silk route, now aerial and transoceanic.34 In this sense,
the geographic position of Portugal—and its historical
relation with China, via Macau, a Portuguese colony for
more than four centuries—must be considered. Especially
since this opens an alternative to the controversial
transcontinental railway connection proposed in 2015 in an
agreement between Brazil, China and Peru, which would
link the Atlantic and Pacific oceans with a line stretching
from Porto do Açu, in Rio de Janeiro, to the Peruvian
coast, crossing through the Amazon forest and the Andes
Mountains.35 But this will be another cartography, of
architectural flows that are still undreamt of.
Ana Luiza Nobre (Rio de
Janeiro, 1964) is an architect
and architecture critic and
historian. She is a professor at
the Department of Architecture
and Urbanism of the Pontifícia
Universidade Católica do
Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio),
where she coordinates
Là – Laboratório de Análises
Arquitetônicas [Laboratory of
Architectural Analysis].
2
Human flows:
the dilution of
barriers through
cultural assimilation
How open is Brazil
to the reception
of immigrants?
“Human Flows” approaches the theme Walls
of Air through a socio-spatial analysis of the
Brazilian territory in order to measure how
open towards immigrants Brazil has been
in the last century, and how viable is the
dissolution of social, cultural, and political
barriers inherent to the movement of people.
Brazilian culture has historically been
marked by the miscegenation of foreigners
and locals. From the country’s foundation
to the development of its international
policy, political opening accelerated the
inevitable urbanization of the territory and the
convolution of external and internal dynamics.
In contemporary Brazil, the concept of the
urban immigrant is increasingly present in the
quotidian of cities due to the rapid domestic
migratory movement. New tendencies for
such movement have arisen as a response to
economic recessions and social crisis that
the country underwent in the last 20 years,
resulting in an unprecedented flow of people
both between metropolises and between rural
and urban areas.
“Human Flows” traces the routes of millions
of humans in order to question the structures
that produced waves of immigration among
countries and states, as well as the events
that caused them. This approach aims at
visualizing and understanding the scale of
these waves of displacement that make ever
more complex the composition of the social
and urban panoramas of Brazil.
The many origin myths of the Brazilian
people almost invariably tell the story of the
miscegenation of three so-called “racial
matrixes”—the approximately three million
indigenous native people that inhabited the
country before 1500, the European colonizer
that settled in the land in the 16th century,
and the African population forced into the
country through slave trade thereafter. And
while admitting a fourth group encompassing
other nationalities present in the processes of
early formation of the country, these tales do
not encompass the country’s five centuries
of immigration history. Today, although legal
immigrants make up less than one percent of
the Brazilian population, these groups point at
important cultural ties, historical events, and
technological possibilities surrounding the
consolidation of Brazil but also of the global
landscape as we know it.
The intimate relationship between
the intensified exchange of goods in the
mercantilist era and the establishment of the
modern nation-state is further expressed in
the influx of nationalities such as Spanish,
Italian, Japanese, French, and Dutch in the
first couple of centuries after the arrival of the
Portuguese in Brazil. Shortly after the crisis of
succession in Portugal and the consequent
formation of the Iberian Union in 1580, the
then Portuguese possessions in South
America were violently contested by the
Netherlands and France. Both nations sought
to rival the Iberian power in trading sugar and
African slaves. During the 17th century, about
twenty thousand Dutch immigrants lived in
northeast Brazil.
From the 18th to the 20th century, as later
stages of capital exchange developed
alongside communication technologies,
war conflicts, and systemic economic crisis,
Brazil remained attractive to immigrants from
European countries suffering from economic
recessions and shortage of employment, such
as Germany after its unification in 1870. In
fact, the country actively sought the presence
of Europeans to serve as cheap farm labor as
well as to “whiten” the sizable population of
African slaves - especially after 1888, when
the Golden Law (Lei Áurea) abolished slave
work and granted their civil freedom. The
national government’s immigration policy
financed immigrants’ transportation costs,
and its the expenditure almost doubled
from 1867 to 1872. During this period, most
immigrants arriving to the country were Italian
and Japanese - the latter arriving after the
Italian government reacted to the precarious
conditions of life reported by Italians in Brazil
with a 1902 decree that prohibited subsidized
immigration to the country.
Today, immigration to Brazil follows
patterns of displacement motivated by similar
issues than those of a century ago. Leaving
their native countries for reasons related
to wars, persecution, or simply dreams
and hopes of a better life, millions of men
and women wish—consciously or not—to
be a part of the country. It is worth noting
that, increasingly, the influx of immigrants
originates in the American continent itself,
and that new trends of movement have arisen
as a response to economic and social crisis
the country underwent in the last 20 years.
This condition triggered an unprecedented
flow of people between metropolises but also
between rural and urban areas.
These new narratives of immigration
are the main subject of this section, which
aims to visualize and understand the scale
of these waves of displacement that make
ever more complex the composition of the
social and urban panoramas of Brazil. This
way, it exposes the immigrant as a force that
successfully challenges the walls represented
by traditionally defined geographic limits.
Yet, it also shows barriers further imposed
to the free circulation of people, narrated
by immigrant groups as an antagonistic
attitude expressed in frustrated expectations,
prejudice, language adjustments, and overly
bureaucratic processes.
While a spatial and historical consideration
of immigration demonstrates the impact of the
flow of people in and out of Brazil in the social,
economic, and political panorama of the
country, the hardships narrated by immigrant
groups—which we had contact through a
workshop organized by the Caffé sisters,
reveals the human scale of these trajectories.
Carla and Eliane Caffé, filmmakers present
evidences of systemic segregation as
witnessed during the production of their
film Era o Hotel Cambridge (The Cambridge
Squatter). The title references the name of an
abandoned hotel in the center of São Paulo
where more than 150 homeless and refugee
families live. The directors reveal the presence
of the physical body as the ultimate space
in which segregation occurs, reinforcing the
multiplicity of scales in which immigration
can be read as a political act. That is to say
that many of these bodies, although having
successfully crossed geographic borders, still
live at the margin of a society that estranges
them with other walls.
While the work of Carla and Eliane Caffe
documents and speculates on a marginal
space where this dynamics of power takes
place, Ana C. Tonetti and Ligia Nobre,
reference Felicity Scott’s work—Outlaw
Territories: Environments of Insecurity/
Architectures of Counter-Insurgency—to
describe near-slave labor conditions in
which population from rural areas end up
finding themselves when moving to urban
concentrations. Finally, as these groups of
“others” continue to search for opportunities
and find space within the margins of Brazilian
society, the walls they have breached start
to compose a new landscape in the country.
As shown in the photographs of Rivane
Neuenschwander, sites like the old Cambridge
Hotel—and others, in their reference to
geographical locations outside the political
borders of Brazil—depict how immigrants and
the global economy has an impact in local
Brazilian society. In the end, even in the most
simple towns, one finds the desire to belong to
a global culture.
THE MAP
In order to map recent trends in the movement
of people in the Brazilian territory, the map
summarizes migratory flows of over a million
people during the period between 2000
and 2016. Dividing them in incoming flux
of refugees, incoming flux of international
immigrants, and domestic migration flows,
the graphics indicate the direction and
intensity of this movement. Additionally, the
timeline accompanying the map allows the
visualization of the total absolute number
of people immigrating, according to their
country of origin. In this same section, the
increase or decrease in the flows is also
visible, represented in a yearly basis.
Finally, after a workshop specifically
organized to construct this map, with the help
of Eliane and Carla Caffé, the journeys of 23
individuals and their families are narrated,
delineating the path they travelled from their
home to São Paulo. Some of them migrated
for work opportunity, others immigrated or
sought asylum looking to improve their life
conditions. Their paths are enumerated, and
joined with their personal stories describing
feelings and obstacles while crossing different
kinds of borders until their arrival in Brazil.
Rivane Neuenschwander
Mapa-Múndi BR (Postal)
[World‑Map BR (Postal)], 2007
Postcards and wood shelves
interview: 84
Carla Caffé
Eliane Caffé

Eliane Caffé earned her degree in

psychology from PUC-SP in 1988.
She studied cinema in Cuba and
the aesthetics of art in Spain. As
director and screenwriter, her first
feature film, Kenoma (1997), was
shown at the 56th Venice Biennale.

Carla Caffé earned her degree in

architecture from FAU-USP at the
start of the 1990s. She works in the
fields of art and design direction.
She is a professor at the school
of architecture and urbanism at
Escola da Cidade and teaches
workshops at Sesc Pompeia.
Walls

What appear to be the main barriers that

immigrants encounter in their struggle
for access to housing?
Carla Caffé: Housing involves closely
held customs. This cultural shock comes
in the form of simple things. Something
common for a Brazilian family, such as
children sleeping in their parent’s bedroom,
is unthinkable for the Congolese. These
differences appear in a very violent way in
a universe of conflict zones.
Eliane Caffé: When you experience the
problem, you can see how far we are from
being able to articulate in a discussion
what we face today. It is really harsh and
intense. We really do not understand. They
carefully select what they tell us. We don’t
know where the line is of what is permitted
to talk about, we do not understand their
cultural codes.

Evidence

What physical evidence of this segregation

is revealed by the occupations and
movements for housing?
CC: Physical presence.
EC: The level of disease that exists in these
bodies and the enormous suffering. It’s an
open wound. These are vulnerable people
and, in their desperation, they get involved
with drug trafficking.
CC: When we speak about refugees, we
think in the abstract. These are very
different worlds and there is an enormous
segregation between them, as well as
among us. The world of refugees is a
diverse one, but we lump them all into a
single category.
EC: Perhaps this is one of the bricks that
build this wall. When a wall is finally torn
down, we see that there is another behind
it. Our system is reaching a very high level
of cruelty; everything revolves around
capital and forms of exploitation. The word
is no longer “exploit” but rather expropriate.
Exploitation occurs on every level: social
networks, biennials, festivals, universities.
What does it mean to continue repeating it?
The consequence is enriching a few while
leaving many in abject poverty. Behind
the wars that resulted in these searches
for refuge, there are human beings that
coordinate them. If we believe that war is
part of human nature, we become used to
the building of walls.
CC: Walls are these bubbles in which we
live. With social networks we are becoming
more inward-looking, discussing issues
only amongst our own groups. We forget
the presence of the body. It is the body
that leaves the comfort zone; we are able
to perceive others only when we pass over
these walls.
We’ve changed a lot since June 2013,
when we learned what is a corporeal
presence in a public space and the
political force that it has. We can see the
importance of this through Carnival, when
we rid ourselves of all borders, exposing
ourselves in a way that does not happen
the rest of the year.
Experience in the discipline
How is the subjectivity of the immigrant
and low-income population—the social
categories most impacted by difficulties
in accessing housing—affected during
this process of struggle? What type of
collective body arises from this meeting
of a context of vulnerability and struggle
for a common roof?
EC: We perceive a clear change in this
subjectivity, above all with Africans, and in
their understanding of what is a collective
activity. In many of their vocabularies there
is no record of the term “social movement.”
There is no reference to unite people to
fight for their rights. We perceive this
difficulty when doing grassroots work with
the immigrants there in the occupation.
Gathered in a big circle for a talk, no one
speaks; but when it’s done, we see parallel
communications emerge. We perceive that
they are afraid to express themselves and
they don’t believe that we can resolve things
collectively that we are not able to individually.
CC: These are people who live in conflict
zones and are stripped of their right to
housing. During the film we use play to
help get beyond the language barrier. It
was through games that the collective
could get along.
EC: An example of this is that children
from different nationalities find no
difficulty playing together.
Behavior and micro-politics
What experience in crossing divides
did you gain from contact with the
movements struggling for housing?
What role can cinema and docufiction
play in this discussion?
CC: The film Era o Hotel Cambridge was
able to create an understanding between
various nationalities, among six languages.
The relationship between architecture and
cinema was interesting and very fertile.
It was decided that the scenography for
the film would be used to improve the
building’s facilities. The setting of an
Internet café, for example, was transformed
into the library of the Cambridge.
EC: Since the script required the building
of film sets, Carla’s idea was to take
advantage of the opportunity to transform
the place according to their needs. At this
moment the powerful counterpart begins
and through it we were able to access that
territory. At the same time we were asking for
something, we were also offering something.
A kind of reciprocity and affection developed
between the parties, who recognized that
they needed each other for that to happen.
When we are present, our tools are our
senses. We read about a subject, but when
we deal with it in person we capture other
levels of the problem. Physical presence
is indispensable.
CC: In the first calls to form a collective
for the film, no adults came, only children.
They were the ones who brought the adults,
little by little, to the theater workshops. I
would never have thought of, considered
or imagined this work method. It was the
result of being present.
EC: Children take the subject matter into
the home and the family opens up to us.
This is one of the methods that emerged.
Transformative potential
What type of power and new uses for
urban space can you see emerging
from the relationship between
Brazilian cultural diversity and
contemporary immigrants?
EC: There is no public policy to assimilate
these immigrants into society. They tend
to isolate themselves in ghettos with
those with similar backgrounds. This
creates a closed system of codes that
drives prejudice. The housing movements
are perhaps a way of facing this problem
head-on, but we are far from resolving it.
It is impossible to do anything effective
if we don’t change the way we organize
ourselves in the Western world. As long
as we are marked by the hegemonic
presence of capital, of the marketplace,
which permeate everything, it will not be
possible. A concrete example is that, in
just a few days, newly arrived migrants
become slaves of the factories in the
neighborhood of Bom Retiro. They are
hired by construction companies to lay
marble but they are not paid. The vast
majority are being enslaved. And they
can’t fight for their rights because they
have no documents, just a protocol slip.
They can’t call the police. If they try to
escape this system, they are automatically
co-opted by drug traffickers. We will
not be able to implement a policy of
assimilation while there is still hunger.
As long as this system exists, everything
we discuss—through films, architecture
biennials, books and other ways—in order
to make a better world, will be an exercise
in futility.
CC: A refugee is already the result of an
exploitative relationship. This idea that
Brazilians are generous and open to
new cultures is not true. Miscegenation,
which is the imprint of our society, is
bigoted and dangerous.
EC: The system protects itself by creating
masks that make us accept circumstances
as something normal. Everyone criticizes
the government, but no one talks about
the companies. Those of us who put on
festivals and biennials are born into this
context and are unable to see that it is a
system that exploits and profits. We’re not
talking just about Brazil: In 2017, 82% of
global generated wealth went to the richest
1% of the world population.
With an experimental narrative
that moves back and forth
between reality and fiction,
the films by the director and
screenwriter Eliane Caffé explore
“real conflict zones,” both in
the context of rural Brazil and
large urban centers. Artist
and art director Carla Caffé
conducts research on design,
cartography and mapping as
ways of representing the urban
landscape.
A partnership between the
sisters culminated in the film Era o
Hotel Cambridge [The Cambridge
Squatter] (2016), whose backdrop
was a building occupied by the
Frente de Luta por Moradia
[Struggle for Housing Front
(FML)] from São Paulo. The film
was directed by Eliane Caffé and
featured the building’s inhabitants,
who acted and blended in
seamlessly with professional
actors. Art direction was provided
by Carla Caffé, in partnership with
a group of students from Escola
da Cidade.
A reflection on
the 9 de Julho
Occupation,
in São Paulo
One of the layers of the map featured in this
chapter retraces the steps taken by families
that have recently come from other states
and countries and settled in São Paulo. To
create it, a collective mapping event was
organized in partnership with the homeless
group Movimento Sem Teto do Centro,
which fights for access to housing in São
Paulo. The work was organized around
a lunch at the 9 de Julho Occupation,1
in January 2018. The meeting brought
together more than a hundred people,
including organizers, guests, cooks and
other stakeholders, with participation from
23 families of migrants, immigrants and
refugees—some of them residents in this
occupied building.
Their 23 stories intersect in the city of
São Paulo, but they are different in many
ways. We got to know these families that
hail not only from other regions of Brazil but
also from the Congo, Angola, Ghana, Peru,
Paraguay, Venezuela and Haiti. In addition to
access to housing, they mentioned financial
difficulties, the search for work, inadequate
public services—such as transportation
and healthcare—the Portuguese language,
inflexibility of the bureaucracy, illegal
status, racism, isolation and fear of death
as some of the main problems faced in this
metropolis of 20 million people.
The journeys of these families also show
the tangible and intangible borders that
mark our territories, whether they be in the
88
air, land or water. One of the families made
the journey between Bahia and São Paulo
six times—an example of the intense flows
of people today. Their many stories evoke
strong emotions and point to some of the
challenges in observing human rights
in Brazil.
In addition to the adversities experienced
by these families, it is evident, in our opinion,
that dialogue and contact can help to build
new ways forward. Predatory mining in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo also
affects the building of experiential meaning
in the city of São Paulo. These points
of discourse need to be developed and
understood, since they can illuminate new
paths for contemporary cities.
1. Former headquarters for the
Instituto Nacional de Seguro Social
(INSS) in the center of São Paulo,
occupied since 2016 by movements
that demand housing and refugees,
migrants and immigrants.
 Metropolitana de Belém

Norte maranhense

Metropolitana de Fortaleza

Leste potiguar

Mata paraibana

Metropolitana de Recife

Leste alagoano

Leste sergipano

Metropolitana de Salvador

Central espírito-santense

Metropolitana do Rio de Janeiro

Metropolitana de São Paulo

Metropolitana de Curitiba

Grande Florianópolis

Metropolitana de Porto Alegre

This map was developed and designed in collaboration with

Mapping-lab (www.mappinglab.me) for this catalogue to highlight a
layer of the main exhibition map Human Flows.
Migration flows for work and
study by mesoregion
Total population
Migration: to different City
Migration: to different State
Roads/Railways
Ports/Airports
Counter- Ana 92
conducts: Carolina
politics of Tonetti
architecture and and Ligia
contemporary Nobre
slavery

MIGRATION, OUTSOURCING,
AND CONTEMPORARY SLAVE LABOR

June 2013 has been remembered as a turning point in

Brazil, standing between the period of optimism and
consolidation of democracy and its reflux. After the
protests in São Paulo (initially against a R$0.20 cent
increase in bus fare) began to take to the streets of several
Brazilian cities, with an expansion and diffusion of their
demands—poor public services, corruption, and police
violence, among many others—the signs of exhaustion of
this last cycle of Brazilian economic growth came to light, 1. Guarulhos Airport was privatized
exposing all of its contradictions. in 2012 with a twenty-year lease
At the same moment, in the city of Petrolândia, in to the GRUPar consortium,
Pernambuco, cars with loudspeakers drove around the receiving a new name and brand,
city offering work opportunities in São Paulo. Those GRU Airport—as a sign of the
“modernization” of Brazilian
interested would have to pay a fee to cover travel expenses, infrastructure and part of a
having as a guarantee a job placement when they reached larger international insertion
their destination: the construction site of Terminal 3 at strategy. The NEC.USP, a research
Guarulhos International Airport. group based at the Instituto de
Guarulhos International Airport—or GRU Airport, as Arquitetura e Urbanismo of USP
São Carlos, shows us via diagrams
it was rebranded due to its privatization and leasing to the new stock configuration
the GRUpar1 consortium—serves the country’s largest between the State (Infraero),
metropolitan region with 21 million inhabitants. The private Brazilian companies
construction work of Terminal 3, under the responsibility of (INVEPAR, which includes OAS)
the OAS building contractor, was one of many great works and a South African company, as
well as Brazilian workers’ pension
which, at that time, was part of the Regime Diferenciado de funds (PREVI, FUNCEF, PETROS).
Contratação [Special Contracts Regime], an exception law These project diagrams clearly
to ease bidding processes and the hiring of contractors, show the systemic relationship
expanding the already delicate dynamics of convergence between contractors and the
between the State and private companies. State. They are basically the same
actors in both situations. David
Upon arriving at the large construction site, workers Sperling and Fábio Lopes (eds.),
from Pernambuco joined other workers from various GRU-111. Contracartografias. São
parts of the country. As Tomás Chiaverini puts it in his Carlos: IAU/USP, 2017, pp.139-145.

2. Tomás Chiaverini, “Cimento,
lama e poder: um breve panorama
da construção civil no país da
Lava Jato”, in Ana Carolina
Tonetti, Ligia V.Nobre, Gilberto
Mariotti and Joana Barossi
(eds.), Contracondutas: Ação
político-pedagógica. São Paulo:
Editora da Cidade, 2017, pp.533-
524. The three books used as
bibliography for the preparation
of this text were published by
the Projeto Contracondutas
and are distributed free of
charge and can be accessed at:
www.ct-escoladacidade.org/
contracondutas/publicacoes/
3. Sabrina Duran, Contracondutas:
Por trás do tapume. São Paulo:
Editora da Cidade, 2017, p.99.
4. Anália Maria M. de Carvalho
Amorim, “Sobre o ato de projetar
e construir”, in Tonetti, Nobre,
Mariotti, Barossi (eds.), op. cit.,
p.272.
5. TAC is a repressive legal
instrument, whereby the sued
company undertakes promptly to
comply with the laws and reimburse
those involved. In some cases,
as with the Ministério Público do
Trabalho, a fine is applied that is
reverted to Fundos de Amparo ao
Trabalhador [Workers’ Aid Funds]
and institutions that can develop
projects related to the eradication
of work analogous to slavery.
journalistic investigation “Cimento, lama e poder: Um
breve panorama da construção civil no país da Lava
Jato” [Cement, Mud and Power: A Brief Overview of Civil
Construction in the Country of Lava Jato], these workers
underwent an admissions medical examination and were
instructed to wait for the company to get in touch. After a
few days, only part of the group was hired and there was
no forecast for new hires:
Thirty-eight men would have to live in a property with
three bedrooms and only one bathroom. There were
no furniture, beds, or mattresses […] Every two days
there was no water […] There was little or nothing
to eat […] As there was no work and no salary, many
asked for food in the neighborhood or got into debt.2
Brought to the state of São Paulo by enticers to serve
outsourced companies, a common phenomenon in
construction, these itinerant workers enlarge the reserve
armies and cause a reduction in negotiated wages. At a
site like Terminal 3, they are employed to carry out smaller
services, such as the loading of cement bags and rubble.
Such a building site, focused on productivity and profit,
does not contribute to the formation of the workforce,
does not care about its working or health conditions, and
does not consider that a constructive matrix could be
devised that takes the human being and its activity as a
guiding element of the project.
According to the journalist Sabrina Duran, outsourcing,
which makes oversight and the attribution of responsibilities
difficult, pulverizes hirings that are already based on low
sums negotiated between principal and subcontracted
contractors, in a chain effect that makes it impossible to
comply with legal obligations and allows for abuses and
violations.3 Still, “about eight million Brazilians, or about
ten percent of Brazil’s labor force, are civil construction
workers. Most are functional illiterates, and much of this
large contingent ‘sails’ through the national territory in
search of work.”4
The Ministério Público do Trabalho [Public Prosecutor’s
Office for Labor] rescued one hundred and eleven
workers during an inspection in Guarulhos. This flagrant
operation, which involved the Guarulhos construction
workers’ union—barred from entering the construction
site at Terminal 3—and complaints arising from the
misunderstanding between enticers serving different
subcontractors, triggered one of the largest judicial
agreements concerning slave labor in Brazilian history,
a Termo de Ajuste de Conduta [Term of Adjustment
of Conduct] (TAC) 5 in which the construction company
OAS agreed to review its conduct and pay a fine for
 compensation. This action is also the result of serious work 94
done in Brazil since 1995, when the federal government
recognized the existence of slave labor in the country.
According to public data, 47 thousand people have already
been rescued from slavery in Brazil by actions of NGOs,
civil society entities, and especially the Ministério do
Trabalho e Emprego [Ministry of Labor and Employment],
which works hard, although with few enforcement agents.
The conditions analogous to slavery presented in this
case are not an exception, but a recurrent situation on
the global scale of the contemporary civil construction
industry. In Brazil, these degrading labor conditions
also reverberate the continuity of slavery, insofar as the
majority of the Brazilian population remains excluded
from social and political rights, as the historian Rodrigo
Bonciani points out. Slavery is a form of exploitation that
occurred and still occurs through internal or “out” of the
country displacement—either forced or by grooming—,
resulting in desocialization and depersonalization. In the
system of social relations in Brazil, Bonciani says that
the abyss remains deep between the practice of “kinship,
clientele, and slave relations” and the norm of “the fiction
of the Rule of Law—the foundation of national sovereignty—
accessible according to the socio-racial place occupied by
the individual or group”,6 and the State’s commitment to 6. Rodrigo Bonciani, “Escravidão,
private interests, turn out to be systemic. tráfico de pessoas e trabalho
forçado: costumes e direitos na
Another historical factor that pervades this question
história”, in Tonetti, Nobre, Mariotti,
is the atavistic convergence between State and private Barossi (eds.), op. cit., p.113.
enterprise, structural in the Brazilian urban development
that consolidated with the country’s large-scale public
works of infrastructure, starting with the construction of
Brasilia, between the 1950s and 1970s. This developmentalist
bias, which informs and reverberates in the current situation,
also includes works such as the Rio-Niterói Bridge (RJ),
the Transamazônica (AM), the Jupiá (MS) and Itaipu (PR)
hydroelectric plants, among many others that marked
these decades, as an impetus for “modernization” and
“developmentalism”, “by intensifying the exploitation of the
labor force” and the “degradation of nature”.7 7. Guilherme Petrella e Carolina
Heldt D’Almeida, “Produção
de grandes obras públicas no
Brasil: Das cenas dos anos 1950-
COUNTER-CONDUCTS: MAKING A STAND 1970 para uma reflexão sobre o
contemporâneo”, in Tonetti, Nobre,
This story, which gives rise to the Projeto Contracondutas Mariotti, Barossi (eds.), op. cit.,
[Counter-Conducts Project], is inserted in a national and pp.371-382.
global context, in which architecture becomes intertwined
with the political, economic, legal, and cultural forces of
the civil construction sector.
If the case of the TAC happened in 2013, on the eve of the
2014 World Cup, the Projeto Contracondutas began in 2016,
concomitant with the impeachment of the democratically

8. In the context of the GRU-111:
counter-cartographies project,
the sociologist Cibele Rizek points
out that it was no coincidence that
the 2015-2016 crisis in Brazil (with
the impeachment and dismantling
of labour laws) exposed the close
ties between large contractors
and the economic agencies
of the Brazilian State, already
present for decades, from the
military dictatorship to the recent
“neo‑developmentalism” of the
Lula era. As a recent development,
Rizek points out that the economic
slump triggered a crisis of political
and institutional legitimacy,
culminating in “the dismantling
of citizens’ and labour rights”,
and “praise for the intensification
of flexibilization and even more
severe radicalization of the removal
of rights, transformed into a post-
impeachment agenda”. Cibele
Rizek, “Trabalho, desigualdade,
dominação, escravidão”, in David
Sperling and Fábio Lopes (eds.),
op. cit., p.136.
9. See: Mauricio Pelegrini,
“Foucault e a sociedade neoliberal:
O trabalhador como ‘empresário
de si’”, in Tonetti, Nobre, Mariotti,
Barossi (eds.), op. cit., pp.97-108.
elected president and the 2016 Olympic Games, and was
concluded in 2017, in the midst of a series of labor reforms,
led by the federal executive and legislative powers. These
reforms suppress historic social achievements obtained
over the last thirty years, articulating the full outsourcing
of middle and end business activities, as well as the
extension of working hours, in a total entanglement
between private and public dimensions.8
The political-pedagogical project Counter-Conducts
was developed by the Associação Escola da Cidade—
Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo, in São Paulo and
Guarulhos, as a platform designed to establish dialogues
and to make visible the implications of slave labor in
contemporary times, with focus on construction and
infrastructure works in Brazil. The Associação Escola
da Cidade was one of the civil entities chosen by the
Ministério Público [Public Prosecutor’s Office] to receive
part of the fine imposed on OAS, taking responsibility for
preparing an educational project. Seminars, workshops,
studies, reports, a documentary, public artistic
interventions, lectures, editorials, essays, and publications,
were inserted in the curricular structure of the Escola in
order to amplify its already remarkable stand in the public
sphere. Contracondutas approached different publics,
collaborators, and institutions focused on teaching and
culture, bringing together more than 250 participants—
from multiple practices and fields of knowledge—into
heterogeneous constellations, which allowed crossovers
between academia and society, architecture and politico-
aesthetic practices.
The choice of title, Contracondutas [Counter-Conducts],
came from a critical and reflective position on the term
conduct, as developed by Michel Foucault,9 to refer to the
techniques and procedures that work for the conduction of
a set of individuals. We were interested in the ambivalent
character of the term, emphasized by Foucault, since a
particular conduct also implies the way we allow ourselves
to be conducted, and how we behave under the effect of
the conductive act.
The Counter-Conducts project potentializes taking a
stand in the face of about the vision of the contemporary
labor statute and its implications for architecture and civil
construction within the current Brazilian socio-political
context and within the globalized structural context of
capital. The project’s strength also lies in the questions
that guided it, on how to elaborate new insertions and
practices in architecture.
What is the role of the architect and the architectural
project in reducing (or increasing) violence at the construction
site? How does the production and consumption of the
neoliberal city impact on civil construction’s degrading type
contrac foucault:
for a non-fascist
lifE
slavE labor

work analogous to slavery, according to article 149 of

is characterized by four scenarios that may occur simultane
conditions that are degrading and incompatible with human dig
characterized by excessive effort or work overload, that da
labor forced through geographical isolation or threats
workers subject to debt bondage.

“so, this is how it is: it’s been decided and it’s clear and it’s been seen and proven. slavery never ended here in
brazil, it never stopped, never. it’s official. it is the greatest reality of all histories.” worker rescued at the
construction site of Terminal 3 — Guarulhos in the centoeonze — coletivo Metade project

slavE labor
rks and MaJor
ic wo Publ
Publ
sl

ic
r
av

aJo
Er

M
y

“the way the civil construction worker

is incorporated into the national
yE

conduct adJustMEnt tErM

economy does not allow construction
st

or architecture to evolve.” anália

the term of adjustment of conduct (tac) is an agreement that the Public Prosecutor’s offic
Er

amorim in de Brasília a Guarulhos [From

Brasília to Guarulhos], jornalistic adjudged to the violator of a certain collective right. this instrument is intended to prev
da

report 1, sabrina duran continuation of the illegal situation, redress the damage to collective rights, and
y

avoid legal action.

an
d
to
da

MaJor
y

Public works
and rights

cEntoEonzE
Labor
bodiEs architec
at thE
construction
sitE
bEl
on thE EMErgEncy of
a c
thE Era in which wE livE
MisE-En-scènE / of
a

s E:
ho it
scalE ModEl

Es

ul s
t

ar on
si

gu ti
n

— uc
io

3 str
t
c
u

al on
r
t

in c
s
n

rM hE
o
c

E
tE t

h
t
g
of in

at
t
or sE uc

n “dialogue reveals itself a

io
rP ca tr

in a collective construct
at
ai hE ons

construction site, and th

PrEcarization c conduct), we must think a
ri
t
t Ec

in Intervenções: apontame
and Profit b
d

a
Ef
Pr
ri
of
c

ti
cal sis
a n a ly

“consumption is fundamental to contemporary capitalism. the men [rescued]

from slave-like labor [at terminal 3] had cell phones and participated
in the world of consumption. this ambiguity of the enslaved worker
interests capitalism—from the most absolute exploitation of his work to
his status as a consumer who helps make the wheel go round. the enslaved
laborer [in civil construction] will also buy the nike made with slave
labor elsewhere. we are living in a very violent moment of capitalist architEcturE and city
exploitation.” rodrigo bonciani in Escravos de ontem e de hoje: nexos
entre trabalhadores no canteiro colonial e contemporâneo [Slaves of in thE Era of financial
yesterday and today: links between workers in colonial and contemporary
construction sites], jornalistic report 2, sabrina duran caPital - airPort
tErMinal sPacEs
“the distance between the
observed in the labor rel
reinforcement in the acad
little or nothing about t
less about the violence i
in order for the architec
what conditions, and by w
sabrina duran in Entre o
na diminuição (ou aumento
project and execution: th
increasing) violence on t
condutas
the brazilian Penal code,
eously or in isolation: working
gnity; exhausting workdays,
amage health or are life-threatening;
and physical violence; and/or

thE third
sErvitudE
“the process of
contemporary
enslavement is very
subtle and complex.

Es:
[...] keeping people
on deposit is like
in brazil

iti
maintaining a
warehouse.”
Jônatas andrade

Mun
– in Terminal 3
Documentary,
Papel social

coM
Ed
wor

Ect
ks
a

aff
nd

ce

in
vent
li

ks
c

En
fr
si

wor
ng
an oM “slavery and freedom are the fundamental indices for the qualification
d t of power: slavery establishes despotic power and tyranny, while freedom
fr hE

lic
establishes political power and public authority. sovereignty in the
oM sP americas is incomplete because the private or seigneurial power of the

th Eak

Pub
colonists over native peoples and africans weakened political authority.
this contradiction was intensified because the king constructed his
E a legitimacy by legalizing, regulating, and controlling slavery and forms
in blE of forced labor. this is a structural element in the confusion between

and

or
vi

asE
public and private spheres in american history.”
si rodrigo bonciani in Escravo, forro e livre: O antigo regime e o Brasil

MaJ

atlas of slavE labor in brazil

bl atual [Slave, unfettered and free: The old regime and Brazil today],

E c
cture
article in História e Escravidão [History and Slavery]
E

of
ont
c o u n t E r- c a r

act
111

o M
gru togr
aPh

iMP
iE

bEl
— s
Elo
Mon
tE, thE
thE
o
cart l
ogr
aPh
countEr-
E

y
Pa r al

abs
EncE
—

intErvEntions
f

M i
E El
d
— no
tEs
ct
P r oJE labor —

as essential [...], not only the discussion of each task in isolation, but considering them
tion, with a genuine dialogue with the problems that surround the guarulhos airport, the
he question of slave-like labor. [...] if the intention is to effect a reckoning (or to amend
about effective conditions for real communication with the local population.” thiago tozawa
entos críticos [Interventions: critical notes], curadoria e Mediação / unifEsP
“the world cup needed a series of
emergency decrees in order to be built.
that is: [these construction sites] operate
under a regime in which both the rights of
nature and of humans must be diminished
or violated. it is very interesting to
work on this: the construction site as a
space where the exception is the rule.”
Paulo tavares in Precarização e lucro:
trabalho degradante na construção civil e
a produção e consumo da cidade neoliberal
Escola da cidadE [Precarization and profit: degrading work
in civil construction and the production
and consumption of the neoliberal city],
the associação Escola da cidade—arquitetura e urbanismo (aEc) is a non-profit civil entity with democratic journalistic report 5, sabrina duran
governance and financial autonomy. created in 1996, it resulted from the union of architects, intellectuals,
artists and technical experts committed to improving brazilian reality. the group, on the basis of its teaching
experience, research (theoretical and applied), as well as professional and academic practice, has as its
fundamental purpose the creation of a privileged locus for freedom of reflection and proposal.

e drawing and the construction site that is

lations of civil construction finds powerful
demic community. architecture schools teach architEcturE as a Political tEchnology
the collective labor at construction sites—much
installed there—, which would be fundamental
ct to visualize at least minimally where, under
whose hands his drawing will materialize.”
projeto e a execução: o papel do arquiteto
o) da violência no canteiro de obras [Between
he role of the architect in diminishing (or
the construction site], journalistic report 3
of labor? How to confront the great infrastructure works that 98
consume the environment and destroy ways of life? How do
these regional realities fit into a globalized world?
All these questions were precisely synthesized by a
rhetorical image proposed by the journalist Sabrina Duran:

If the hoarding that surround and hide the building

sites of large-scale constructions were removed, what
would a passer-by see? […] They would certainly not
see the macro relations of production and labor that
make the building site of a large-scale construction
one of the main fields for profit-extraction through the
overexploitation of manual labor in civil construction.10 10. Sabrina Duran, op. cit., p.13.

ARCHITECTURE AND POLITICS

The cost of the architectural project corresponds on

average to 1% of the total value of the construction,
however, it is only through the technical project, in all its
complexity and with the due technical responsibilities in
place, that one can correctly plan the construction, with the
dimensioning of the work fronts, material specifications,
and the final cost outline. In relation to a public work, the
executive project is even more important, says Anália
Amorim in her text “Sobre o ato de projetar e construir”
[On Design and Construction]. “As the essential piece
for any conscious act of transformation, the project is the
document that guarantees the transparency of resource
management. With numerous social reverberations, the
project is the first element to be attacked by outside
interests, bargaining, and by lobbies that seek to
compromise its technical and ethical coherence.”11 11. Anália Maria M. de Carvalho
In addition to this planned dismantling process, there Amorim, op. cit., p.284.
is the dismembering of public technical teams—capable
of planning and supervising the big investments—, the
distancing of the architect from the construction site, and
the controversial Law nr. 8666, which passes on to the
managers the role of developing the executive project
and guaranteeing the compatibility of complementary
projects. This law confiscates from the architects the
conception and control over the whole, further weakening
the transparency of bidding processes subject to the
pressures of the politico-financial scenario. Architecture
is thus also implicated in this precarious labor system,
with the outsourcing of contracts, partial work regimes,
absence of employment contracts, and exhaustive days, in
an unequal equation between the profits of the managers
and exposure to risk by the architects.
The possibilities for design intervention in construction
of site work relations represent an important dimension

12. Felicity Scott (Columbia
University) participated in the
international seminar “Políticas
da arquitetura e escravidão na
contemporaneidade” where
she presented the conference
“Arquitetura como uma tecnologia
política” in which she discussed
her most recent book Outlaw
Territories: Environments of
Insecurity/Architectures of
Counter-Insurgency. Her lecture
also resulted in a text published in
the book Contracondutas. Ação
político-pedagógica.
Counter-Conducts Diagram.
The artist Vitor Cesar appropriated
pre-existing visual schemes,
associated with the notion of the
public sphere to create diagrams
that document the process of the
Counter-Conducts project. In this
way, he sought to make visible the
sharing of contents and expressions
through compositions that reveal
the forces at play that ran through
the project. This diagram was based
on the centrality of the relationship
between architecture and labour in
order to name artistic interventions
and academic studies, understood
as a politico-pedagogical process,
and thus to relate the parts
highlighting essential definitions
and quotations.
for resuming the capacity of “architecture as a political
technology”. This term, coined by Felicity Scott,12 exposes
the ambivalent relations between control and care
inherent to architecture that, on the one hand, turns to
social, environmental, populational, and cultural questions,
but, on the other, inserts itself into complex systemic
processes, with layers of opacity, subject to constantly
having their intentions captured by the inversions of signs.
The discussions raised here reverberated together
with the projects and mappings present in this Brazilian
pavilion for the 16th International Architecture Exhibition
- Venice Biennial, and seek to contribute to a necessary
critical moment in which reflection on the changes of
direction in the professional and educational activities
is informing new and different ways of thinking, acting
and producing collectively, and thus expanding what
architecture can establish.
Ana Carolina Tonetti (São Paulo-sp,
1974) Is an architect, Master of
Arts, and PhD student in Design,
Space and Culture at FAU-USP.
She is a teacher at the Escola da
Cidade, where she coordinates the
sequence of disciplines focused
on means of expression and
drawing. She articulates different
action strategies, bringing
together art and architecture. She
is part of O Grupo Inteiro.
Ligia Nobre (São Paulo-sp, 1973) Is
a researcher, architect, and curator.
She works at the crossroads
between art and architecture. She
holds a Masters degree in Histories
and Theories from the Architectural
Association School of Architecture
(London) and a PhD in Aesthetics
and Art History at PGEHA-USP. She
was involved in the curatorship
of several projects, including the
X Biennial of Architecture in São
Paulo. She is currently a teacher
at the Escola da Cidade in the
Expression Media Sequence,
and is part of O Grupo Inteiro.
Immigration Paula Miraglia, 100
to Brazil in Gabriel
seven graphs Zanlorenssi and
Rodolfo Almeida,
reporting for
Nexo Jornal

FOREIGN POPULATION FLOWS ARE AN IMPORTANT

PART OF BRAZILIAN HISTORY. A RECENT WAVE OF
IMMIGRATION GENERATES POLITICAL, INSTITUTIONAL
AND CULTURAL DEBATE

Since colonial times, the arrival of immigrants has

been an important issue for Brazil, which has already
seen a significant portion of its population composed
of foreigners. Today, however, the scenario is different.
We are talking about an estimated 700,000 immigrants
among more than 200 million Brazilians. This is not
very much when compared to countries like the United
States, which has the largest absolute number of
immigrants in its population, or countries recognized
for specific policies to attract foreigners, like Canada
and Australia.
These graphs present a compilation of data that
allows us to see immigration throughout Brazilian
history. The different migratory waves have helped
shape the country’s demographics, had important
economic and cultural impact and are an essential part
of the construction of the national identity.
In the updated version, the flow of foreigners takes
on new dimensions, but also raises old questions. Is
Brazil ready and willing to welcome these people? How
should the country control their entry and regulate
their permanence? What are the effects, from a social
and cultural standpoint? Up until now, the investment
appears to have been greater in the legal and
institutional context. Since May 2017, the country has
had a new Immigration Law, which replaced the Statute
of Foreigners, originally formulated during the military
dictatorship, in 1980. Efforts in terms of documentation
and regularization of this population are underway.
 But how do we evaluate the impact that this diversity
of cultures has on the daily life of many Brazilian cities?
We are faced with new urban dynamics, many times with
entire neighborhoods transformed into veritable ethnic
territories, capable of mobilizing, among other things, the
economy, housing market, public services, in addition to
promoting new cultural experiences.
The data show a new pattern of migration, with different
countries of origin, reflecting local crises and global
geopolitical issues. Over 50% of the individuals that arrive
in Brazil today are aged between 19 and 30 years old. In
other words, they are in the prime of their productive lives.
The Brazilian southeast is by far the most sought after
region. The category “student” appears frequently among
the occupations. This combination suggests that we are
talking about individuals that will have an opportunity
to “make a life for themselves” in the country. At the
same time, it is clear that we are faced with a new cycle
of cultural negotiations in which the possibilities of
exchange will have, as in other times, huge implications
for Brazilian identity.

Paula Miraglia (São Paulo-sp) is co-founder and

general manager of Nexo Jornal. She has a bachelor’s
degree in social sciences from the University of
São Paulo (USP) and holds a master and a doctorate
in social anthropology from the same institution. She
has worked as director of international organizations
and consultant to the World Bank and Inter-American
Development Bank.

Gabriel Zanlorenssi (Guarapuava-PR) is data scientist

at Nexo Jornal. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Social
Sciences and is a master candidate in Political Science,
both at University of São Paulo (USP). As a researcher,
he is a member of the Center for Studies in Politics and
Economics in the Public Sector of Fundação Getúlio
Vargas (FGV-SP) and the Center of Comparative and
International Studies (NECI) of the University of São Paulo.

Rodolfo Almeida (São Paulo-SP) is an infographics

designer of Nexo Jornal. As a visual journalist with
a degree in journalism from the Pontifical Catholic
University (PUC-SP), he has worked with video
production in O Estado de S. Paulo newspaper
and develops projects in data visualization and
information design.
Portuguese immigration to Brazil
Between 1500 and 1991, according to estimates by IBGE
portuguese immigrants
0 100.000 200.000 300.000 400.000 500.000 600.000

estimated
1500 − 1580 total for the
period

1581 − 1640

1641 − 1700

1701 − 1760

the periods of
1808 − 1817 the estimates are
not continuous

1881 − 1900
1901 − 1930
1931 − 1950

1981 − 1991

Source: "Brasil: 500 anos de povoamento" [Brazil: 500 years of settlement], IBGE
(Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics).

Nationality of immigrants that arrived in Brazil

Between 1884 and 1959, according to estimates by IBGE

as % of total immigrants

100%

OTHERS
TURKS AND ARABS*

GERMAN
SPANISH

JAPANESE
50%

ITALIAN

PORTUGUESE

0
1884 − 1893 1894 − 1903 1904 − 1913 1914 − 1923 1924 − 1933 1945 − 1949 1950 − 1954 1955 − 1959

IN 9-YEAR INTERVALS IN 4-YEAR INTERVALS

* Includes immigrants that came from territories belonging to the Ottoman empire, such as the Turks, Syrians
and Libanese.
Source: "Brasil: 500 anos de povoamento" [Brazil: 500 years of settlement], IBGE (Brazilian Institute of
Geography and Statistics).
 Gender of immigrants
Of those who immigrated between 2000 and 2016, according to data from the Federal Police

66% 34%

MALE FEMALE

Source: Sincre 2016 (National System for Registration and Recording of Foreigners), Federal Police.

Age of immigrants when they arrived in Brazil

Of those who immigrated between 2000 and 2016, according to data from the Federal Police
immigrants
40.000

30.000

20.000

10.000

0
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
AGE UPON IMMIGRATING

Source: Sincre 2016 (National System for Registration and Recording of Foreigners), Federal Police.
 Origin and destination of those who immigrated to Brazil
Of the main nationalities that immigrated between 2000 and 2016,
according to data from the Federal Police

ARRIVED FROM DEPARTED TO

Bolivia
106.000

Haiti
Southeast
81.500
306.200

USA
72.200

Argentina
54.100

China South
49.400 87.700

Colombia
Northeast
42.800
37.000
Portugal North
42.800 24.600
Peru Midwest
22.600
35.000

Source: Sincre 2016 (National System for Registration and Recording of Foreigners), Federal Police.

Nationality of immigrants who arrived in Brazil

Between 2000 and 2016, according to data from the Federal Police
as % of total foreigners
100%
ARGENTINEAN

BOLIVIAN
COLOMBIAN
CHINESE

AMERICAN HAITIAN

PERUVIAN
PORTUGUESE
50%

OTHERS

0
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016

Source: Sincre 2016 (National System for Registration and Recording of Foreigners), Federal Police.
Professions of immigrants upon arrival in Brazil
Of the main nationalities that migrated between 2000 and 2016, according to
data from the Federal Police*, as a % of total immigrants from each country

Portugal Peru Haiti

HOUSEWIFE
ENGINEER
SEAMAN
STUDENT BAKER
RETIREE ENGINEER

OTHERS
STUDENT STUDENT

SALESMAN
BRICKLAYER

OTHERS
DIRECTOR/

OTHERS
OWNER

NO PROFESSION
SEAMSTRESS

USA Colombia China

PROFESSION

HOUSEWIFE
DOCTOR
NO

ENGINEER
STUDENT
SEAMAN OTHERS
SALESMAN
CLERGYMAN STUDENT

DIRECTOR/
SALESMAN OWNER

STUDENT
OTHERS
OTHERS

Bolivia Argentina
PROFESSION

The names of the professions come

ENGINEER

TEACHER

from Federal Police records and were

NO

STUDENT adapted to improve comprehension.

For example, salesman includes: sales
clerk, shopkeeper, traveling salesman,
door-to-door salesman, newspaper
SEAMSTRESS
salesman and similar professions.
Seamstress includes: decorator, tailor,
OTHERS
dressmaker, furrier, tapestry maker
and similar professions. Bricklayer
includes: bricklayer assistant, tilelayer,
plasterer, glazier and similar
HOUSEKEEPING
DIRECTOR/

professions. Seaman includes: pilot,

OWNER

engineer, sailor and worker on a

STUDENT MINOR
river/sea vessel.

Source: Sincre 2016 (National System for Registration and Recording of Foreigners), Federal Police.
3
Material flows:
physical imprint
of commodities
exchange
How sensitive is the
urban environment
to the movement
of commodities?
Around the globe, the development of
cities is intrinsically linked to the primary
production: agriculture, livestock raising
and the extractive industries. Since the first
civilizations, humans have always chosen
to settle in places where their subsistence
was possible. Over the course of history,
however, with the rise of technological
mechanisms and the idea of an external
market, the primary production began
to generate continuous surpluses; more
than subsistence, it became wealth. The
development of a worldwide system around
this production added particularities
to what is generically called today the
commodities market. This term defines
products with less value added by
industrial processes, but necessary for a
wide range of economies and societies.
As an essentially agricultural and
exporting country, with a history marked by
large cycles (sugar, gold, coffee), Brazil has
developed a significant role in the global
production of primary products. It ranks
among the 25 largest exporters worldwide,
selling mainly soybeans, iron ore, sugar,
petroleum and chicken meat.
But why deal with an economic and rural
theme, if we are talking about architecture
and urbanism? As an historical example
we can consider the coffee cycle, where
the production of the Paraná Valley region
in the interior of the states of São Paulo
and Rio de Janeiro was shipped mainly
to the Port of Santos for export. To cover
such distances, the São Paulo Railway
was inaugurated in 1867, the first railroad
in the state. The city of São Paulo, which
was neither a producer nor a port city
became a strategic point along the way and
hosted the financial infrastructure of the
business. Coffee production, even though
it was hundreds of kilometers away, was
essential for the urban development and
consolidation of the city of São Paulo.
Although the large tracts of land involved
in primary production are far from the
large cities, the main destination for their
products, yet today, is the Brazilian coast.
The vast territory, with an area greater
than 8 million square kilometers, and the
geographic distribution of the production
sites and export facilities requires the
creation of a complex network. Historically,
this infrastructure was implemented in
a disconnected way, without integrated
planning and, as pointed out by Sergio
Besserman in his interview, without
economic rationale. The result was the
predominance of a transportation model by
diesel-powered trucks, without prominent
railroads or river barge routes (in a country
with one of the largest potentials for
waterways in the world). In a scenario
of global policies of reduction in carbon
emissions, Brazil began from a backward
position, with a slow, burdensome system
of considerable environmental impact.
There are other questions linked to
this distribution. Since a large part of the
Brazilian primary production originates
in the continental portion of the country,
especially in the Central-West, and the
export facilities are, invariably, on the
East Coast, an enormous flow of heavy
trucks must pass through areas of greater
population density and urbanization—the
large metropolises. Therefore, regions
where public transport and mobility are
already complex questions find themselves
obliged to also think about urban networks
for the circulation of merchandise.
The externalities of this circulation
in the intra-urban context are a theme
of discussion in a wide range of places.
As photographer Cássio Vasconcellos
illustrates in the composition Ceasa,
logistics has become one of the biggest
problems requiring a solution in the large
Brazilian cities. Where to situate the
arteries—referring to the urban metabolism
mentioned by Philip Yang, who writes in
this chapter—and the supply depots are key
questions in the planning and management
of Brazilian cities.
Relating origin and destination in the
primary production requires a reflection
on which cities and populations are
being formed at these poles. Cities like
Fordlândia (Pará), portrayed by artist
Melanie Smith in the pages of this
book were entirely constructed around
agriculture, livestock raising, and the
extractive industries. Rather than being
designed for the lives of their residents,
they were materialized as a response to
the needs of determined products. Areas
of shipping and export facilities also wind
up developing their structure according
to their role as the site of depots. Focused
on their ports, airports or railways, like
the large primary producers, they become
cities of a single function.
While the point of production becomes
more fragile in the generation of jobs,
income and living conditions, something
different takes place in the cities that
are along the way between sources and
destinations. In general, judging by the
example of São Paulo, their economy
become more energized, generating
new job opportunities. A systemic
understanding is thus necessary: the
relation of the material flows through
the Brazilian territory is not uniform,
and the productive sources constitute a
nearly invisible wall of social inequality.
In general, the producer cities have a less
dynamic economy and offer fewer social
opportunities. In contrast to this, cities that
are further away from this production tend
to exploit other economic activities that are
more specialized and diversified; they are
what Yang calls “machine cities”: those that
are not producing commodities, but are
essential for their commercialization.
The main issue at stake in this chapter,
besides the environmental degradation
that is the theme of the next chapter,
“Fluid Landscape,” is how a deeper
understanding of the material flows in
the territory can help in the design of
projects for regional development. This
would allow the relations between the
regions Southeast/South and Central-
West/North/Northeast to move away from
dependency, and structure joint actions
suited to the Brazilian urban reality at large.
Such understanding would also permit
the rural-urban duality to be seen as a
relation of complementary parts that can
foster new local and regional opportunities
and development.
The Map
The map essentially considers the
landscape created by the impact of primary
production in Brazil. Four questions are
highlighted: the specialization of the
commodities—mining (especially iron),
agriculture and livestock raising (soybeans,
chicken meat), petroleum and wood; how
they circulate through the country; the
composition of the trade balance; and
the urban layers that are related to these
dynamics. The aim is to reveal the scale of
this production which, although it is one of
the main economic sources of the country,
the power is not translated into progress
for the social issues related to it.
The map relied on various
collaborations, especially that of Pedro
Camargo, the developer of the project
AequilibraE., an specialized tool for QGIS.
He was in charge of the processing of the
consolidated data regarding the movement
of commodities throughout the territory.
The national information of the logistics
companies was transformed into a
network of links and nodes—representing,
respectively, the circulation of merchandise
between the Brazilian microregions and
their central points. Four main categories
were considered in these flows: general
bulk, liquid bulk, solid agricultural bulk and
nonagricultural solid bulk. The information
on imports are represented at the left,
exports at the right, according to products,
countries and distribution centers.
Lastly, in a social layer, the map shows
the population density in the Brazilian
cities compared to their amount of
petroleum extraction—a commodity that
is used more in areas far from where it is
processed—suggesting the inequalities
arising from flows of material through the
Brazilian territory.
Melanie Smith
Stills from Fordlândia, 2014
HD 30’
Cássio Vasconcellos
CEASA, 2012
Photograph
interview: 116
Sérgio Besserman

Sérgio Besserman Vianna (Rio de

Janeiro-RJ, 1957) is an ecologist
and economist. He holds a degree
in economic sciences and a
master’s in economics from PUC-
Rio. He has served as the director
of planning for the Banco Nacional
de Desenvolvimento Econômico
e Social [Brazilian Development
Bank – BNDES]; president of the
Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística [Brazilian Institute of
Geography and Statistics – IBGE];
president of Instituto Pereira
Passos (IPP) of the City of Rio de
Janeiro and its Technical Chamber
of Sustainable Development;
and professor of history at UFF.
He is a member of the board for
the World Wildlife Fund (WWF),
professor of economics at PUC
Rio and president of the Instituto
de Pesquisa Jardim Botânico do
Rio de Janeiro.
Walls

What are the greatest logistical and

economic obstacles to the flow of goods
in Brazil?
The infrastructure that enables and
organizes this flow was built without any
economic rationale. We have never had a
government capable of long-term planning
and we have difficulty in developing
collective solutions. As a consequence,
today we have infrastructure that
suffers from low productivity: a country,
continental in size, that uses diesel trucks
to transport freight. In an era that could
be defined by a transition to low carbon,
we have very little coastal navigation, few
waterways considering our potential.
In Brazil, only now have we begun to
develop governance that is sophisticated
and complex enough to make collective
low‑carbon solutions feasible.

Evidence

Is there a disassociation, by design or

effect, between economic planning and
urban/land planning?
It’s chaotic, completely disconnected.
There is neither planning nor control over
the use of land in cities, which results in
unnecessary risks and impacts on the
environment and the health and well-being
of people. We are experiencing a problem
that is not unique to Brazil: mining, or any
activity with high short-term economic
returns, always attracts lots of people.
When the activity ends, because the
resource is exhausted, we have people
left in squalid conditions and a degraded
environment. Today, municipalities and
large and medium-sized companies are
aware of this, so some very interesting
experiments are beginning to happen.
There are large companies supporting
quilombolas, helping them to generate
income from a company-related activity—
eucalyptus honey, for example. This
integration of science, technology and
production with traditional populations
is an important step toward resolving the
lack of economic and social development
after the enterprise has already peaked or
simply shut down.
Side effects
What are the most critical socioeconomic
and environmental impacts from the
production and transportation of goods
around Brazil? How does one balance the
high demand from foreign markets, like
China, and development on a local scale?
From a socioeconomic standpoint, the
most critical impact is from the inefficiency
of our infrastructure. This reduces our
competitiveness in relation to other
countries, raises the “Brazil cost” and
generates less income and fewer jobs. The
environmental impact could be huge, for
two main reasons: first, risks are not always
well managed; second, because of climate
change. The World Bank predicts that this
could potentially wipe out all the progress
made on poverty over the last 20 to 30
years. It is a terrible threat that will result
in wars, genocides, perverse suffering.
Temperatures will rise 2ºC or more by the
end of the century, even if we do everything
that has to be done.
The greatest impact of selling
commodities to the entire world tends to
be the enterprise itself, even more so than
its transportation. Cattle raising causes
deforestation and emits greenhouse
gases; agriculture causes deforestation
and reduces biodiversity. But for all of this
there is a solution, based on scientific
and indigenous knowledge. Farming
cannot continue to use the same amount
of nitrogen and phosphorus. We know
that when it rains, these chemicals are
carried by streams to rivers and end up
creating dead zones in oceans, a problem
even bigger than that of plastic. We can
farm and protect reserves, by paying close
attention to the connections between
biomes. Alone, we cannot help nature
deal with the climate change that we have
created. Nature is extraordinary and very
resilient, but it needs connections. Animals,
plants and fungi need to circulate between
natural environments.
Behavior and micro-politics
How is the production of commodities
in Brazil related to the different
consumption patterns of Brazilians?
How does a growth development model
affect individual lifestyles?
First, Brazil is an unjust country and the
most effective way to deal with poverty
generated by huge inequality is to grow,
grow, grow. So we are hostage to growth-
at-any-cost developmentalism. We
have to discover how to grow with fewer
impacts. Brazilian society has a hierarchy
based on conspicuous consumption, an
unconscionable, perverse consumption.
Encouraging superfluous consumption
is really bad, but I don’t think it’s ethical
to tell a poor family to consume less.
Another interesting topic is conscientious
consumption, where products must have
labels that warn us if they are responsible
for polluting, warming the planet, reducing
biodiversity or promoting deforestation.
Experience in the discipline
Based on your involvement with the
Instituto de Pesquisa Jardim Botânico
do Rio de Janeiro, what is the outlook
for the sustainable development of
Brazilian tropical forests? And how
could alternative models to predatory
extractivism transform our energy grid?
To do this, you have to increase governance
and engage everyone. An important tool
for this is the Cadastro Ambiental Rural
[Rural Environmental Registry – CAR]
which georeferences the properties and
allows any citizen to monitor for possible
deforestation. We need to improve
monitoring efficiency and punish those
who deforest, but also create opportunities
for surrounding populations and value
prevention and sustainable management.
Brazil has more forest area in need of competitive commodities in the world, with
restoration than any other. We could feed low environmental impact, is within reach.
the world with our degraded pastures It’s just a matter of engagement and the
alone. This would make a big difference in application of knowledge.
the fight against climate change. It’s not
just a matter of interrupting deforestation,
it is a matter of sequestering carbon with
agriculture, with forestry, with biomass
used for as yet unimagined things.
Except for our hydroelectric network,
our infrastructure is from the fossil fuel
age. This is a huge problem, but it is also
an opportunity. If we make the transition to
low-carbon infrastructure, the competitive
advantages for Brazil will be extraordinary.
We can supply food, energy, materials,
based on biotechnology and synthetic
biology, all of it with almost zero carbon.

Transformative potential

Which economic or land planning

mechanisms can be associated
with the production and shipping of
commodities to ensure conservation
and prevent environmental crimes
like the Rio Doce case? And what
is the importance of redesigning
freight transportation infrastructure
in Brazil, in terms of parameters for
sustainable development?
Improving the quality of democracy
in Brazil is the best way of avoiding
disaster. The greatest challenge in
Brazilian infrastructure is to reorganize it
more efficiently, which depends mainly
on governance, and the ability to find
collective solutions. The specificities of
each region need to be studied. In the
Amazon, you may think that a road is a
cheaper solution, but a road promotes
deforestation. With the railroad, you have
to go to the station, where you can control
whether the timber is under management
or is illegally logged. And there are also the
waterways. But all of this must take into
consideration that a low carbon economy
will one day be a component in the price
of everything, especially commodities.
Supplying the cheapest and most
 VENEZUELA

MEXICO
U N I T E D STAT E S
C A N A DA
G U YA N A

C O LO M B I A

PERU

BOLIVIA

PA R AG U AY

This map was developed and designed in collaboration with

Mapping-lab (www.mappinglab.me) for this catalogue to highlight a
layer of the main exhibition map Material Flows. U RU G UAY
 P O RT U G A L
S PA I N
IRELAND
UNITED KINGDOM
FRANCE Brazilian soy
B E LG I U M
N E T H E R L A N DS Municipal production volume
Trade flow

GERMANY Ports
S LOV E N I A
DENMARK
L AT V I A
LITHUANIA
N O R WAY
FINLAND

S E N EG A L GHANA
M A RO C C O EGY P T
A LG E R I A G R E EC E
TUNISIA TURKEY
I TA LY ISRAEL
RO M A N I A G EO RG I A
POLAND R USS I A

C A M E RO O N
ANGOLA
CONGO
SAUDI ARABIA
OMAN
IRAN
PA K I STA N

INDIA
M YA N M A R
VIETNAM
CAMBODIA
THAILAND
CHINA

M A L AYS I A
INDONESIA
PHILLIPINES
N O RT H KO R E A
S O U T H KO R E A
JA PA N

SOUTH AFRICA
M OZ A M B I Q U E
M A DAG A S C A R
A UST R A L I A
NEW ZEALAND
Cities and Philip Yang 122
the trail of and Marcela
commodities Ferreira

The awareness that cities are the largest and most

complex artifacts ever created by civilizations has
inspired urban studies in different fields of knowledge
that go far beyond the classic discipline of urbanism. As
a result, several metaphors have emerged to represent
the city, revealing the new outlooks and distinct analytical
and methodological perspectives brought about by this
expanded range of approaches.
Semiotics and social psychology, for example, interpret
the city as a sign1. In life sciences it is viewed as a living 1. See the interesting article by
organism and its physical networks are described as Nikita A. Kharlamov, “The City
as a Sign: A Developmental-
tissues,2 in an allusion to the sets of cells that make up
Experiential Approach to Spatial
animals and plants. A metaphor derived from biochemistry, Life,” in Jaan Valsiner (edit.), The
urban metabolism3 is used to describe the energy, water, Oxford Handbook of Culture and
food and waste processes of cities. Psychology. New York: Oxford
The ubiquitous presence in urban environments of Library of Psychology, 2012.
commodities, understood as general products intended
for commercial use, instigates the creation of yet another 2. See the studies of urban
morphology and references to the
metaphor, derived from mechanics: the city as a machine,
urban tissue in Saverio Muratori,
consumer and processor of such products. Albeit less Studi per una operante storia
seductive than the figures of speech derived from genetics, urbana di Venezia, I. Roma: Istituto
quantum physics or the digital world, the allegory of the poligrafico dello Stato, Libreria
machine city seems apt for contributing to an analysis dello Stato, 1960.
that fosters a better understanding (1) of the role of a city
vis-à-vis others; (2) of the functions of specific parts of a 3. See, for example, the lines
city’s territory, at the peripheral level, in relation to others; of research developed by
Delft University of Technology.
(3) of the historical path covered by certain cities; and,
Available at: urbanmetabolism.
perchance, (4) of their future paths and vocations in this weblog.tudelft.nl/what-is-urban-
historical moment in which several cities are transitioning metabolism/. Accessed on: March
from industrial to postindustrial centers. 20, 2018.
As we know, the prefix “post” is used to designate
periods which, despite succeeding something that
has recognizably ended, still lack clearly defined traits.
Therefore, given the ubiquity of commodities in cities,

4. Historically, extractive cities that
did not diversify their economies,
such as Ojuela in Mexico, Sewell in
West Virginia (US), or Copperfield
in Queensland (Australia), became
ghost towns following depletion of
the extraction resource. In a closer
Brazilian example, Rio de Janeiro
experienced wealth and fiscal and
social collapse with the rise and
fall of oil prices, the main source of
royalties sustaining the city’s vigor.
an analysis of the urban territory as a machine for their
consumption, manufacturing and distribution may unveil
trends and possibilities, positive or negative, about
their future.
Economics defines commodities as a set of products
of a generic, basic and highly fungible nature, i.e., without
much apparent differentiation among them, so much so
that their origin or producer is irrelevant to those who
consume them. Among many possible categorizations,
commodities may be ranked as extractive (iron, copper,
zinc, aluminum), energy or fossil (gas, coal, oil) and
agricultural (soy, rice, wheat). Given the broad process of
commoditization of industrialized goods, one may also
affirm that industrial commodities forcibly emerge as a
fourth and necessary category of analysis.
The different relationships each urban environment
establishes with commodities make it possible to
tentatively classify them into five categories of machine
cities: producer, consumer, trader, value adder and
value‑adder trader.
Cities such as Gillette, in Wyoming, or Araxá, in
Minas Gerais, are prominent for being large producers
of commodities, coal and niobium, respectively. They
have poorly diversified economies and small markets,
and therefore do not stand out as machines in the other
categories. We might think of both cities as belonging to a
subtype characterized by intensive extraction of non-fossil
commodities and by equally intensive consumption of
fossil commodities.4
Venice and other cities of the Hanseatic League or
located along the Silk Road were prominent traders of
goods. Throughout history, trading cities have played a
key role in the transfer of goods and exchange of ideas
between different parts of the world. As a side effect,
trade brought wealth and capital accumulation, which
made it possible to improve industrial processes such as
printing and the manufacture of glass and paper, as well
as promote the advancement of medicine, philosophy,
astronomy and agriculture.
Chicago stands out among big cities for hosting the
world’s largest commodity trading platform. The trade of
basic goods on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is worth
one quadrillion dollars per year, although the city itself has
no physical facilities associated with these transactions,
which relate mainly to virtual operations performed over
the entire planet.
Large metropolises such as Shanghai, São Paulo and
London operate as urban machines in the five above
mentioned categories, with more or less emphasis on
each of their defining characteristics. Levels of operation,
such as value adder, are certainly higher in more mature
cities with greater material and intellectual resources. 124
And while such a correlation is intuitively obvious, the
nuances that may be inferred from more in-depth
quantitative studies are potentially revealing of less
obvious social and economic causes and effects, even
pulling in opposite directions.
Machine cities functioning as value adders
and value‑adder traders perform the function of
de‑commoditization. In their role as value adders, they
aim to make goods that are fungible—or undifferentiated—
acquire traits of differentiation. Such differentiation
necessarily occurs in the field of innovation: enhancement
of goods, branding and marketing, and the supply of
services associated with them.
In a more constrained movement, but representative of
new trends, several mature cities in the developed world
whose production of commodities is currently close to
zero are striving to implement agricultural production in
urban areas. At the same time, many consumers in these
cities have started favoring commodities with certificates
of origin, and therefore differentiated, refuting the very
concept of commodities, which is non-differentiation.
Non-genetically modified corn, free-range eggs, organic
vegetables and antibiotic-free meat are just a few
examples of products offered to consumers interested in
traceability (and therefore differentiation) of commodities.
In another example, potentially larger in scale,
enhancement of 3D printing will allow, in the near
future, the production of industrial commodities,
currently restricted to peri-urban areas, in urban and
even domestic environments. Auto parts, footwear,
integrated circuits and chips are part of this new world
of commodity production of increasingly non-rural and
non‑industrial origin.
The different examples listed in the sparse and
disorderly inventory above suggest that forms of treatment
and consumption of commodities in urban environments
are lively indicators of various economic and social trends
in cities. Commodities and the “commoditization” of
industrial goods are associated with traditional sectors of
the economy, while the search for product differentiation
is related to the so-called new economy, dominated by the
knowledge-intensive services sector. On the demand level,
comparison of consumption rates between different types
of commodities may indicate the shortcomings and virtues
of each urban machine and suggest a course of action for
certain sectors.
One may conclude from these rambling ideas that the
systematization in the machine city of an input-output
framework focused on commodities may potentially
generate a set of indicators capable of guiding urban

5. Saskia Sassen, The global city:
New York, London, Tokyo. New
Jersey: Princeton University Press,
2001.
agents regarding (1) the sustainability of their processes;
(2) their positioning in relation to new paradigms of
production emerging in the digital era; (3) how prepared
their populations are as to the possibilities of production
and consumption of higher value-added goods; and, lastly,
(4) their possible repositioning in the international division
of labor which, as we know, is strongly hierarchical.
Although they are less attractive to the marketplace of
ideas than metaphors derived from emerging disciplines,
the lines of research that advance in this approach—
addressing the city-as-a-commodity-processing-
machine—seem therefore worthy of the current agenda.
This is especially true if we recall that the global economic
restructuring initiated in the 1970s was also accompanied
by a spatial restructuring of cities, which thereafter took
on different roles. While some of them have become
centers of command in the global economy, concentrating
management roles,5 others remained linked to production
activities. Within this economic and territorial hierarchy,
the most prominent cities are those capable of managing
their territories in order to induce their transformation into
new innovation-producing machine cities.
Philip Yang (São Paulo, 1962)
holds a master’s degree in public
administration from the J. F.
Kennedy School of Government
at Harvard University and is
the founder of the Instituto de
Urbanismo e Estudos para a
Metrópole (URBEM).
Marcela Ferreira (São Paulo,
1989) has a bachelor’s degree
in architecture and urbanism
from the Universidade de São
Paulo (USP) and a master’s
degree in management and
public policies from Fundação
Getúlio Vargas (FGV-SP). She is
projects coordinator at URBEM
and develops research in urban
dynamics and regulation.
4
Fluid landscape:
encounter between
human and natural
ecosystems
How unregulated
is the relationship
between human and
natural ecosystems?
When we analyze the human impact within
the geographical space we note that the
territorial borders are not limiting factors.
Ecosystems do not respect geopolitical
borders. The analysis of an ecosystem—
concept that presupposes the relation
between beings and physicochemical factors
of the determined environments—does not
involve, therefore, only visible questions.
In the common definition, an ecosystem
is a natural environment, without anthropic
transformations. Here, however, it involves
the human being and his or her interactions
with the surroundings, influenced by natural,
economic, cultural and social variables. How
can an ecosystem be impacted by man and
vice versa? What role do geographic borders
have in this?
The analysis of territories such as Brazil
and South America helps to understand
these questions. The country is seeing this
conflict grow each day in its forests, which
make up about 55% of its territory, with
its urban dwellers surpassing 80% of the
total population and impacting the natural
landscapes either directly or through the
externalities of consumption.
On the scale of the city, the conflicts
between man and ecosystem are constant,
often linked to social factors. The rapid
process of Brazilian urbanization resulted in
cities where planning could not catch up to
speed to the informal growth. Industrial labor,
without access to good-quality of dwellings,
settled in areas without infrastructure, on
the fringes of the urban centers, often in
environmental protection areas. Houses
built with cheap, scrap and improper
materials, without technical finishing,
compose residential clusters far from the
urban centers, with unhealthy conditions and
subject to situations of high risk, as shown
by geologist Álvaro Rodrigues dos Santos in
this chapter. In 2000, only 33% of the Brazilian
dwellings were considered adequate.
In 2008, the Technical Assistance Law
was passed,1 which guarantees low-income
families (earing three times the minimum
wage or less, in urban or rural areas) technical
plans and accompaniment in the construction
of a dwelling. Encompassing questions of
aesthetics, structure, environmental comfort
and upgrading of the building, the law
understands the housing object as part of
a more complex environment. Although it is
an important and entirely new endeavor, the
law is not without its flaws: the target families
are unaware of it, and because of the scarce
dialogue between architects and urbanists,
engineers, geologists and health technicians,
it does not produce significant results.
Conflicts of an environmental order
are not limited to the scale of cities only.
To reach a deep understanding of our
ecosystem it is necessary to consider the
positive or negative externalities, in multiple
scales simultaneously.
In recent years, there has been a
significant reduction of the Brazilian forests,
especially in Amazonia. The 325-million-
hectare territory of the country’s North
shrinks by about 800,000 hectare per
year—nearly one and a half federal districts—
due to the expansion of the agricultural,
livestock raising and extractive industries.
The rampant deforestation is related, on one
hand, with considerable gains in exportation,
and, on the other, represents a significant
loss of natural ecosystems fundamental
for maintaining the Brazilian and South
American bio-climatic balance.
As we are reminded by Antonio Donato
Nobre in his interview, the location of South
America in relation to the equator ensures
the continent relatively mild temperatures,
which has allowed for the establishment of a
significant equatorial flora, of high humidity,
thanks to the vapors from the transpiration
of plant life. The coastal winds push these
vapors toward the Pacific Ocean, causing
rain in the equatorial region; then, upon
running up against the Andes Mountains,
the humidity heads toward the interior of the
country, reaching Brazil’s Central, South and
Southeast and arriving in Argentina.
Both Nobre as well as Paulo Tavares
underscore that the agricultural, livestock
raising and extractive industries should
enter into harmony with the system of the
Amazon forest, since its demise would
have considerable impacts on the rain
cycle in Brazil and in other South American
lands. If primary production is not reduced,
its shipping and consumption will also
create great environmental impacts. The
construction of infrastructure for the
distribution of these products devastates
green lands with paved highways that
aggravate the problem of soil impermeability.
On the urban sphere, the increase of
the population and of activities linked to
industry and services generate new demands
for power.2 In recent years there has been
a considerable increase in the number of
hydroelectric plants in the Amazon and
Pantanal basins and in the cerrado [Brazilian
tropical savanna] regions.3 Two of them,
Itaipu and Belo Monte, are in A gente
Rio—Be Dammed, published here. In this
work, artist Carolina Caycedo investigates
ideas of flow, assimilation, resistance,
representation, control, nature and culture,
with a critical look at the developmentalist
infrastructural projects.4
Effects of a systemic order show that
the externalities are not necessarily logical
or direct. A global analysis that considers
everything from the local to regional scale is
necessary to ensure that the perception of
degradation processes does not remain only
in the collective imagination. The barriers
should stop being invisible and reach the
tangible field of everyone who works in
shaping the Brazilian urban space.
Works like those of photographers Helena
Wolfenson and Aline Lata, who document
the bursting of the Bento Rodrigues dam
in Mariana (MG), shed light on the conflict
between the natural and human ecosystems
and raise awareness about the impacts on
human life. There is an ever-growing need
to develop consciousness and mechanisms
to prevent scenes like these to become
increasingly frequent in Brazil.
More knowledge is needed about the cycles
of nature and our impact in them. Instead of
being an unknown wall for the urban territory,
they should be understood holistically by all
the agents building the Brazilian cities: from
the owners of the means of production and
large tracts of land, to real estate promoters,
the public power, social groups, and, not least,
architects and urbanists.
the MAP
Fluid Landscape constructs its narrative
based on natural elements overlaid to the
topographical charts of South America.
Instead of geopolitical borders, the map
emphasizes the physical natural barriers of
significant impact.
Carbon emissions from biomass loss
are represented in red and yellow tones.
The darker the area, the more intense the
emissions. When in balance, the equatorial
vegetation absorbs significant rates of
carbon through photosynthesis, offsetting
releases by decomposition. When it is cut
down or substituted by agriculture, for
example, the carbon concentration levels in
the atmosphere increases, contributing to
global warming.
This scenario is complemented by the
accumulation of vapor in the air and the winds
that transport them, thus regulating the rain
cycle in South America.
By highlighting natural elements
distant from the urban environment but
with significant impact on them, the map
encourages architects and urbanists to
developed a more global understanding of
their territory of action.
1. Law 11.888/2008. Available at:
www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/_
Ato2007-2010/2008/Lei/L11888.
htm. Retrieved on: April 20, 2018.
2. It should mentioned that the
primary production is also essential
for industry, even influencing
civil construction—which in 2015
represented more than 5% of the
Brazilian GDP and accounted for
more than 8% of the employment in
the country (CBIC, 2015), including
architects and urbanists.
3. In the basins of the Amazon,
Tocantins/Araguaia and Paragua
Rivers, six were inaugurated after
2000. In 2014 alone, more than
15 hydroelectric plants were in
the planning stage in the region
(Agência Nacional de Águas, 2014).
4. This work was executed for
the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo –
Incerteza Viva (2016).
Carolina
Caycedo
A Gente Xingú,
A Gente Doce,
A Gente Paraná
[The People
Xingú, The
People Doce,
The People
Paraná], 2016
From the series
A Gente Rio –
Be Dammed
[The People
River–Be
Dammed]
Satellite
photographs
Helena Wolfenson
Paracatú de Baixo, 2015
Marlon, Bento Rodrigues, 2015
From the series Rastro de lama
[Mud Trail]
Photograph
Aline Lata
Bento Rodrigues, Mariana –
Brasil, 2015
From the series Rastro de
lama [Mud Trail]
Photograph
interview: 142
Antonio Donato
Nobre

Antonio Donato Nobre (Santo

André-SP, 1958) studied agronomy
at Universidade de São Paulo,
earned a master’s degree in
tropical biology from Instituto
Nacional de Pesquisas da
Amazônia and holds a PhD in
Earth Systems Sciences from
the University of New Hampshire
(1994). He was a member of the
Scientific Steering Committee
for the Global Carbon Project and
rapporteur for the Forest Code. He
is a senior researcher at the Centro
de Ciência do Sistema Terrestre, at
the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas
da Amazônia [National Institute
of Amazonian Research - INPa],
where he works on the agenda
for technological innovation
and studies the phenomena of
flying rivers in the Amazon. He is
deeply involved in disseminating
and popularizing science and
with the agenda for sustainable
development of the Amazon.
Walls

What characteristics of Western

culture appear responsible for the stark
segregation between natural and man-
made landscapes?
Westerners are enchanted with analytical
capacity, abstract reasoning, fostered by
the development of the left hemisphere of
the brain, the only functional structure in
nature that is exclusive to human beings.
Culturally, by cultivating this structure we
separate ourselves from our own body
and, in this way, from the environment,
because the body does not exist outside
of it. We have this detachment, while the
native peoples of the Amazon, ancient
peoples of Asia, are more playful and less
rational. They maintain their roots because
the playful side is completely linked with
the hypothalamus, to the animal brain,
emotional and sensitive to what connects
us to the environment.

Evidence

What are the best examples of this

segregation on a global scale? And
how does this take shape in the
Brazilian context?
Today, in the geological epoch of the
Anthropocene, this disconnect with the
environment leads humanity to modify the
entire system, following a logic of positive
feedback, powerfully multiplying the
number of human beings on planet Earth.
Technology allows us to equal geological
forces. On Earth, mankind has produced,
in a very short period of time, the same
stratigraphic markers as left by the impact
of a massive meteor or processes that take
millions of years.
Indigenous people believe in spirits, and
have no problem with what they cannot
see. They don’t see what’s happening in
the forest, but were taught that something
very complex happens there, which must
be respected. The society exported from
Europe lost the word “veneration”, in the
sense of “I respect something because
it is far behind my comprehension”. The
indigenous people view the forest, animals,
the jaguar, with great respect. We have
lost this, especially due to the influence of
science and rationalism.
Side effects
What links the Amazon, in the north, and
the cities of the south and southeast
of Brazil? How are the so-called flying
rivers affected by the progress heralded
by agribusiness, by the exploration of
nonrenewable natural resources (fossil
and mineral) and by drastic interventions
in the natural landscape, such as the
building of hydroelectric plants?
The Amazon is located in the equatorial
zone, which generates an enormous
amount of heat and water vapor. The
equatorial zone is the motor that generates,
while the polar and temperate zones
serve as the planet’s radiator. We are very
concerned about global warming and
the emission of carbon, but there is little
emphasis on the protection of forests.
More important than carbon is controlling
water vapor and its atmospheric flows, the
phenomena that we call flying rivers. These
“rivers” carry moisture from the ocean,
desalinated by the sun, to the continents,
producing an incredible amount of water
vapor. The water, however, can only get
to the continents because of the forests,
which act as a biotic pump. The Amazon
forest, with its trees, puts around 20 billion
tons of water into the atmosphere on a
daily basis—which is more water than the
Amazon River. The vapor returns from the
atmosphere in the form of rain, spreading
throughout the interior of the continent.
With deforestation, the forest is already
undergoing a process of terminal decline.
We are breaking the biotic pump for
atmospheric moisture. The invasion of the
Amazon is part of the mentality I referred to
previously: we cannot see the vapor, just as
we cannot understand its importance. So,
if I plant soybeans, it’s of no concern. The
European disaster is being repeated here.
Even with proof, linear reasoning will not
regard what it cannot see. In the discussion
of the forest code, our academic group
and SBPC explained the situation to the
politicians. Years later, the Supreme Court
partially conceded our point. But the
European memes are very active in the
minds of Blairo Maggi, Kátia Abreu and the
entire Brazilian ruralist caucus. A backward
oligarchy determines how things will be.
They are only an insignificant fraction of
society, since the times of colonial Brazil.
We say: you are destroying the goose that
lays the golden eggs, agriculture depends
umbilically on the forest… Remove the
forest, agriculture will end, we cannot farm
the desert.
Behavior and micro-politics
Is there some relationship between
the current economic and political
crisis in Brazil and the way we treat the
environment? How does climate change
currently influence disputes over urban
and rural land and those inhabited or
claimed by indigenous peoples?
Mining pervades our national ethos, for
example. Renca, a national reserve, has
been opened to mining. It was the last
reserve connected to the ocean left
intact, which enables the flying rivers to
reach the interior. If the vapor transport
chain is interrupted, the interior will dry
up. And President Michel Temer removed
protection from precisely this area.
The company Icomi mined manganese
in Serra do Navio, in the state of Amapá,
for 50 years, removing 37 billion tons of
the mineral; 85% went to the United States
and Europe. Today manganese costs 2,000
USD/ton. Brazil received as royalties, for 50
years, the equivalent of 0.07 USD/ton. Icomi
paid 12% of their net profits to Brazil, the
highest rate of royalties ever paid. Today,
the highest rate for mining royalties is
3%, paid by Vale and BHP Billiton, the two
companies that destroyed the Doce River.
They were exempt from paying the ICMS tax,
so the State earned nothing despite paying
for all the infrastructure. What’s left? Huge
holes, pollution and deforestation, since
the roads that they created provide access
to those who deforest.
When a mineral is taken from here and
enters a developed economy, it is infinitely
recycled. There scrap iron generates more
money than those who possessed the
original wealth. Traders are the ones who
make the most from commodities, not
Brazil or farmers or agribusiness. Just
like the times in which Europeans came
and traded a mirror to indigenous people
in exchange for gold. The wealth of the
Amazon is being squandered for 0.07 USD/
ton. If Brazil earned what these minerals
were worth on the market, there would be
no economic problems. The country would
be on top if the rules enforced here were
the same rules followed by the countries
that colonized us. Our problem is not
poverty in the Amazon. It is the poverty in
wealth, the mental poverty of the elites.
Experience in the discipline
What practices have you and your
research groups developed at the Centro
de Ciência do Sistema Terrestre [Earth
System Science Center] to promote a
more balanced relationship between
human and nonhuman ecosystems, with
a view to the sustainable development
of Brazil?
I developed a project called Fênix
Amazônico [Amazon Phoenix] (a reference
to the region’s extraordinary capacity for
rebirth), in which I created an ecosystem
of sustainable enterprises in an area of
timber production. I used knowledge that I “vigorous growth”, “unlimited growth”
obtained militating in forestry engineering
and planting to recuperate degraded areas. mentality that governs Wall Street, the
If an earthquake destroys a city, you rebuild London Stock Exchange, Bovespa.
it with bricks, concrete and steel. If the
same happens with a forest, all you have to
do is toss in some seeds and it will rebuild Today we’re back to square one and say
itself—and we don’t stop and take a minute
to respect and venerate the technological
dimension of a seed. Using forest
technology, we propose a system that
produces pioneering fibers from plants.
People from the department of materials
engineering at Universidade Federal de
São Carlos, inspired by the project, have
used this fiber to develop plastic wood.
Wood created from fragments of embaúba
as a component of a sheet pressed with
cement. Where there is degradation,
we can produce fibers and create a
composition of fast and slow cycles. We
will regenerate forests in the Amazon like
the ancient peoples did. It is the future.
Transformative potential
Do you believe that the environmental
crisis can bring about a more holistic
understanding of the earth and
transform the borders that exist
between men and between mankind
and nature?
There are huge distances between
us. Perhaps between the agribusiness
lobby and myself—since I am an
environmentalist—there is more distance
between us than the ends of the universe.
It’s unbridgeable. “They taught me, from
very early on, that I should plant soybeans
to rid the world of hunger.” Actually, the
soybeans are grown to feed pigs, chickens
and cows in China. This generates a
kind of cultural autism, to the point that
someone says we do not need the Amazon
forest, we need soybeans. The cultural
autism that rules society is reminiscent
of a phenomenon in oncology: when a
cell stops working within the system,
and begins to defend only exuberance.
Adjectives like “exuberant economy”,
show this individualistic, cancerous
Egotism introduces a disintegrating
factor—this is finally appearing in biology.
that natural selection is a very important
supporting actor, but the leading actor
is collaboration. The Amazon forest only
functions because of collaboration.
 23°26’N

0°

23°26’S

Why isn’t the southeast

of Brazil arid as the other
regions in the tropics?

This map was developed and designed in collaboration with

Mapping-lab (www.mappinglab.me) for this catalogue to highlight a
layer of the main exhibition map Fluid Landscape.
Land cover
Forests
Arid and Semiarid
Tropical Rainforests
Tropical Deserts
The floods, Paulo 148
the droughts Tavares

In June 2013, while the Brazilian government rushed to

finish the construction of lavish football stadiums and
urban projects to host the 2014 FIFA World Cup—an
event supposed to showcase the much heralded “global
emergence” of South America’s largest economy—a
multitude of popular protests flooded hundreds of
cities throughout the country, converging in mass
demonstrations not witnessed since the movements for
democratic reforms that brought an end to twenty years
of military dictatorship in the 1980s. People took to the
streets demanding better health, education and urban
services; social networks were bubbling with the hashtags
#nãovaitercopa and #semdireitossemcopa [“there will
be no cup”, “no rights no cup”] and rioters attacked
government headquarters, banks, and other symbols of
political and economic power.
Fearing that social mayhem could escalate and
jeopardize the event, security forces imposed a swift
crackdown. In the city centers the military police contained
the protests with tear-gas, rubber-bullets and arbitrary
detentions; in the peripheries, where the projects of the
World Cup and the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro left a
legacy of widespread evictions,1 they deployed the usual 1. “Articulação Nacional dos
means of repression utilized against the poor, terrorizing Comitês Populares da Copa
e Olimpíadas”. In Dossie
the population with curfews, armoured vehicles, and
Megaeventos e violações dos
extrajudicial killings. direitos humanos no Brasil, 2014.
Although attracting much less attention from the Available at comitepopulario.files.
mainstream press, the “Journeys of June” were anticipated wordpress.com/2014/11/ancop_
by a series of rebellions in remote frontier-zones of the dossie2014_web.pdf. Accessed on:
April 6, 2018.
Amazon, far away from the major urban centres and the
public view. On 15 March 2011, the construction sites of
the Complexo Hidrelétrico do Rio Madeira [Madeira River
Hydropower Complex] became the stage for the largest
worker uprising in the recent history of Brazil, triggering

2. Instituto Humanitas Unisinos,
Conjuntura da Semana. A rebelião
de Jirau, n/d; Raul Zibechi,
Rebellion in the Brazilian Amazon,
CIP Americas, April, 2011.
3. Interview with a worker in Belo
Monte, published on April 18, 2013.
Available at: www.youtube.com/
watch?v=XcmcO7KkkiQ. Accessed
on: April 6, 2018.
4. See: R7 Notícias, Mais de 1.500
cidades do Nordeste estão em
situação de emergência por causa
da seca, February 11, 2014; Folha de
S.Paulo, Uma em cada dez cidades
brasileiras já tem epidemia de
dengue, April 19, 2015.
5. UOL, Mais de 82 mil estão
desabrigados com cheias dos rios
Madeira e Acre, March 14, 2014; O
Estado de São Paulo, Cheia do Rio
Madeira atinge novo recorde na
região amazônica, April 3, 2014
6. Lúcio Flávio Pinto, Os
Rios enchem como nunca, o
rodoviarismo chega ao fim,
Amazonia Real, April 12, 2014.
a wave of revolts that quickly spread to several other
mega-construction sites in the Amazon. The first item in
the workers’ list of demands was “ending the truculence
of guards and supervisors, physical and psychological
harassment, and the use of private imprisonment”.2
Two years later, a ten-day-long strike at the
construction site of the Belo Monte Dam on the Xingu
River exposed a similarly oppressive labour regime,
revealing that migrant workers lived in a situation
of “confinement” under constant police surveillance
and aggressions.3 Like the projects built for the World
Cup and the Olympics in the cities, dams and other
mega‑developments that are being installed in the
Amazonian hinterlands became social battlegrounds
for conflicts over rights.
Massive popular protests across the nation—and
the incomprehensible 7×1 defeat to Germany by in the
semi‑finals—were not the only seismic historical events
that shook Brazil in 2013–2014. As striking as the political
convulsions were the extremely harsh droughts that
hit the country in these months. And as the droughts
progressively worsened, the government started to realize
that social unrest was not the only problem menacing the
FIFA World Cup, but that it would also have to deal with the
destabilizing effects of climate change.
By the beginning of 2014 thousands of cities in the
drought-prone northeast declared a state of emergency,
and in the southeast the hydroelectric reservoirs that
supply the metropolitan areas of Rio de Janeiro and São
Paulo were pushed to the brink of collapse, prompting
alarm that water shortages and energy blackouts could
disrupt key services and cripple the games.4
Meanwhile, a disastrous “once in a century” flood
in the Amazon was swallowing vast tracts of forests,
farms, towns and entire riverbank villages, leading to
the displacement of thousands of people. Main roads
and communication networks were disrupted and large
regions were completely cut off for months, causing
food and medicine shortages, impeding the access
of humanitarian operations and leading to outbreaks
of leptospirosis.5
The impacts of what has been called a “tsunami on land”
in the Amazon were so massive that they were indirectly
felt as far away as the metropolitan region of São Paulo.
The flooding forced the suspension of operations at the
Santo Antônio and the Jirau power stations in the Madeira
River Hydropower Complex, two recently built dams
intended to meet the growing energy demand of Brazil’s
economic powerhouse in the southeast, where, at that
same moment, an equally catastrophic extreme weather
front was drying out major hydroelectric reservoirs.6
— 150
Besides the temporal coincidence, there is apparently
no correlation between these exceptional historical
events. Social turbulence and climatic extremes were
perceived and analysed as unrelated episodes pertaining
to separate domains. Whereas the former was located
in socio-political history, the latter was treated as a
de-historicized phenomenon resulting from natural
disturbances, being placed outside the realm of social
conflicts that shape history.
Once observed from a broader perspective, however,
the simultaneous political storms, floods and droughts
that swept over the Brazilian territory appear to be
interdependent events on many different levels, drawing
the contours of a complex environmental-political terrain
in which social and natural forces are interrelated by
manifold interactions that operate across different scales
and temporalities.
Recent scientific studies demonstrate that the Amazon
is responsible for supplying most of the rainfall across
South America, principally to the modernized core-regions
of the continent’s southeast. Wind currents periodically
carry the moisture released by the forest trees in the
atmosphere through the interior of the basin towards
the Andes, and as the giant mountain barrier deflects
the gyre, the vapours migrate across the landmass to the
south, nourishing vast agricultural fields and replenishing
numerous hydroelectric reservoirs along the way.
In the region of São Paulo, where the mega-drought
of 2013–2014 was most severe, as much as 70% of the
rainfall during the wet season is derived from the waters
produced by the Amazon, and therefore the climate of this
region is structurally dependent on the sustainability of
the rainforest, without which it would be an inhospitable
desert-like ecosystem.7 7. Philip M. Fearnside, A água de
The historic floods in the Madeira River in 2014, the São Paulo e a floresta amazônica,
in Ciência hoje, April, 2014.
latest in a string of exceptional floods and droughts
recorded in the Amazon over the past decade, was further
strong evidence that the rainforest’s water-producing
engines are rapidly changing and fracturing, a condition
which in the context of global warming is likely to intensify
exponentially, causing more frequent extreme floods in
the western portion of the basin and at the same time an
incremental process of “savannization” in the southern
and eastern areas.
Rather than simply a natural phenomena, this
ongoing climatic destabilization of the rainforest is
the environmental product of development projects
implemented during the late twentieth century, when
the military dictatorships of South America, seeing
themselves as a force of modernization, sought to

8. Hilton S. Pinto and Eduardo D.
Assad, Global Warming and the
new geography of agricultural
production in Brazil, Brasília:
British Embassy, 2008.
transform the entire basin into a global machine
of resource extraction and commodity export. The
occupation of the forest hinterlands with a series of
mega-developments—continental highways, dams,
agribusiness plantations, oil and mineral extraction
complexes—triggered massive deforestation in a short
period of time, severely damaging the biophysical
structure and ecological resilience of the Amazon. This
project was imposed on local populations by means of
pervasive repression and violence, particularly against
indigenous peoples, who were systematically displaced
and targeted by vicious colonial policies of cultural and
physical extermination.
The political convulsions recently witnessed in the
Amazon were directed against similar planning schemes
devised by the military government to “develop” the
Amazon during the resource rush of the global Cold War.
Their implementation on the ground has also been marked
by widespread rights violations of local communities who
are opposing this project.
—
The numerous ongoing and planned projects to drill
and mine the rainforest, plus the hundreds of mega-
schemes planned to re-engineer its free-floating rivers,
will contribute to enhancing deforestation and global
warming, which in a feedback loop will disrupt the
ecological resilience of the forest and engender a much
less biodiverse and much less fertile environment across
the entire Latin American continent. Regional habitats
will be disrupted, aggravating conflicts over land and
water and so fuelling frontier violence, driving the further
encroachment into indigenous territories and ecological
reserves, and pushing environmental degradation deeper.
Increasing water deficits will compromise the soil of
the most important grain producing regions throughout
Latin America, dramatically reducing the area suitable for
export crops such as coffee, maize and, chiefly, soya. “We
will witness a migration of plants to regions they are not
native to in search of better climatic conditions,” according
to scientists of the Agência Brasileira de Pesquisa em
Agricultura [Brazilian Agricultural Research Agency],8
thus accelerating the expansion of the agricultural frontier
towards the hinterlands of the Amazon.
Climate-induced displacement of plants will be
accompanied by migratory waves of populations of urban
and rural poor whose livelihoods will be equally disrupted
by water shortages and droughts. As with what happened
during the decades of the dictatorship, when the generals
enforced the massive displacement of peasants from the
drought-prone northeast regions in oreder to colonize the
forest hinterlands, “we are about to witness a new exodus 152
to the Amazon,” scientists claim, as a grand contingent will
be forced to “flee from the greatest water crisis that our
history has ever registered”.9 9. Id., Ibid.
Due to migration influx deforestation tends to increase,
and insofar as the Amazon exports huge quantities of
rainfall to the southeast, the loss of forest areas will
further aggravate water shortages and dry spells in
the core modern regions around Buenos Aires and São
Paulo, thereby uprooting more climate refugees and
increasing the pressure on indigenous territories and
ecological reserves.

—
The ensuing environmental impacts of this neo‑colonial/neo-
developmentalist strategy will exacerbate deforestation and
ecological fragmentation, intensifying the effects of climate
change in the Amazon and further disrupting its water-
producing capability, thereby jeopardizing the supply of
rainfall to South America and inevitably engendering extreme
droughts in the populous regions of southeast Brazil.
Experts argue that in São Paulo, the largest urban
agglomeration of the continent, a drastic reduction in
water supply is practically certain to happen in the near
future. As reservoirs and pipelines run dry, water will
become one of the main factors over which urban conflicts
will be fought. Indirectly catalysed by deforestation in the
Amazon, the coming Journeys of June will be ignited by
riots and rebellions over common natural resources, both
in the cities and the hinterlands, while the devastating
social effects of climate change are turning into a question
of national security that will be contained with the
characteristic state repression and violence that rules in
urban peripheries and forest frontiers of Brazil.
The Amazon, the most biodiverse territory on Earth,
is currently one of the world’s deadliest territories for
land defenders and environmental activists. Indigenous
peoples and peasant communities are being forced to
abandon their homelands to open space for transport and
energy infrastructures, corporate extraction enclaves and
industrial plantations and ranches. The people who are
at the frontlines of the battle to protect the environment
in these contested territories are being systematically
murdered, harassed, and persecuted as terrorists.
Strengthening the land and human rights of forest
peoples, guaranteeing the integrity of their territories
and providing support for the sustainable practices of
environmental management developed over centuries,
are therefore forms of strengthening the resilience of the
Amazon’s forest-ocean mechanism and acting upon
the dynamics of the Earth System, helping to balance
the global carbon cycle, keeping the planet cooler and
preserving the hydrological regime of the entire South
American continent.
The combined effects of tough forms of resource
extraction, increasing environmental depletion, shrinking
natural reserves and climate change are not only
driving the constitution of a radically new ecological
order, but also a political one, inscribing the borders,
partitions, enclosures and divisions that are defining a
new geography of global conflicts. In the post-climate
change geopolitical condition, environmental factors will
be decisive in shaping conflicts, inasmuch as power—
and resistance—have turned into “geophysical forces”,
coextensive and consequential with the life-shaping
processes that make the Earth System.

Compiled from a draft

written in 2015.

Paulo Tavares (Campinas-SP,

1980) is an architect based in
Brasília, where he currently holds
an adjunct professor position at
the Faculdade de Arquitetura
e Urbanismo, Universidade de
Brasília. He has published and
lectured widely in different
contexts and locations, including
ETH Zurich, Haus der Kulturen der
Welt, Ireland Biennale, Mercosul
Biennale, and Bienal de São
Paulo. Prior to that, Tavares taught
Design Studio and Spatial Theory
at the School of Architecture of
the Pontificia Universidad Católica
del Ecuador in Quito, and at the
Centre for Research Architecture,
Goldsmiths. He runs the agency
autonoma, a platform dedicated to
spatial research and intervention,
and is a long-term collaborator
with Forensic Architecture.
Architecture, Álvaro 154
urbanism and Rodrigues
geology: an dos Santos
indispensable
combination

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

– Francis Bacon, 1620

THE COMMON DISSOCIATION BETWEEN

ARCHITECTURE, URBANISM AND GEOLOGY

It is highly important to consider that the guiding

concepts of how the relationships between an
enterprise and the natural environment in which it will
interfere are defined, primarily and originally, in the
architectural concept proposed. It is this conception,
determinant in the spatial placement and in the
adjustment of the enterprise to the terrain, which will
influence, as a result, the choice of the construction
procedures and future rules of operation and
maintenance, all essential elements in interrelations
with the natural environment.
In this way, it will be the initial architectural concept
that will determine the success or failure of an enterprise,
regarding the relations of mutual interference that
it establishes with the geological and geotechnical
environment in which it is installed.
Notwithstanding this conceptual premise, serious
and costly geological and geotechnical problems,
such as erosion/silting, flooding, sliding of natural and
landfill slopes, soil settlement or consolidation, massive
production of high risk areas, deterioration of installed
infrastructure, etc., commonly including the loss of many
human lives, have been the result of obvious mismatches
between urban and architectural projects and the natural
characteristics of the terrains on which they are built.
This shows the absence or insufficiency of collaboration
between architects and geologists.
[Fig. 1] A radically inadequate
concept for the natural shape of
the terrain.
[Fig. 2] Steep slopes, naturally
predisposed to mudslides, should
never be the object of urban
occupation.
[Fig. 3] Occupation of shorelines
subject to seasonal rises in sea
level: disaster foretold.
 156

[Fig. 4] The low-income population

is compelled to occupy potentially
high risk land.
 Some practical examples serve to clarify. By insisting
on the creation of flat areas using extensive earthworking
methods, for example, the architectural projects
associated with urban expansion—whether intended for
residential or commercial construction—and built on areas
of accentuated relief, subscribe to a culture of flattened
earth. Earthworking services are obsessively used to
produce flat plateaus. Result: creation of areas at risk of
mudslides; exposure of deeper soils, which are extremely
susceptible to erosion; intense erosion processes in
excavations, landfills and dumps; destruction of existing
infrastructure; silting of drainage channels; and increased
flooding. An urban and architectural concept guided by
areas of accentuated relief would avoid, from the outset,
all these problems. [fig. 1, 2, 3]
When intending to occupy strips of shoreline seasonally
subject (in the scope of geological time) to the action of
the sea, architectural projects associated with private
tourism or business enterprises have resulted, in many
cases, in clamorous failures, with the destruction or
structural impairment of the facilities. The protection
measures for the facilities normally adopted in these cases
are characterized by the same ignorance of the dynamics
of natural geological and marine processes, and end up
compromising local enterprises even more, not to mention
those situated in adjacent regions.
In summary, in the absence of technically sound urban
planning, land is occupied that, because of its high natural
susceptibility to destructive geological events, should
never be. Even in areas of low natural risk, with more
favorable conditions, which could actually be occupied,
projects are so technically inadequate that they end up
generating situations of high geotechnical risk.
Various other examples could be given, all of
them witness to the urgent need for architecture
and urbanism to incorporate practices that take into
account the geological, geotechnical and hydrological
characteristics of the terrains that they use. This
new culture would automatically result in a closer
collaboration between architecture and geology, in this
case, engineering geology, a professional specialty
that focuses on the technical mastery of the interface
between man and nature.

CHALLENGE

As a concise guideline, we believe that Brazilian

architecture faces the following challenge: taking the bold
and creative step to adjust projects to nature instead of,
bureaucratically, trying to adjust nature to their projects.
 COMPARTIMENTOS CARACTERÍSTICAS DO MEIO FÍSICO PROBLEMAS EXISTENTES OU ESPECIFICAÇÕES TÉCNICAS OBRIGATÓRIAS

GRUPOS tipo Geomorfologia Geotecnia ESPERADOS PARA A ÁREA PARA O LOTE/CONSTRUÇÃO

Áreas de platô, Solos profundos. Solos
topografia suave superficiais mais resistentes
em maciço à erosão e de melhor
cristalino. comportamento geotécnico.
i Solos residuais mais
profundos com grande
suscetibilidade à erosão. Boa
qualidade para fundações.
Erosões, uma vez removida Impedir terminantemente que Atender exigências do Código
a camada de solos águas servidas ou pluviais de Obras para áreas de
superficiais (~3 m). sejam lançadas para encosta topografia suave.
a jusante sem proteção
adequada.

Áreas ii
passíveis de
ocupação iii

Encostas Solos rasos (~2,0 m), em sua Franca possibilidade Área de urbanização Terminantemente proibida
predominante- maior parte coluvionares. de deslizamentos a desaconselhada, somente a execução de cortes na
mente retilíneas qualquer ação de corte, podendo receber encosta. Cuidar para que as
com inclinação sobrecarregamento ou infraestruturas leves águas pluviais e recebidas de
iv entre 20° e 30°. recebimento de fluxo de associadas a atividades montante não sejam lançadas
drenagem concentrado educacionais de lazer/ para a encosta jusante sem a
originado de montante. ecoturismo. proteção adequada.

Segmentos de Solos rasos (~1,0 m) Grande suscetibilidade Restrição absoluta a qualquer —

encosta com coluvionares podendo
declividades haver exposições rochosas.
v superiores a 30°. Normalmente trincas, fissuras
e solos fofos logo abaixo da
ruptura de declive superior.
a deslizamentos tipo de urbanização e uso
translacionais rasos. físico da área. Eventuais
Grande vulnerabilidade a ocupações existentes deverão
intervenções antrópicas. ser removidas. Setores
desmatados deverão ser
reflorestados.

Áreas não vi
ocupáveis non vii
edificandi
Faixas de risco Solos profundos, podendo Grande probabilidade Restrição absoluta a qualquer —
situadas na crista haver acúmulo de material de ser atingida ou por tipo de urbanização e uso
ou na base de escorregado. descalçamento (crista) ou físico da área. Eventuais
encostas definidas Topografia suave. por material escorregado ocupações existentes ou
viii como suscetíveis a (sopé). deverão ser removidas, ou se
deslizamentos. uma análise custo/benefício
sugerir, protegidas por obras
geotécnicas.
[Fig. 5] The Geotechnical Map of
the hills of the cities of Santos and
São Vicente (SP, Brazil) identifies
the different geological and
geotechnical compartments and
the options for urbanization and
construction for a safe occupation
of these areas.
[Fig. 6] A typical Risk Map
indicating the compartments with
different levels of risk of an area
already occupied and affected
by instability events. The Map
is accompanied by instructions
on emergency and corrective
measures for each level of risk.
SOCIAL FACTOR 160
In Brazil, as in most poor tropical and subtropical
countries, aggravating social circumstances lend a
tragic quality to this technological mismatch. In these
regions, a low-income family can only afford to build—or
rent—a dwelling that fits their meager budget if they
accept some combination of the six following conditions:
consirable distance from urban centers, lack of safety,
unhealthy conditions, environmental discomfort, unsafe
construction and illegal land use. This situation leads
the poor population, inexorably, toward three types of
housing: slums, tenement-houses or outlying urban
zones. Especially in the latter, the very low-income
population has played a major active and passive role,
in the serious widespread tragedy of areas of risk that
occur on terrains of higher relief, low-lying flood-prone
areas and along the banks of streams. [fig. 4]

STRUCTURAL SOLUTIONS

If the objective is the radical interruption of the installation

of new areas of risk (which requires a preventive approach)
and the elimination of existing areas of risk (which requires
a corrective approach), four essential structural measures
are necessary:

–– Sensible planning of urban growth, in order to stop

the occupation of areas that are highly susceptible
to destructive geological events, and the adoption
of urban plans and sound building techniques in the
occupation of geologically urbanizable land.
–– Implementation of housing programs that meet the
needs of the low-income public for home ownership,
reducing pressure on the occupation of land
inappropriate for urbanization.
–– Evacuation of existing high-risk areas on land that is
highly susceptible to destructive geological events, and
relocation of residents to new housing that is both safe
and decent.
–– Urban and geotechnical consolidation of existing
high, medium and low risk areas on geologically
urbanizable land.

TWO VALUABLE TOOLS

Two cartographic documents stand out as highly effective

tools to guide preventive and corrective actions: the
Geotechnical Map and Risk Map, respectively.
 The Geotechnical Map is a cartographic document
that shows the behavior of different homogenous
geological and geomorphological compartments of an
area, according to typical requests for a certain type
of intervention, such as urbanization. It also indicates
the best technical options to carry out a technically and
economically successful intervention.
The Geotechnical Map stands out, therefore, as a
tool for prevention and planning. It provides public
administrators, architects and urbanists the necessary and
essential information to avoid occupying areas naturally
disposed to destructive geotechnical and hydrological
events, and uses the most appropriate urban concepts and
construction techniques to occupy areas with geological
restrictions, but which are potentially urbanizable.
The Risk Map delimits, in an area or region already
occupied, the zones or compartments subject to a certain
type of occurrence (for example, landslides) in a given type
of occupation (for example, urban), defining different levels
of risk (with four internationally established levels: Low,
Medium, High and Very High) and the necessary measures
that need to be taken for each one. The Risk Map applies,
therefore, to situations with already detected or ongoing
problems, and is a tool for emergency actions by Civil
Defense or for the correction of existing risks. [fig. 5, 6]

The present essay had the
collaboration of the geologists Cássio
Roberto da Silva (Serviço Geológico
do Brasil – CPRM), Eduardo Soares
de Macedo (Instituto de Pesquisas
Tecnologicas – IPT), Lídia Keiko
Tominaga (Instituto Geológico – IG) and
the architect Cristina Boggi da Silva
Rafaelli (Instituto Geológico – IG).
Álvaro Rodrigues dos Santos (Batatais-SP, 1942)
has a degree in geology from the University of
São Paulo (USP) and is a senior researcher at the
Instituto de Pesquisas Tecnológicas (IPT). He is
specialized in engineering geology, geotechnics
and environment and has authored several technical
papers and books. He won the Ernesto Pichler Award
for Brazilian Engineering Geology. He is CEO of ARS
Geologia Ltda.
5
The map is
not the territory:
a retraced border
How unimpeded
is access to the
Brazilian border?
The term territory was introduced by botany
and zoology as a synonym of the area
wherein a determined species is dominant.
With the development of the human
sciences, it was incorporated into various
areas of knowledge, taking on distinct
senses. The concept of human and urban
geography is the key for understanding
its use in studies of architecture and
urbanism in Brazil. Territory is related to
a socioeconomic formation: a population
in a determined space,1 as well as to other
variants that present important political
aspects for the discussion of the territoriality
of border areas.2 In the conception of
geographer Friedrich Ratzel, a territory is
submitted to the activity of a state, which
exercises the role of defense. For Stuart
Elden, professor of political theory and
geography, territory is a political technology.
Thus, a territory necessarily implies a matter
of limits and borders.
A territory, however, is not automatically
bound to the physical characteristics of a
place, but rather to the political dynamics
between it and countries, states and cities.
As stated by Celma Chaves Pont Vidal in her
essay, the borders pass over the physical
environment, bearing relation to deeper
symbolic and subjective questions.
How to understand these concepts
in light of the vast Brazilian continental
political border is a topic explored in this
chapter. The political border of Brazil with
its neighboring South American countries is
from the order of 16,886 kilometers long, and
was constructed by the Portuguese and the
Spanish in the years of colonization without
taking into account the dynamics and
spatial flows of this land’s native inhabitants.
Involved with political aims, the border was
shaped according to interests, especially
commercial ones, and was guided by
physical limits or obstacles on the ground,
in total disregard for the existing societies
already established there. All of this took
place as though the map were found already
made, as exemplified in the work by Runo
Lagomarsino, who finds cracks similar to
the map of South America in the concrete
of the marquee in Ibirapuera Park.
Between the establishment of the border
and the conception of the Brazilian territory
and that of its neighbors, it is necessary to
consider the socioeconomic dynamics of
these areas. Approached by Vidal and Gabriel
Duarte, this aspect presents what Ailton
Krenak calls a fluid border—that which does
not concern the physical world but rather the
culture of a society. The physical institution
of territorial limits does not definitively reflect
the social relations of those spaces, which
undergo constant modification.
Fundamental for the understanding
of the border areas, the so-called twin
or triplet border cities are those where
populations from different origins, cultures
and economies come together, creating
plural realities. As pointed out by Krenak,
we need to understand them as areas
of the interaction of flows, based on the
indigenous experience of exchange,
rather than on experiences of the capture
of identity. The line, more than a physical
limiter, can be a place of concentration
and irradiation of activities; or, as stated by
Duarte, not an edge, but a core.
Beyond the conceptual barriers,
establishing border territories as units of
larger cultural spheres requires a profound
understanding of these locations. There
is a need to deal with distinct historical
evolutions. In some older contexts,
confrontations resulted in the construction
of physical elements of territorial protection,
such as forts and walls. Others places
are recent territories: isolated cities and
“company towns,” disconnected from their
larger context. Colonization, productive
bases and infrastructure, among other
factors, impact their organizational, political
and morphological structure.3
There are 558 border cities in Brazil, or
more than 10% of all cities in the country.4
They are different in terms of their role in
relation to Brazil and to South America,
with which we lack interconnectivity and
common knowledge.
If the territories are in constant
transformation, they can be seen as flows
and, therefore, they should be treated
as such through dynamic proposals and
collective values. Maybe, then, these the
border regions could become enriching
moments for those who are in them or
connected to them. As stated by geographer
Marcel Roncayolo, the city “is a particular
territory or a combination of territories.”5
the MAP
The Map Is Not the Territory overlays the
political borders of Brazil to the real limits
that define the perception of this territory.
It is thus structured based on two types of
limits—the instituted and the perceived—
illustrating the layers that compose the
border and defining the zones of contraction
and dilation in this separation.
Rotating the map 90 degrees reinforces
the image of the border as a wall and
distances the observer from the traditional
image of the South American territory.
Traced in red, the possible paths along the
border include highways, rivers and aerial
stretches. The administrative divisions of
the countries give way to the subdivisions
that in fact define the experience of these
spaces: the intersection between the
biomes, the freshwater ecoregions, customs
control points, the cities and the urban
agglomerations, indigenous reservations and
environmental preservation areas, rivers and
bodies of water, the memories of the Jesuit
missions, the special border army squads in
the Amazon, the seaports and airports.
The main points are accompanied by data
about the proportions of inhabitants (men
and women, rural and urban, foreigners,
active architects) and visually convey the
intensity of the relations in the different
stretches of the border, revealing various
levels of permeability and interaction from
the country’s North to South. While in Chuí
(RS), the twin Uruguayan and Brazilian cities
pulsate together, linked by an avenue built
due to the relations of exchange between
the two countries, in Oiapoque (AP) the
access of Brazilians to French Guiana—by a
378-meter-long bridge completed in 2011 but
opened to traffic only in 2017—still depends
on special permission.
1. Definition used by Brazilian
geographer Milton Santos from
the 1970s onward. See Antonio
Carlos Robert Moraes, “Território,”
in Revista Orientação, n. 5. São
Paulo: Instituto de Geografia da
Universidade de São Paulo, 1984
2. The Portuguese word for
border, fronteira comes from the
Latin frons or frontis and can also
signify in fronte, “in front.” See
Maria Lucia Torrecilha, “A gestão
compartilhada como espaço de
integração na fronteira Ponta Porã
(Brasil) e Pedro Juan Caballero
(Paraguai).” Doctoral thesis,
Universidade de São Paulo, 2013.
3. IPEA DATA. Banco de Dados,
2017. Available at: <www.ipeadata.
gov.br/Default.aspx>. Retrieved
on: April 18, 2017. Maria Lucia
Torrecilha, “Na linha da fronteira,”
Colóquio Internacional Sobre o
Comércio e Cidade: uma relação
de origem, 2015. Available at: www.
labcom.fau.usp.br/wp-content/
uploads/2015/05/1_cincci/041.pdf.
Retrieved on: April 18, 2018.
4. Ministry of National Integration.
Proposta de Reestruturação do
Programa de Desenvolvimento
da Faixa de Fronteira. Bases
para uma Política Integrada de
Desenvolvimento Regional para a
Faixa de Fronteira. Brasília, 2005.
Available at: <www.retis.igeo.ufrj.
br/wp-content/uploads/2005-
livro-PDFF.pdf>. Retrieved on:
April 18, 2018.
5. Regina Maria Prosperi Meyer.
“O urbanismo: entre a cidade e o
território,” in Cienc. Cult. [online],
vol. 58, n. 1, pp.38–41, 2006.
Runo Lagomarsino
ContraTiempos [Setbacks], 2010
Dia projection loop, 27 original
images in a Kodak slide projection
carousel with timer
Paulo Nazareth
Premium Bananas/Mapa Guarani
[Premium Bananas/Guarani Map],
2012
Sewing and mixed media on tissue
interview: 174
Ailton Krenak

Ailton Krenak (Rio Doce-MG,

1953) is a historic leader of the
indigenous movement. Since the
1980s he has dedicated himself to
this work, having played a crucial
role in achieving indigenous rights
in the Constituent Assembly
of 1988. He participated in the
founding of the União das Nações
Indígenas [Union of Indigenous
Nations - UNI] and the Aliança
dos Povos da Floresta [Alliance
of the Peoples of the Forest], and
conceived the Festival de Dança
e Cultura Indígena [Festival of
Indigenous Dance and Culture]
in Serra do Cipó (MG). In 2016, he
received the title professor honoris
causa from Universidade Federal
de Juiz de Fora (UFJF), where he
teaches Culture and History of
indigenous peoples.
Walls

What are the main borders in

dispute today in Brazil?
Borders in Brazil are always shifting,
demarcating or suggesting boundaries
between worlds, which could be identified
as worlds at war. It is a war in which we see
an insistence on handing modernity over to
what is archaic. At some point, disputing
this territory we call Brazil, primarily from
the 20th century up until now, we became
comfortable with the idea that we have a
stable plan for the country. This is fiction.
These borders have never stabilized.
Indigenous people are the ones who suffer
most from this arrangement of internal
borders in Brazil. When we think about
the reality of 300 ethnic groups, peoples,
experiencing a conflict of identity and
rights, all these borders hinge on the idea
of a culturally diverse world. And not only
thinking of borders as conflict, but also as
the possibility of interpenetration of worlds,
constantly interacting.

Evidence

What is characteristic about

indigenous occupations that straddle
international borders, and how does
this line organize the space where the
indigenous people live?
We have transborder peoples who cross
back and forth, lending an autonomy and
fluidity to these relationships, protected
by Convention 169, an international accord
on indigenous and tribal populations that
protects freedom of movement for people
who live on borders between nations. The
principle of freedom of movement for
communities who do not have passports is
very creative. We should think more about
international instruments that can ensure
this fluidity between peoples, so we can
gradually move away from this archaic
standard that the colonizers brought to
the Americas—a throwback to the times
of castles, peoples suffering from the
plague, from war. Borders are a medieval
thing. If we want a world of peace, we have
to create a world where borders are not
barriers. The idea of an imposed border,
such as the demarcation of indigenous
lands, is an aggression against the original
peoples of the Americas. We call for the
demarcation of indigenous lands by the
Brazilian government, as if it were a lesser
evil. Since we live in a culture in which
borders indicate domain, our call for a
border is more for an external rather than
internal interpretation.
Side effects
What type of border does economic
development based on the extraction
of primary materials, such as mining,
represent for the existence of
indigenous reserves?
It represents a constant threat and imminent
risk of disaster. Extractivism, primarily when
backed by financial capital, establishes an
active and invasive border in different places,
ecologies and territories. The Amazon
lies inside the borders of Brazil, but the
environment is not in the souls, hearts and
minds of people who plan public policies.
Our Ministry of the Environment is much
more concerned with the management of
urban ills, neglecting the great wealth we
have. We need to call attention to the great
importance of the Amazon, to the cultural
complexity of the peoples who still live
autonomously in this region. Because these
peoples are not hostages to the market
or the food industry, they are capable of
self-sustained food security. In addition to
invasion by predatory extractivism, there
is the encroachment by cattle raising
and monocultures, which conflict with
traditional farming practices. These borders
are constantly moving horizontally and
vertically. Today, in southern Brazil, there
is a serious threat to the Guarani Aquifer,
one of the largest fresh water reserves in
the world. Transnational corporations want
to appropriate and sell off the aquifer, and
the current Brazilian government is very
susceptible to this type of pressure.
Behavior and micro-politics
What do indigenous people understand
by borders or limits?
Once, I heard a story about a Kaiapó
chief, from Xingu, who was speaking with
a Guarani, from coastal São Paulo: “My
relative, I’m very grateful to you. You
spent 200 years on the coast enduring the
presence of the white man while we were
protected from this invasion in Xingu. They
arrived on our land only in the 20th century,
in the 1940s; and on your land, they arrived
over 300 years ago. You have sustained
great losses, protecting our border.
Because of the siege of white culture, many
of you no longer speak the mother tongue,
and have lost important traditions from
your ancestral culture.” It is a fluid border;
it is not physical, it is cultural. Habits
change completely with this interaction
between cultures. There are people who
believe that it is a natural tendency for all
of us to form a type of global community,
where differences are diluted. I see this
dilution as a type of autophagy. It is a
joint body of self-impoverishment. We are
experiencing global impoverishment: that
which appeared to be positive was actually
a loss of quality of life for the peoples and
the landscape.
Experience in the discipline
What other territories are drawn
up through collaboration between
indigenous peoples, as in the case of
the União das Nações Indígenas [Union
of Indigenous Nations – UNI] and the
Aliança dos Povos da Floresta [Alliance
of the Peoples of the Forest]? How are
these interactions related to the idea of
the Brazilian nation?
There is an idea out there that all types of
diversity—people, genders, of everything—
have their place guaranteed. If we were
to extend this idea to borders, in a world
with all this mobility, what would this
place be like? A hologram? A place in a
constant state of reconfiguration? In the
1980s, we thought of the Aliança dos Povos
da Floresta as an affective alliance, as a
way of allowing the flow and presence
of each culture in different places. When
discussions began on the European
Union in the 1990s, they tried to dilute the
hardness of internal borders and create a
flow that benefited the economy. Suddenly,
the economy became more important
than the sharing of culture. I believe it is
difficult for us to provoke creative flows
of relationships; it is difficult for us to
relate to the fluidity of borders between
our peoples. The Guarani are in Bolivia,
in Paraguay, in Argentina, which creates
misunderstandings, like the notion they
come from Paraguay. This was always a
shared territory.
Transformative potential
These fixed narratives of the world,
whether from Trump or Kim Jong-un, plant
walls inside our heads, inside our hearts.
Instead of becoming bogged down in
this, we could consider interchangeable
worlds. The Ticuna, for example, live on
the border between Brazil and Columbia,
on the Solimões River. They hunt, live and
trade with people without asking who is
Columbian or who is Brazilian. They are
able to live on the border without it limiting
their relationships. The best way to reduce
conflict is by flows interacting, which is
very different than integrating. Integration
is when an active agent captures the
identities of others; interaction is when
everyone can exchange, when there
is mutuality. I think this occurs in the
indigenous territories, because there is no
such thing as private property.

What attempts have been made to

create a region of cooperation between
Brazil and other countries of the
Amazon region?
There was an experiment that coincided
with the initiative of the Amazon
Cooperation Treaty (ACT), at the end of the
1970s, which would’ve been marvelous if
it had been developed. Then president of
Venezuela, Carlos Andrés Pérez, perhaps
inspired by Unesco programs, proposed
the creation of an Amazon biosphere
reserve, to be shared between Brazil
and Venezuela. This region includes the
Yanomâmi territory (11 million hectares),
which at the time suffered greatly from
an invasion of illegal mining operations. It
would serve as a mechanism to maintain
the autonomy of these peoples and
safeguard their immense territory. This
progressive idea received a primal
response from then president of Brazil
José Sarney: a project called Calha Norte,
the occupation of the border with military
barracks. Today, in the midst of a very
serious socioeconomic crisis, this dream
became a nightmare and what we are
having to deal with is a migratory crisis
between the two countries.
This map was developed and designed in collaboration with
Mapping-lab (www.mappinglab.me) for this catalogue to highlight a
layer of the main exhibition map The Map is not the Territory.
 Amazon biome
Potential carbon gain
Indigenous territory
Natural protected areas

- inhabitants + inhabitants

BRAZIL
The horizon Gabriel 180
is just the Duarte
beginning:
borders, cities
and identities

REGERE FINES, OR THE IMPOSITION OF LIMITS

Yo no sé de dónde soy, mi casa está en la frontera

Y las fronteras se mueven, como las banderas.
– Jorge Drexler, Frontera, 19991 1. I don’t know where I’m from,
my home is on the border / And
borders move, like flags.
In the song Frontera (Border), by Uruguayan composer
Jorge Drexler, the fleeting nature of the South American
borderlands is praised as the ethos of very particular
identities: one of the border itself, imprecise and
blurred; and that of the border dweller, nomadic
and deterritorialized.2 This dual quality of the South 2. Anthony Giddens, The
American borderlands is unique and can be traced Consequences of Modernity.
Stanford: Stanford University
back from the meticulously planned and violent clashes
Press, 1990.
between pre-Columbian civilizations and European
colonizers, to the independence projects of regional
governments. From the imprecise definition of the initial
colonial occupations of South America to the oscillation
of territorial control due to military and economic
interventions, distinctive types of territorial in-betweens
(transition zones) emerged.3 3. Brasil, Ministério da
As national borders are not as impermeable as Integração Nacional. Proposta
de Reestruturação do Programa
governments wish, their rigidity overlooks the way de Desenvolvimento da Faixa de
numerous social, economic and cultural practices Fronteira. Brasília: Ministério da
inadvertently disregard constraints set by borderland Integração Nacional, 2005.
control policies. The border is more than just a
geopolitical fact. It represents a forced sociocultural
rupture, one that can be illustrated by the analogy with
the Latin expression regere fines, which literally means
the tracing of lines that limit something, define the end. In 4. Claude Raffestin, “A ordem e a
the Catholic Church, regere fines is a ritual carried out by desordem, ou os paradoxos da
fronteira”, in Tito Carlos Machado de
priests before the construction of temples, defining clear Oliveira (ed.), Território sem limites:
boundaries to sacred and non-sacred spaces.4 These estudos sobre fronteiras. Campo
religious procedures and the marking of national borders Grande: Ed. UFMS, 2005, p.10.

5. Michel de Certeau, The Practice
of Everyday Life. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984.
6. Néstor García Canclini,
Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for
Entering and Leaving Modernity.
Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2005.
7. [The notion of limit is in itself
artificial, a creation of civilization, of
mankind. (…) There is not a strong
border, no matter which natural
conditions or military defenses are
in place, for a weak nation, without
principles.] Oswaldo Aranha,
Fronteiras e limites (a política do
Brasil). Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa
Nacional, 1940, p.43.
in Latin America share more procedural coincidences.
National sovereignty is enforced through the definition
of limits, the clear difference between inside and outside,
between us and them, between order and chaos.
However, the manifestations of regere fines in South
American borders create short-circuits with preexisting
contexts, where transgressions are inevitable. This
condition is particularly visible throughout the borders of
South America, whose legacies of territorial occupation
(urban, rural and everything between the two) do
not necessarily abide by international agreements in
their everyday practices.5 Today, as South American
governments struggle with troublesome integration
processes, their borderlands offer alternative modes of
urbanism (both “aboriginal” and “foreign”) and unique
hybrid cultures that are seldom accounted for. The ways
life in these regions bypasses imposed geopolitical
limits and control mechanisms are formidable examples
of how—sometimes—the ‘bottom-up’ prevails.
As these regions were generated out of the shifting
territorial limits of colonies in the continent, many
specific territorial systems and networks evolved amidst
geopolitical inaccuracies. Be it the Neutral Territories
(Campos Neutrales) of the pampas, the networks of
the Jesuit Missions (Misiones), the rubber extraction
zones of the Amazon (seringais), the mining compounds
in Potosi and Jujuy, among others, all evolved into
cohesive territorial systems with common cultures that
persist today. Their identities became highly hybridized
and hard to categorize.6 The alternation of power in
these contexts created urbanized transition points,
fundamental to the resilience of local economic systems.
Such points appear in the form of twin—sometimes
triple—border cities where different powers and interests
converge. In the current troubled political scenario for
South American regional integration, the recognition,
and identification of how borderlands and their cities fuel
regional networks are crucial. This argument motivated
the making of an alternative cartography of the border,
one where it is not the edge, but its core. This essay
narrates the making of this map and the conceptual
challenges that permeated it.
THE MAP AND THE REWRITING OF BORDERS
A noção de limite é em si própria artificial, a criação
de civilização, da humanidade. […] Não há fronteira
forte, não importa quais condições naturais ou defesas
militares existam, para uma nação fraca, sem princípios.
– Oswaldo Aranha7
 182

[fig. 1] The border should not limit,

but radiate. Image: Gabriel Duarte
and Barbara Graeff, 2018.
 The cartographic exercise that dialogues with this
essay is titled “The Map is not the Territory” and set
in motion two empiric investigations on how one can
visualize the dichotomy between the lived (experienced)
dimension of the South American borderlands and their
institutionally defined boundaries. The first aimed at
pragmatically identifying continuous spatial features
that cross borders and are bisected by them. The ones
that more commonly exemplified this condition were, of
course, natural. The continuities of biomes, watersheds,
aquifers, forests, relief, among others, express the lived/
defined dichotomy of the border. They exist and are
continuous, but never perceived or represented entirely.
The second traced an imagined (but verisimilar) journey
along the western international border of Brazil. This
itinerary suggests real possibilities for a hypothetical
trip throughout the landscapes that were revealed by the
first investigation.
The first step on this was essentially procedural. The
map had to be drawn from a spine, the borders, from
the inside out. The border, in this case, should not limit
but radiate [fig. 1]. This challenges traditional drawing
methods, where boundaries are drawn first and contents
added later (a lot like traditional maps, whose main
borders are drafted as the framework for the marking of
subdivisions and locations). In this case, the border plays
the role of a “catalytic threshold”, which highlights the
spatial components that should be added to the map. This
method uses the border not only as a mapping reference
but embeds it with a gravitational quality, one that directs
looks and attention.
In practical terms, this alternative map of the
borderlands would mainly be a collaged patchwork
of different geographic databases. In principle, the
making of this map does not offer necessarily original
content. What it actually does is offer a new perspective
(a new frame) to territorial realities that are currently
disassociated. Despite the seemingly simple task,
this collage involved the complex synchronization of
cartographic datasets from completely independent
international sources. The merging of different
geographic surveys that actually depict the same
continuous landscapes revealed astonishing conditions
that are, most of the time, only partially seen [fig. 2].
Different landscapes that keep on being understood as
separate entities, when reality shows otherwise.
The hypothetical itinerary that interweaves the entire
map pragmatically demonstrates the possibilities and
difficulties for one to effectively engage the borderlands
as a spatial entity [fig. 3]. Even though the map reveals a
series of continuities, most of the time those are hardly
 184

[fig. 2] The continuity of trans-border

landscapes. Image: Gabriel Duarte
and Barbara Graeff, 2018.
[fig. 3] The hypothetical itinerary
weaving the border through actual
paths. Image: Gabriel Duarte and
Barbara Graeff, 2018.

8. M. C. Castro; Lia Osorio
Machado; Rebeca Steiman; Letícia
Parente; Paulo Peiter; André Reyes
Novaes; Cristiane Adiala; Flavia
Lins de Barros; Maurício Martins;
Pedro Fernandes Neto; João
Sousa Lima; Lucimar Arararuna,
Terra limitanea. Atlas da fronteira
continental do Brasil. Rio de
Janeiro: UFRJ/CNPq, 2002.
9. Néstor García Canclini,
op. cit. p.xxv.
accessed (except for very localized populations). This
makes evident the ethos in the wordplay in the title of the
map: the discord between the lived and sensed reality
and that represented through political cartography. To a
certain extent, this was a very cynical experiment, where
cartography showed its limitation by exposing them using
its own terms, a map.
TERRA LIMITANEA, THE CASE OF THE
SOUTHERN BORDERLANDS
Among the relationships that the map reveals, the
emergence of urbanity is particularly important to
address. Beyond the evident continuities that are
overlooked by the artificial limits of the borders, twin
border cities offer the opportunity to be specifically
understood from design and planning perspectives to
re-encounter a locally lost agency in territorial scales.
Having historically relied on their complementarities,
such cities (precisely identified in the map) continue
to play the role of gateways toward larger territorial
systems that bypass regimental borders. Such heritage
is still apparent today in their everyday lives and in the
implementation of international treaties and policies.
The intermediary positions that they assumed are still
valid and (loosely) officially recognized. Comparable to
the border transition zones created by the Romans in
Britain, the terra limitanea,8 where locals and the families
of the military could settle down in less controlled zones,
South American twin border cities thicken the frontier
lines, creating networked regions whose articulation
depends on them. In order to describe, document and
analyze them it is necessary to rethink the traditional
lexicons of urbanism and architecture to better
accommodate their hybrid features. The basis for this
analytical challenge stems from the concept of “hybridity”
by Argentinean anthropologist, Nestor García Canclini. In
his words, hybridizations are “socio-cultural processes
in which discrete structures or practices, previously
existing in separate form, are combined to generate new
structures, objects, and practices”.9
The hybrid conditions found in twin border cities are
particularly identifiable in the southern borders among
Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, where the occupation
patterns of the pampas landscape evolved into a highly
networked system of intensive agriculture and cattle
raising. This region is one of the most (if not the most)
neglected and disputed regions in South America. Its
political shape was subject to numerous negotiations and
fierce battles between the Portuguese and the Spanish.
[fig. 4] Gaucho boy training for a
rodeo in Santana do Livramento
(Brazil). Photography: Gabriel
Duarte, 2013.
[fig. 5] Cattle raising field in the
pampas landscape close to the
border towns of Monte Caseros
(Argentina) and Bella Unión
(Uruguay). Photography: Gabriel
Duarte, 2013.
[fig. 6] Pampas landascape in Rio
Grande do Sul (Brazil). Photography:
Gabriel Duarte, 2013.
[fig. 7] Gauchos in typical attire
attending festivities of the
Farroupilha Revolution in the twin
border town of Rivera (Uruguay)
and Santana do Livramento (Brazil).
Photography: Gabriel Duarte, 2013.
Unlike in other parts of South America, the Spanish
occupation in the pampas—the vast plains that stretch
over the south of Brazil (in the State of Rio Grande do
Sul), most of Uruguay and Argentina (in the Provinces
of Buenos Aires, La Pampa, Santa Fe, Entre Ríos and
Córdoba)—was extremely rarefied until the 16th Century if
compared to many regions in the Andes. The pampas, and
the rivers La Plata and Paraná were regarded as gateways
to other regions where rare mineral extraction was thriving.
This condition resulted in an intensive oscillation of
territorial power in the region. The striking vagueness
of political control in the region came to the point of
forcing the official creation of portions of land that
belonged to no one, the Neutral Fields (Campos
Neutrales). These strips of uninhabited land that
stretched from the Taim marshlands to the Chuy creek,
were formed to avoid direct confrontations between
Portuguese and Spanish settlers and were created by
the Treaty of San Ildefonso, signed by both empires
through the mediation of Pope Pius VI. Former military
from both Spain and Portugal later occupied them.
Curiously, such lack of political rule did not foster a hub
of anarchy in the region but created the opportunity
for a seamless culture to emerge, one that, from the
beginning, was not constrained by artificial limits,
creating a whole culture out of ephemerality.
Today, the remnants of this era still persist in the
mythic culture of the gaucho, the South American
equivalent to a cowboy [fig. 4, 5]. The monotonous
regularity and anonymous extension of the pampas are
not disadvantages, but the very condition that allows it
to be understood and function as one [fig. 6, 7]. Political
borders are nothing but a virtual limit to the networked
systems that live through it. And the twin cities that
pinch its surface are not isolated occupations. They are
the outposts, or moments of intensification, of a larger
territorial logic, one that relies on the legacy of the
everyday nomadism of the gaucho. The metonymic of
the gaucho exemplifies this notion perfectly, one of being
constantly in motion and not belonging to any place.
It is possible to assume that the emergence of the urban
in the pampas is also embedded with this same transient
quality, one that cannot be understood in isolation. Among
the cities that permeate this landscape, the ones located
on national borders stand out due to their common
feature of occupying intermediary positions in regional
commercial and agricultural processes that dwell on the
remains of historical networks. These cities do not have
a logic in themselves but depend on external polarities.
The border here is seen as the threshold that provides an
impulse, not impermeability.
 Today, especially considering the integration challenges 188
proposed in the last decades by initiatives throughout
South America, it is possible to foresee the benefits that
discussing the adaptable urbanisms of twin border cities
can offer in this scenario. The current events on the South
American geopolitical stage—with the implementation
of infrastructural projects in transportation, energy, and
telecommunications—point towards the need for radical
changes in how the region marks its position in the global
market as a cohesive community. How can one think
of complementary international planning and design
actions that consider the transient and hybrid qualities
of border territories? How should the role of border cities
be rethought to merge efforts that take advantage of
their conditions? How are the currently proposed shifts
in infrastructure in the continent going to transform local
cultures and economies?
Those are not easy questions. And in the same way
that the operational logic behind South American
borderlands and their twin cities depends on movements
and transitions, this issue requires similar modes of
understanding. The imagined itinerary traced through the
landscapes identified in the map demonstrates that the
context of operations present in the borderlands does not
require punctual studies. To truly grasp the complexity
of this, a continuous and transnational approach must
be used. One that is not necessarily governed by virtual,
institutional limits, but by the way these landscapes
have fostered different types of regional networks
throughout history.
Additional references
–– ABINZANO, Roberto Carlos. Las regiones de frontera:
espacios complejos de la resistencia global. in OLIVEIRA,
Tito Carlos Machado de (ed.). Território sem Limites:
Estudos sobre Fronteiras. Campo Grande: Ed. UFMS,
2005, pp.113-130.
–– BRASIL, Ministério da Integração Nacional. Proposta de
Reestruturação do Programa de Desenvolvimento da
Faixa de Fronteira. Brasília: Ministério da Integração
Nacional, 2005.
–– CASTRO, M. C.; MACHADO, Lia Osorio; STEIMAN, Rebeca;
PARENTE, Letícia; PEITER, Paulo; NOVAES, André Reyes;
ADIALA, Cristiane; BARROS, Flavia Lins de; MARTINS,
Maurício; FERNANDES NETO, Pedro; LIMA, João Sousa;
ARARARUNA, Lucimar. Terra Limitanea. Atlas da Fronteira
Continental do Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: UFRJ/CNPq, 2002.
–– CLEMENCEAU, Georges. Notes de voyage dans
l’Amérique du Sud, Argentine, Uruguay et Brésil. Paris,
Hachette et Cie, 1911.
–– GARCIA, Fernando Cacciatore. Fronteira iluminada:
História do povoamento, conquista e limites do Rio
Grande do Sul a Partir do Tratado de Tordesilhas
1420‑1920. Porto Alegre: Editora Sulina, 2012.
–– GIDDENS, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.
–– LEJEUNE, Jean-François (ed.). Cruelty and Utopia: Cities
and Landscapes in Latin America. New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 2005.
–– MACHADO, Lia Osório. Cidades na fronteira internacional:
Conceitos e Tipologia. In NUÑEZ, A.; PADOIN, M. M.;
OLIVEIRA, T. C. M. de (ed.). Dilemas e diálogos plantinos.
Fronteiras. Dourados, Ed. UFGD, 2010, pp.59-72.
–– GRAZIANO, Manzio. What is a Border? Stanford, CA.
Stanford University Press, 2018.
–– MOOG, Vianna. Bandeirantes e pioneiros: Paralelo entre
duas culturas. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 2011.
–– OLIVEIRA, Márcio Gimene de. A formação das
cidades-gêmeas Ponta Porã-Pedro Juan Caballero,
II Simpósio Nacional de Geografia Política, Território e
Poder—I Simpósio Internacional de Geografia Política
e Territórios Transfronteiriços. Foz do Iguaçú: 2011.

Gabriel Duarte (Niterói-RJ, 1979) is Director of

Urbanism at Bernardes Architecture, and a Professor
at the Department of Architecture and Urbanism of
PUC‑Rio (Brazil). He was one of the founders of CAMPO
(2008‑2016) when he co-created the New Cartographies
group, which researches new methods for collaborative
mapping. He is also an Associate Researcher at
the Institute for Landscape Architecture at Leibniz
University Hannover (Germany). He has been a Visiting
Professor at the Architectural Association, MIT, Harvard,
among others, and was the Lemann Visiting Scholar at
the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies
at Harvard (DRCLAS). He was educated as an architect
and urban designer at UFRJ (Brazil), and at Delft
University of Technology (Netherlands).
The multiple Celma Chaves 190
Amazon and Pont Vidal
the meanings
of frontier

THE HISTORICITY OF THE AMAZON FRONTIER

AND ITS VARIOUS MEANINGS

The term “frontier” has different meanings in the

various areas of knowledge, which go beyond its usual
conceptions and meanings. Trindade Jr.1 promotes
a relevant dialogue between studies that compare
different perspectives on the theme. The author
presents the general definition of the word in the light
of Ramoneda’s thought:
Frontiers define the inside and the outside,
them and us. There are frontiers of many
types: physical, political, cultural, and also
psychological. A frontier creates an interior
space that pretends to be homogeneous and
deliberately differentiated from the outside.
However, frontiers are also invisible barriers that
are interposed between men, as well as within
their personal relationships.2
During the last few centuries in the history of the
Amazon, this term has crossed semantic variations and
gained a wide spectrum of meanings. It is not a matter
here of relating all these meanings, or of categorizing
the concept exhaustively. What we are interested in is
to define two dimensions of frontier that are relevant
in the context of the Brazilian Amazon. The first is
the objective dimension that defines the Amazon: its
physical, political, demographic, economic aspects,
modes of production, etc. The second dimension lies
in the scope of the intangible, of the impalpable, but
which is absolutely visible through subjective and
psychological, individual and collective, perceptions.3
1. Saint-Clair Cordeiro Trindade Jr.,
“Pensando a noção de fronteira:
Um olhar a partir da ciência
geográfica”, in Durbens Martins
Nascimento (ed.), Amazônia
e defesa: Dos fortes às novas
conflitualidades. Belém: NAEA/
UFPA: 2010, pp.100-123.
2. Ramoneda, 2006, p.6, apud Saint-
Clair Cordeiro da Trindade Júnior,
“Pensando a noção de fronteira: Um
olhar a partir da ciência geográfica”,
in Durrens Marins Nascimento
(ed.), Amazônia e defesa: Dos fortes
às novas conflitualidades. Belém:
NAEPA/UFPA, 2010, p.102.
3. Saint-Clair Cordeiro Trindade Jr.,
“Cidades na floresta: os ‘grandes
objetos’ como expressões do meio
técnico-científico informacional
no espaço amazônico”, in Revista
do Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros
– IEB, São Paulo, nr.51, mar./sep.
2010, pp.113-137.

4. Philippe Lená e Adélia Engrácia
de Oliveira (eds.), Amazônia: a
fronteira agrícola 20 anos depois
[Amazon: the agricultural frontier
20 years later]. Belém: Museu
Paraense Emílio Goeldi, 1991, p.10.
5. Antônio Cláudio Rabello,
“Amazônia: uma fronteira volátil”,
em Estudos Avançados, v. 27, n. 78,
2013, pp.213-235.
6. John O. Browder, Brian J.
Godfrey, Cidades na floresta.
Urbanização, desenvolvimento
e globalização na Amazônia
Brasileira. Manaus: Editora
da Universidade Federal do
Amazonas (EDUA), 2006, p.105.
7. Id., ibid.
8. Id., ibid.
Frontiers can be conceived and interpreted based
on the different ways of occupying and urbanizing the
Amazonian space. One cannot fail to consider that there
is “a complexity of phenomena covered by the concept
of ‘frontier’ when applied to the Amazon.”4 The frontier as
a differentiated phenomenon in this region began to be
discussed mainly after the occupation and colonization
development projects initiated in the 20th century.5 Some
discussions aimed to understand the dynamics of frontier
expansion from the perception of the incorporation
of the Amazon, analysing the political, economic, and
socio-cultural disputes from a perspective related to the
characteristics or the daily life at the frontier.
Conceptual structures have been developed to account
for the plurality of the frontier in the Amazon region. New
analytical categories have emerged to try to offer a better
understanding of the phenomenon: expansion frontier,
economic frontier, agrarian frontier, urban frontier, military
frontier, corporate frontier, etc. The frontier is almost
always seen as an area of settlement expansion and
economic incorporation to the center of the country. It
presents a network of cities, a settlement system, but also
a fragile institutional system, which usually results in a
disjointed urbanization trend at the regional level.6
It is possible to identify the configuration of these
frontiers at different moments. In the first one, roughly
between 1880 and 1910, at the height of the rubber
extraction activity, an extractivist or populist, agrarian
frontier became evident.7 The introduction of a
tool‑lending [aviamento] system in the Amazonian
rubber plantations of the 19th century, through so-
called “tool‑lenders” [aviadores], explains one of the
first separations between social and cultural groups in
the region: the workers and the owners of the rubber
plantations. The system of tool-lending, which coexisted
with the currency, constitutes a moment in which the
extraction frontier happened to exist in parallel with the
urban frontier in the main capitals of the Amazon. The
frontier stopped being an abstract space8 to become a
place of transformation of labor and capital relationships,
altering the appropriation and access to places, creating
a wall sometimes visible, with the expansion of the great
properties, and sometimes invisible, through cultural
differences, both individual and collective.
In the 1940s, Getúlio Vargas’s National State spread the
idea of modernization, which had as an important vector
the occupation of the Amazon in the so-called march
West. However, the Amazon would remain on the fringes
of national policies until President Juscelino Kubitschek’s
development drive in the 1950s. The inauguration of the
Belém-Brasília motorway in 1960, and the policies of
disorderly colonization along its route, promoted another 192
type of occupation, leading to the materialization of a new
frontier: between the new urban spaces, along the roads,
and the traditional riverside occupation. The bounds
between the new and the traditional would configure
unprecedented separations.
The insertion of the Amazon into the capitalist free trade
system, through the implantation of the great extractivist
mining projects of the 1960s and 1970s, promoted the
disordered occupation of the space, with new planned
urban centers— the “company towns”. Thus, other
frontiers would materialize: those that separated and
separate the traditional riverside cities and the new cities
of the great mining projects. New frontiers were created,
within the Amazon and between the region and other
Brazilian regions.
In the Amazon today, areas characterized by
settlements of diverse groups— small farmers, gold miners,
merchants— are opposed to expansion fronts dominated
by capital, which generate popular and corporate frontiers,
the latter dominated by national and transnational capital
enterprises.9 The map of the occupation and insertion 9. Id., ibid.
of the Amazon into world capitalism contrasts with a
fragmented and asymmetric territory, marked by socio-
cultural and land conflicts.

FROM THE FORTIFIED TERRITORY TO THE

CURRENT INTERNATIONAL FRONTIERS

The northern frontier of Brazil can be understood in its

urban, economic, political, military and subjective senses.
The military presence in the frontier towns of the Amazon
region dates back to the first Portuguese fortifications,
built between 1616 and 1776. The geopolitics embodied
in these fortifications, from 1616, coincides with the first
settlements, which became the towns and cities of the
Amazon. Subsequently, this embodiment followed the
European settlement as recorded by the Westphalian
Order of 1648, and contextualized the demarcation of
cross-border spaces subsequent to the Treaty of Madrid
(1750). In this sense, cartography, architecture, history, and 10. Ligia Terezinha Lopes
international relations are linked in the examination of the Simonian, Márcia Pires Saraiva,
“Fronteiras em construção: Índios,
role of frontiers in the Amazon.
mocambeiros e as disputas
Historically, the frontier areas of the Brazilian Amazon— colonialistas no rio Araguari,
which is part of the Pan-Amazon region— became loci of Amapá”, in Ligia Terezinha Lopes
skirmishes, massacres, battles and even revolution. The Simonian (ed.), Políticas públicas,
Lusitanian expansion, when going beyond the Treaty of desenvolvimento, unidades de
conservação e outras questões
Tordesillas (1494), required the construction of numerous socioambientais no Amapá.
small-forts, forts and fortresses, during the 17th century,10 Belém: NAEA/UFPA; Macapá:
with the fortress of Macapá (AP) and the forts of Rio MPEAP, 2010, pp.51-90.

11. Christiane Figueiredo Pagano
de Mello, “Amazônia colonial:
fronteiras e forças militares
(segunda metade do século XVIII)”,
in Anais do XVI Encontro regional de
história ANPUH. Rio de Janeiro: 2014.
12. Bertha Becker, Amazônia. São
Paulo: Ática, 1990.
13. Rosélia Piquet, Cidade-empresa:
Presença na paisagem urbana
brasileira. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge
Zahar, 1998.
Branco (RR ) and Costa Marques (RO) being the main ones.
The presence of the military was important in the region,
especially in the second half of the 18th century, when the
Portuguese occupation was consolidated.11
Today, there are many inhabited areas that have
conflicts along the international frontiers of the Amazon.
From the North to the West, urban nuclei, small towns, and
cities polarize these areas. Indigenous and maroon villages
are also found along this immense frontier. The frontier
between Brazil and French Guiana, where there are social
status disparities among the inhabitants, is still driven by
tensions, as in Oiapoque, in Amapá, where conflicts with
gold miners are constant.
Opposingly, several situations created along these
frontiers speak of a peaceful coexistence. Bridges linking
the country to Bolivia and Peru were built a few years ago,
several cultural and sports festivals have taken place, and
different indigenous peoples share knowledge based on
biodiversity. Tensions, however, remain, as in the case of
the 2014 World Cup, when both Brazilians and Colombians
were prevented from crossing the local border.
CITIES AS FRONTIERS:
SPACES OF COHABITATION OR SEPARATION?
A different materiality and frontier dynamics are
observed in the case of the Amazon “company towns”.
Characterized by the isolation and the idealization of a
space with a supposed quality of life, these cities were
created to house workers of companies in charge of the
implantation of large projects, institutional employees,
and workers of outsourced companies. The insertion of
these cities, planned by the owner companies, triggered
a process of socio-spatial reorganization, changes in
local ways of life, predatory use of nature, and depletion
of mineral resources. These nuclei present themselves as
a new spatiality, both within the physical and imaginary
frontiers, thus composing a new Amazonian scenario.
This typology of city was established in several states.
In Pará, the first one was Fordlândia (1927), a project by
the industrialist Henry Ford that aimed to recover the
cultivation of hevea brasiliensis. Subsequently, similar
cities were built to support mining projects: Belterra, in
the 1930s; Porto Trombetas, in the 1970s; Monte Dourado
(1968); Nova Marabá (1976); and Vila dos Cabanos, Vila
Permanente de Tucuruí and the Urban Nucleus of Carajás,
all in the 1980s. In Amapá, Serra do Navio Village (1957) and
Vila Amazonas (1957) emerged.
“Company towns,”12“city-enterprises”13 or “cities in the
forest,” are denominations of the urbanizing process that
 194

[fig. 1] Amazon’s company towns.

[fig. 2] First Portuguese fortifications
in the Amazon.

14. Maria Isabel Sobral Escada et
al, “Processos de ocupação nas
novas fronteiras da Amazônia:
O interflúvio do Xingu/Iriri”, in
Revista de Estudos Avançados.
São Paulo, v. 19, nr. 54, 2005.
15. Saint-Clair Cordeiro Trindade Jr.,
“Cidades na floresta: os ‘grandes
objetos’ como expressões do meio
técnico-científico informacional
no espaço amazônico”, in Revista
do Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros
– IEB, São Paulo, nr. 51, mar./sep.
2010, pp.113-137.
16. Id., ibid.
17. Rosa Moura, “Fronteiras
invisíveis: o território e seus
limites”, in Revista Território, Rio
de Janeiro, year V, nr. 9, jul./dec.,
2000, pp.85-101.
configured the Amazon region through the understanding
that this potential territory should be integrated with
the country’s growth process, especially between
the 1960s and 1970s. Following the vision of the then
president [Humberto de Alencar] Castelo Branco that it
was necessary to “integrate so as not to give away”; the
migratory process toward the region began in 1966 with
the creation of the Superintendência do Desenvolvimento
da Amazônia [Superintendence for the Development of
the Amazon – SUDAM]. The activities of the “company
towns” had a high level of capitalist production, playing
an important role in the land ownership scenario,14 since
they allowed for the insertion of their owners into the
base of the political-administrative structure of possible
future municipalities. This is a characteristic process of
frontier regions.
By incorporating the Amazon into the emerging
economic scenario of the 20th century, the “company
towns” established new territorial dynamics, which
resulted in the intense generation of cultural, social and
political assets. The construction model adopted for
city-enterprises emphasizes this. Set up according to an
architectural and urban pattern, they became technical-
scientific hubs:15 in addition to facilities such as schools,
hospitals, clubs and cinema-theaters, they had water and
sewage treatment, which would guarantee residents a
high standard of living. However, only a few of them—the
skilled manpower—enjoyed these services. Social isolation
was thus promoted, in the form of an internal frontier, an
invisible wall among the residents.
Besides this separation within the “company towns”,
there were also divergences between them and the
settlements that emerged on their peripheries, which
bring to light the other side of the great projects intended
for the Amazon,16 such as poverty and segregation. They
also make clear the imbalance between the city-enterprise
and its surroundings, since the former does not expand its
facilities and services, serving the local population only in
a residual and exclusive way, and fomenting barriers that,
whether they are transparent or fenced in, express the
exercise of domination and authority by a people, an air-
frontier between peoples.17
FRONTIERS IN THE AMAZON: CONFLICTS AND
SEPARATION IN CONTEMPORARY TIMES
In today’s Amazon, where different spaces and
temporalities overlap, the external and internal frontiers
continue to define forms of cohabitation or separation
within spaces. What today is identified as the Amazonian
frontier, however, cannot be defined in a univocal way. The 196
frontier is a place of encounters between differences and,
at the same time, of divergences, by virtue of the historical
situation of social conflict that defines it.18 More than a 18. José de Souza Martins,
divergence of otherness, the challenge of the frontier is Fronteira: A degradação do outro
nos limites do humano. São Paulo:
that it puts into perspective a divergence of historical
Hucitec, 1997.
temporalities.19 Therefore, the frontier, and especially in
the Amazon:
19. Id., ibid.

can no longer be thought exclusively as fringes of

the map in whose image the spatial, demographic,
and economic limits of a certain social formation
are translated. A new definition of the broader
frontier becomes necessary, capable of capturing
its specificity—as an exceptionally dynamic and
contradictory space—and its relation to the whole of
which it belongs.20 20. Bertha Becker, “Significância
contemporânea da fronteira:
Uma interpretação geopolítica
To think of frontiers in the Amazon today means to
a partir da Amazônia brasileira”.
establish links with the dimensions that make up the In C. Aubertin (ed.), Fronteiras.
various spatial scales of urban and rural, collective and Brasília: Ed. UnB, 1988, pp.60-89.
subjective values, economic activities and policies, forms
of insertion for national and transnational corporations,
and with the policies of defending international borders.
The commitment should be, above all, with the groups
that live and construct their stories in the real territory of
the Amazon region, rather than with the lines, planes, and
outlines that make up the maps of their representations.
Additional references
–– COSTA, Graciete Guerra da. “Fortes portugueses
na Amazônia brasileira”, final postdoctoral studies
essay. Brasília: IREL/UNB, 2014.
–– LIMA, José Júlio. “A tentativa urbanista da
Companhia Ford na Amazônia ou a primeira
geração de company towns na floresta”, 2011.
Available at: fauufpa.org/2011/12/14/a-tentativa-
urbanista-da-companhia-ford-na-amazonia-ou-a-
primeira-geracao-de-company-towns-na-floresta-
por-jo…. Downloaded: February 20, 2018.
–– SANTOS, Milton. O trabalho do geógrafo no 3º mundo,
trans. Sandra Lencine. São Paulo: HUCITEC, 1986.
–– PIQUET, Rosélia. “Pensando a noção de fronteira:
um olhar a partir da ciência geográfica”, in Durbens
Martins Nascimento (ed.), Amazônia e defesa: dos
fortes às novas conflitualidades. Belém: NAEA/UFPA,
2010, 267, pp.101-123.
–– LIMA, Soeli Regina da S. “Capital transnacional,
company town e a produção do espaço urbano”, in
Revista Caminhos de Geografia, v.9, nr.25, 2008.
–– CONCEIÇÃO, Suellen. “ICOMI e suas company towns
no meio da Floresta Amazônica”, 2011. Available
at: www.thegreenclub.com.br/projetos-urbanos/
icomi-e-suas-company-towns-no-meio-da-
floresta-amazonica/. Downloaded: 27/02/2018.

Celma Chaves Pont Vidal is an architect and urbanist,

with a doctorate from Escola Tècnica Superior
d’Arquitectura de Barcelona/Universitat Politècnica
de Catalunya (2005) and a post-doctorate from the
same institution (2016). She is a lecturer for the
undergraduate and graduate programs in architecture
and urbanism of Universidade Federal do Pará
(UFPA), where she coordinates the Laboratory of
Architectural Historiography and Culture (LAHCA).
She was responsible for the research, coordination
and structuring of the final draft of this article.

Contributors: Graciete Guerra da Costa, architect

and urbanist, with a post-doctorate from the
Institute of International Relations at Universidade
de Brasília (UnB) and coordinator of the architecture
and urbanism program at Universidade Federal de
Roraima (UFRR); Ligia Terezinha Simonian Lopes,
PhD in anthropology with a post-doctorate from City
University of New York, full professor and researcher
at Núcleo de Altos Estudos Amazônicos (NAEA) at
UFPA; Bernadeth Beltrão Rosas Bentes and Rodrigo
Augusto de Lima Rodrigues, graduate students at
UFPA; George Bruno de Araújo Lima, Rebeca Barbosa
Dias Rodrigues, Luciane Santos de Oliveira, Stephany
Aylla de Nazaré Carvalho Pereira and Glenda de Souza
Santos, undergraduate students at UFPA.
6
Succession of
edges: narratives
on the building of
an urban country
How detached from
a cohesive vision of
Brazil has the urban
formation of the
country been?
5,570 municipalities and 208,846,175
inhabitants. This is the composition of
the Brazilian territory, constructed by the
original population, and, from 1500 onward,
by the Portuguese settlers of Terra Brasilis.
Here, they found a vast territory and three
million indigenous people, distributed
mainly along the fertile coastline. This
population consisted of various groups—
Tupis, Guaranis, Tupinambás, Tupiniquins,
Tamoios, Tupinaés, Temiminos, Kaetés,
Potiguares, Tabajaras—with different
cultures and social constructions. Already
in the first years of colonization, they began
to be decimated and, in less than seventy
years, their numbers had dropped by one-
half. As stated by Iris Kantor in her essay
in this chapter, upon receiving Europeans
in their lands, the Indians became reduced
to the status of vassals, to the point where
their mother tongue was prohibited.
Later, the first sites for agricultural
production in Brazil, for the growing of
sugarcane, were also established along
the coast of Brazil’s Northeast. With the
colonizer came the system of slavery and
the first contingents of Africans, who
arrived in Brazil mainly from Angola and
the Ivory Coast.
In this period, the Brazilian territory
underwent modifications due to actions
not only by the Portuguese, but also by
Spanish, French and Dutch colonizers of
neighboring lands. The borders as we know
them today were only configured in 1903
with the annexation of the state of Acre.
Wars and territorial disputes marked the
shaping of the country’s South, North and
West; Rio Grande do Sul was disputed
between the Portuguese and the Spanish;
Maranhão, between the French and
the Portuguese.
The various production cycles—from
sugarcane to gold and coffee—intensified
the slavery in the South and Southeast.
Between 1531 and 1855, more than 4 million
slaves entered Brazil. The importance of this
contingent is highly significant: blacks and
mixed-race Afro-Brazilians constitute more
than 50% of the Brazilian population today,
something which, as pointed out by Luiz
Felipe de Alencastro in his interview, not
even the black movement itself is aware of.
With the abolition of slavery, the
government of the young republic
established international agreements for
procuring labor. In Europe, conflicts and
unification processes drove a significant
number of immigrants to Brazil, seen as
a promising country, with good living
conditions. This wave of immigration,
especially intense between 1884 and 1939,
brought more than 4 million immigrants
from various countries. As stated by
Antonio Risério, the (timid) urban Brazilian
environment became the scenario where
property owners, free slaves and foreigners
lived together and, in this mix, intrinsic
cultural differences were added together to
compose the new urban population.
This period was also one of intense
densification and consolidation of
cities in Brazil. Not by chance, the first
demographic census of an urban character
was conducted in 1940, when the rural
population (69%) was much greater than
the urban (31%). Small villages became
metropolises: the population of São Paulo
leapt from 240,000 inhabitants at the
end of the 19th century to 3.5 million in
the second half of the 20th.
The transition from an agrarian-rural
colony to a modern, urban, capitalist
republic posed challenges in everything
from sanitary to bureaucratic concerns.
How to organize these cities? What
resources would they have? One of the
administrative responses was the creation
of new municipalities. Between 1945 and
1964, in the so-called Populist Republic,
marked by decentralization, the creation
of municipalities was encouraged by state
governments, as the federal resources
were proportional to the number of
administrative units. Between 1940 and
1970, the number of municipalities in Brazil
rose from 1,671 to more than 4 thousand,
while the urban population mushroomed to
more than 50 million.
The extreme political centralization
of the military regime was reflected in
the Federal Constitution of 1967, which
imposed a series of conditions on the
creation of municipalities. The parameters
ranged from the populational census to the
municipal tax revenues. At the end of the
dictatorship, in 1985, Brazil had gained a
little less than 500 new municipalities.
At the turn of the 20th century to the
21 , the number of municipalities in Brazil
st
had increased to more than 5,500, and the
number of inhabitants to more than 160
million. 81% of them already lived in cities,
municipalities, urban agglomerations
and metropolitan regions, which were
consolidated as tools for the analysis of the
territory and had gained a significant role in
the national economy.
The transition to the urban was not
uniform. Knowingly, the initial densification
of the population occurred along the coast.
As Kantor states, the integration with the
interior regions did not see significant
advances until the 18th century, with the
gold mining boom in Minas Gerais. And,
after this, it was not to be strengthened
until 1960, with the creation of Brasília—
which, besides radically moving the
headquarters of the three branches of
government, was the engine of a new and
complex population boom in the Central
West, giving rise to the satellite cities
around the newly installed capital.
In a society constructed in an
exclusionary way, the urban consolidation
was marked by inequality. The population
that arrived in the city coming from the
countryside, and, above all, the black
people faced the greatest difficulty in
finding adequate housing, study and work.
This situation finds its metaphor in the
scenes depicted by Jonathas de Andrade
where horse-drawn carts in Recife, now
prohibited in the urban center, reinforce
the view of an urbanized country which
does not allow itself to remember its rural
roots, of extreme importance in its early
moments of consolidation. It is an unequal
Brazil, in which poor and black populations
have no voice. A Brazil that forgets its
indigenous origins, the paths taken, and
the processes that brought us here. Or,
as stated by Risério, a Brazil in which the
urban public space does not reflect social
characteristics so much as disputes.
The conflictive history raises the question
of how seemingly distinct and independent
processes can significantly impact a large
portion of the population; a portion is found
captive of the historical walls that have
constructed this urban country.
THE MAP
The Succession of borders map first
presents the foundation moments of
Brazilian cities in order to graphically
enable the distinction between the years in
which such events occurred most. Thus, it
intends to enable a reading of the periods
with the greatest urban expansions. The
graphical counter position of the location
of the 5570 Brazilian cities and their dates
of foundation creates a large timeline and a
map in which the territorial divisions are no
longer relevant.
The map, then, presents the history
of the expansion and definition of the
country’s borders. Taking the Treaty of
Tordesilhas (1494) as a startingpoint,
drawings resulting from each reordering
of the territory are revealed, from the state
borders to the national ones, up to the
current geopolitical configuration.
One other layer presents human
elements of the social construction of the
country. The map points to the origins of
the main contingents of foreigners, from
the first Portuguese settlers to the last
maritime voyages, and the variation of the
indigenous population over the years.
Lastly, a series of historical events allow
for a more global understanding of other
aspects that have impacted the Brazilian
sociocultural reality and the history of the
urbanization of the country. Structural
events of the evolution of colonial Brazil
until 2017 are, then, separated into nine
categories—architecture; conflicts
and wars; culture; economy; country;
international; landscape; politics; and
society—to allow for cross-referencing
with the other timelines of the map.
Jonathas de Andrade
1a Corrida de Carroças do
Centro do Recife / O levante
[1st Horse-Drawn Cart Race of
Downtown Recife / The Uprising],
2012
Photographic documentation
and video
interview: 208
Luiz Felipe de
Alencastro

Luiz Felipe de Alencastro (Itajaí-SC,

1946) is an historian and political
scientist. Holds a degree from
the Institut d’Etudes Politiques
d’Aix-en-Provence, and a Phd in
modern and contemporary history
from Université de Paris Nanterre.
He is a professor emeritus at
Université Paris-Sorbonne,
member of History and Archeology
area at the European Academy,
coordinator of Centro de Estudos
do Atlântico Sul and professor
of Escola de Economia [School
of Economics] at FGV, São Paulo.
Author and coauthor of several
books, among them O trato dos
Viventes: Formação do Brasil no
Atlântico Sul (2000).
Walls

How did Brazilian slavery’s historical

condition generate a legacy of social
and racial boundaries in the cities of
our country?
Brazil presented a very significant urban
slavery. In 1850, 42% of Rio de Janeiro
population consisted of slaves: 110 thousand
slaves out of 266 thousand inhabitants, the
greatest urban concentration of slaves since
the end of the Roman Empire. The massive
presence of free black people merged with
a population of still enslaved blacks led
the former to live in a situation of inferior
citizenship. Some fleeing slaves would go to
Floresta da Tijuca quilombo, others would
remain in the city, mixing with free blacks.
Wearing shoes meant a black person was
free, for slaves were not allowed to do so.
Neither were they supposed to walk alone
in the streets after 9 in the evening without
their owner’s order and could be questioned
by the police any time. This situation caused
a deep-rooted contempt in relation to free
blacks, creating a pattern of disrespect
toward black people well before the
abolition of the slavery in 1888.

Evidence

How does social and racial segregation,

perpetuated since colonization, show up
today in urban space?
In São Paulo, the result appears in the
profile of those clubs that intend/purport
to be elegant, dating from the 1920s. They
excluded the presence of blacks in internal
regulations, rejected black members
without any explanation—because not to
be written in was part of Brazilian racism.
This implemented such a real model of
segregation, up to the point, for instance,
of allowing black fellows to be violently
questioned by the police for their black
skin, and for being in a car. In slaughters,
such as the one at Carandiru Penitentiary,
in 1992, most of the dead are always black.
The bullet knows its target when the
police fires.
Today, these clubs keep invading central
public zones without paying property taxes,
such as the Jóquei de São Paulo race track,
which the former mayor Fernando Haddad
tried to transform into a public park. People
are proud to say that São Paulo is the city
with the greatest amount of heliports in the
world, showing the lack of regulation that
favors privileged people. There would be
much more heliports in New York, London
and Paris if the legislation allowed building
them no matter where. It is forbidden,
because they respect their population.
Behavior and micro-politics
How does slave-holding culture affect
public life in Brazilian cities?
The following data produced by Elza
Berquó and other demographers is
interesting: infant mortality of illiterate
mothers increases in color gradation
from white to mulatto and to black. In
neighborhoods where black people live,
there are fewer hospitals, less prenatal
care. Infant mortality in Brazil declined by
half between 2000 and 2015, from 39 to
19 per thousand people, in a huge effort.
However, this figure carries enormous
perpetuating disparities. Obviously there
is no written discrimination, but the
apartheid is evident.
Side effects
How does land reform, demaned
by Movimento dos Trabalhadores
Rurais Sem Terra [Landless Workers’
Movement – MST], for example, relate to
slavery? And which other disputes date
back to our slavery legacy?
There have always been two interpretations
of Brazilian left-wing and reformist politics
in regards to the legacy of slavery in the
countryside. Part is for land reform; the
other interpretation, represented by Caio
Prado Júnior, which I follow, states that
there wasn’t a strong peasant tradition in
Brazil. In Mexico or Bolivia, land reform was
attached to the demands of a community
with a well‑established peasant tradition,
without land ownership, something similar
to Europe in the 18th century, before the
French Revolution. Instead, in Brazil, the
rural worker was a slave or immigrant.
This reformist and left-wing trend fought
for better working conditions in the
countryside and for trade union rights,
and thought that concentrating the whole
struggle in land reform was a strategic
mistake. History evolves in this sense:
the MST doesn’t find great activism to ask
for land any more. It stands much more
as a producer of ecological farming, up
to the point of being the largest organic
rice producer in Brazil. MST’s struggling
conception itself is in progress. And
Bolsa Família1 reduced the human impact
of drought in the Northeast, which was
always tragic, as a thousand water cisterns
were built during this period, enabling a
basic water reserve to form.
Experience in the discipline
Considering your experience in the
United States, which are the main
differences related to racial segregation
vis-à-vis to Brazil?
While, in the 1950s in the US, more than half
of the states still forbade mixed marriages,
in Brazil it was never forbidden. Marriage
here has always been asymmetrical,
reproducing a pattern in which women
are part of the dominated community and
the husband, of the dominating one. The
mixed-racial feature, always presented as a
positive (Brazilian) attribute, doesn’t mean
equality, or respect. While, from the post-
war era up to the year 2000, the US evolved
significantly towards affirmative action
through civil struggle and mobilization—
they even had a black president—, Brazil
stuck to the idea that no affirmative action
was needed, for racism was inexistent.
This presumption was shot down by a
historical decision in the Supreme Court
(STF) in 2012, which unanimously upheld as
constitutional the quota policy in federal
universities. A decision of the utmost
importance, since it implies the idea that
racism exists and that there is no racial
democracy in the country.
pretend blacks had faded away, the notion
of mixed races was to turn people white.
But blacks became the majority. And the
African immigration is on it’s way. We
have a new convergence with Africa.

Transformative potential
1. A social welfare program of
financial aid to low income
Which affirmative racial actions can families, established by the
you see emerging in the Brazilian Brazilian government in 2003, as
context? Which other measures part of Fome Zero [zero hunger]
the policy. [Ed.]
contributed to the dissolution of the
racial gap?
It’s necessary to recall slavery’s
legacy and observe that it’s not about
the struggle of a minority. The Black
movement itself loses sight of the fact
that black people are demographically
the majority, as shown by the census of
2010. Affirmative actions are necessary
in democracy, not only to guarantee
the right of a community—such as the
indigenous peoples, which need to
have their ancestral lands—, but also
to guarantee the right of the majority. A
different struggle strategy is as follows:
“Blacks are the majority of the population
There is no democracy if the social
majority is not represented”.
Achievements are being annulled
by this reactionary government, which
arbitrarily changed the high school
curriculum by provisional measure (MP),
taking away the obligation of teaching, for
example, History and Geography. This
threatens the idea of Afro-Brazilian history.
But we must think about the future.
An African immigration to Brazil is
already taking place, and will increase.
According to a recent UN census,
sub‑Saharan Africa is going through a
demographic boom. Nigeria will surpass
the USA and will be the third largest world
population. At the end of the 21st century,
the Portuguese language will be more
widely spoken in Africa than in Brazil
and Portugal, strongly impacted by the
Brazilian variant, due to soap operas and
missionary priests or ministers. In the
beginning of the 20th century, there was
an attempt to forget this continent and
interview: 212
Antonio Risério

Antonio Risério (Salvador-ba,

1953) is a historian, anthropologist,
translator, poet, essayist and
novel writer. He graduated in
Sociology, with specialization
in Anthropology at UFBA (1995).
Regarding public policies, he
worked as a special advisor at the
Ministry of Culture during Gilberto
Gil’s administration, under Lula’s
government; implemented a
educative television channel in
Bahia; worked with the architect
João Filgueiras Lima (Lelé) in the
foundation of Sarah Kubitschek
hospital, in Salvador; and set the
general project to establish the
Museu da Língua Portuguesa,
in São Paulo. In the 2000s, he
baceme engaged in political
marketing, integrating the creative
and strategic core of Lula da Silva
and Dilma Rousseff’s presidential
campaigns. Published several
books, amongst them Textos e
tribos: poéticas extraocidentais
nos trópicos brasileiros (1993),
Oriki Orixá (1996), Uma história da
cidade da Bahia (2004), A utopia
brasileira e os movimentos negros
(2007), A cidade no Brasil (2012),
Mulher, casa e cidade (2015) and
Que você é esse? (2017).
Walls

You refer to the trio expansion-

segregation-exclusion within Brazilian
urbanization; how does it articulate
politically and materialize within the
city space?
In Brazil, this trio marked the transition
from a rural country to an urban one,
undergoing several and diverse political
regimes—from populist democracy to
military dictatorship—, to consolidate in
governments that claimed to be left wing.
The baroque and slave holding city was
not specially segregating. Land owners
and slaves co-shared domestic and urban
spaces. Segregation really happened with
the modern capitalist city, and became
systematic with urban modernization. Over
the past decades, the bourgeoisie of civil
engineering assumed the leadership of this
process, regardless of the political regime.
That’s why social housing programs such
as those from dictatorship era and Minha
Casa Minha Vida [My House My Life] are
essentially similar: not only were they born
to provide a strong cash injection directly
into the business community at a moment
of crisis, but also to deliver, to this private
initiative, control over urban policies. The
sector of civil engineering is in charge
of deciding what to build in the city and
where: a new luxury neighborhood here,
a mall there, a social housing program
elsewhere. Our governments lag behind.

Evidence

How does the notion of Brazilian

cultural syncretism, opposed to US
multiculturalism, manifest in our urban
space? How do you see the issue
regarding the tension between African,
Indigenous and European cultures in the
construction of our cities?
Despite the cruelties of slavery, things
were deeply merged in Brazilian cities. Yet,
New York, for example, is a multicultural
city. We never had Italian, Irish and Jewish
ghettos in Rio; New York is a mosaic of
differences that look at each other, but do
not merge spontaneously. Multiculturalism
as an ideology objects to cultural
interpenetrations, standing up for the
separate development of communities.
Brazilian cities were not islands, as
in the United States, nor internally
detached, as in Hispanic America. They
were promiscuous cities. While the
Spanish first built the city, only to let the
Indians enter afterwards, the Portuguese
recruited the indigenous workforce to
raise them. The Spanish customized the
grid and distributed the population within,
according to social hierarchy. The power
was set at plaza mayor. Indigenous and
then black people were set just outside the
urban center: Spanish city, afro-indigenous
suburbs. The Spanish segregated so as
to remove the risks of mixing races and
favoring syncretism—the opposite of the
Brazilian scene. Specifically, the central
zone of a baroque-slavery city was the
working and living place of both slave
owners and slaves. Asymmetrical, yet
shuffled lives. Our unruly urban designs
expressed an unruly coexistence. They
were urban cores tending to aggregate,
confuse, blend, giving each other visibility,
enabling genetic and symbolic merges.
Side effects
How does the peripherization of
low-income housing relate to the
consolidation of urban boundaries?
And how has market logic been
organizing urban land nowadays?
There is a specific problem that
compromises the perspective of city
organization: the private market of urban
land. Municipal land heritage does not
grow; urban land is strictly limited, with
no replacement. Brazilian urban land is
entirely divided amongst a selected group
of land owners. If businessmen own the
city soil, they lead urban policies. These
people select strips of land to extract high
profits from it, locating their investment
according to social class criteria. They send
social housing paid by the government to
distant and dismantled steep slopes. That’s
why Minha Casa Minha Vida is said to be
a program that aims at building, today,
the shantytowns of tomorrow. In order to
control urban policies, the government
would need to trigger effective mechanisms
of land usage control. It would be enough
to enforce the law, following the principle of
the city’s social function and urban property.
Behavior and micro-politics
How does the history of State violence,
from colonial times until today—from
the slavery era to security policies and
forced removal in shantytowns—affect
Brazilian subjectivity and its relationship
with the public space?
The specific Brazilian case must be
analyzed in comparative terms. Generally
speaking, our process (colonization,
slavery) was very similar to the one in the
US and Argentina. Maybe less severe, since
black people were practically removed
from the Argentinean demographic map. In
the US, in addition to forced local removals,
black people were almost sent in blocks
back to Africa, as abolitionist president
Abraham Lincoln wanted. How did this
history of violence affect US subjectivity
and its relation to public space? As in
Argentina and in the US, the show of
diversity in public spaces is responsible
for fulfilling our cities within their essential
quality. Everywhere in the world, public
space is an outlook of games and
disputes, always subjected to moving
and multiple interpretations.
Experience in the discipline
Considering your experience with
presidential campaigns, how is narrative
construction able to transform the
self-image of a people? And how does
this ordinary narrative, manipulated
by political marketing, relate to
collective memory?
It is more substantial to think about the consumption of private cars. This triggered
great national narratives, of which the the protest in 2013—speaking about urban
marginal marketing narratives are only a mobility, the right to the city. To face the
spiritually impoverished chapter. Take as present reality, social movements for the
an example the case of Casa-grande & cities need to find a common narrative and
senzala, the cultural mixture affirmation bet on social self-organization. Two of the
discourse by Gilberto Freyre, published greatest protests of 2013—refusing party
in the same year as the Nazis won in politics and fighting for the right to the
Germany. The great ideologies of identity, city—were not deleted. They will return to
although deriving from common sense the streets, heated, sometime soon. Let’s
representations and visible behaviors, see where it will lead us.
can produce a feedback effect, affecting
social existence. They spread within the
society, they begin to structure discourses
and behaviors. An identity discourse can
possibly describe not what we are, but
what we would like to be—and, therefore,
we try to walk in that direction, as an orixá,
as a behavioral archetype to be followed,
redesigning practices and gestures of
those symbolically considered their sons.

Transformative potential

Observing the present Brazilian political

scene, which are the prospects of
reinvention and democratization of the
country, from the point of view of urban
land use?
We’ve said that our governors are
accomplices of businessmen in the
transportation, car and civil engineering
sectors. The Ministry of Cities, created in
response to social demands, was quickly
disfigured. The Ministry renounced its
mission of formulating and coordinating a
national strategy of recovering, enabling
and advancing towards building eco-social
friendly cities. Dilma Rousseff, unlike
promised in her campaign, did not lead
the Ministry to its original goal. It’s up to
society, to activist movements, to fight
on the frontline. Once again, Brazil must
happen over the heads of the State. The
demonstrations of 2013 were born from
the Ministry of Cities early ruins, from a
disastrous failure of Lula’s government,
which, instead of investing in public
transportation, began to subsidize the car
industry, and therefore the production and
 1940 1960

RR AP
MA
AM PI CE RN
PA
AC PE AL
TO SE
RO
MT DF BA
GO MG ES
MS SP RJ
PR
SC
RS

1920 1950

30.6
(y-axys) population
in million

(x-axys) year by
census data

This map was developed and designed in collaboration with

Mapping-lab (www.mappinglab.me) for this catalogue to highlight a
layer of the main exhibition map Succession of Edges.
 Urbanization in Brazil

Rural Urban

1980 2000

1970 1991 2010

160.9

29.8
Imaginary Iris Kantor 218
lines, walls
and mobility:
continental
borders in the
Luso-Brazilian
cartography

Since the beginning of the colonization, the land that

was to become the territory of Brazil was depicted
by European chroniclers and cosmographers as a
space of continental dimensions, separated from
the Hispano-American domains by a fluvial dividing
line that connected the Amazon and Río de la Plata
river basins. At the junction of the two basins, the
cosmographers of the Old World situated a large
interior lake, from which, they believed, the two large
rivers were born. Located in the heart of the biome of
the great swamps of the Upper Rio Paraguai and at the
intersection between Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina and
Bolivia, this lake—variably named Eupana, Ilha-Brasil or,
more commonly, Xarayés—would have configured the
Brazilian space as a cohesive and contiguous unit. This
perception was crystallized not only in the Portuguese
cartography, but was also disseminated in numerous
Jesuit, Dutch, Venetian and English maps for more
than two centuries.1 1. Jaime Cortesão, O Brasil nos
Although the instruments of astronomical Velhos Mapas. Lisboa: Imprensa
Nacional, vol.1, 2009, p.383;
observation and topographical mapping would not
Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, “Um
be introduced until the 1730s, the first European mito geopolítico: A ilha Brasil”,
conquistadors and the Jesuit missionaries transmitted In Tentativa de Mitologia. São
to their contemporaries plausible information about the Paulo: Perspectiva, 1979; Maria
physical geography of South America. Curiously, even de Fátima Costa, “De Xarayes ao
Pantanal: A cartografia de um mito
though there was no direct interconnection between geográfico”, Revista do Instituto de
the basins of the Paraguai and Amazon rivers, we now Estudos Brasileiros – IEB, 2007.
know, thanks to today’s satellite imagery, that during
the high-water season of the Pantanal region a large
lake is visible, which disappears each year during the
dry season, between June and September. Considered
together with the Tordesilhas Meridian—the famous
imaginary line never demarcated on the ground—this
reinforced the geographic motivation for establishing

“the clergy always waged, and continue to wage, a tough
2. Letter sent by T. J. Corte Real
to Governor Rolim de Moura on
August 22, 1758. See Marcos
Carneiro de Mendonça, Rios
Guaporé e Paraguai: primeiras
fronteiras definitivas do Brasil.
Rio de Janeiro: Xerox, 1985, p.9.
the border between the two empires. The maps suggest
a true natural wall, dotted by a system of low-altitude
mountain ranges.
In 1773, Luís de Albuquerque de Melo Pereira e
Cáceres, governor of the captaincy of Mato Grosso, set
forth a plan to open a 5.2-kilometer-long canal between
the Rio Alegre (a tributary of the Amazon) and the Rio
Aguapey (a tributary of the Rio Paraguai), with the aim
of connecting the two basins and facilitating the direct
communications between Cuiabá and Belém.
Until the discovery of the gold mines of Cuiabá and
Mato Grosso, in the 1730s, the effective presence of the
Portuguese metropolitan government in that region
was scarce. The founding of Vila Real do Senhor do
Bom Jesus de Cuiabá, in 1727, was aimed at barring the
expansion of the Jesuits coming from the province of
Paraguai and from the Chiquitos and Moxos indigenous
missions. For their part, these Jesuits had established
a network of settlements where they acted with a
reasonable degree of autonomy, until being expelled
from the Spanish Empire, in 1767. In the Portuguese
Empire, the expulsion of the Jesuits had occurred
eight years earlier, in 1759, under the allegation that the
Ignatian priests had sabotaged the expeditions for the
demarcation of the Treaty of Madrid, signed between
the Iberian crowns in 1750.
According to the correspondence of a high counselor
to the governor of the captaincy of Mato Grosso, in 1758,
war on the borders of those hinterlands, for us to turn
away from them; for this reason we did not penetrate
into the secrets of their colonies or hinder the progress
of their conquests.” He wrote that the king should put a
general end to this violence or, in ten years, “there will be
no more Brazil.”2
It is important to note that the extinction of the
Society of Jesus in Portuguese America aimed
to sedentarize, urbanize and directly control the
indigenous labor force, especially in the missionary
regions, as was the case of the Upper Rio Paraguai and
the Amazon, mainly along the border with the English,
Dutch and French Guianas.
The Treaty of Madrid established that the right to
territorial sovereignty should derive from the principle
of uti possidetis, that is, an effective occupation,
prolonged in time. Thus, the Portuguese crown began
the process of territorial reordering, mandatorily
displacing indigenous populations to the controversial
zones, transforming their villages into true muralhas do
sertão [walls of the hinterlands], as they were frequently
called in the colonial archives. Between 1750 and 1808 a
network of 95 villages and numerous forts, warehouses 220
and prisons were created, evidencing the strategic
planning ability of the Portuguese crown in regard to the
preservation of their conquests.
Between 1755 and 1758, the enlightened indigenous
policy elevated the status of the indigenous
subjects, making them useful vassals, whether for
the construction of forts or for service in the regular
troops that safeguarded the military expeditions.3 The 3. José Roberto Amaral Lapa,
Directory of Indians stipulated that all the missionary Economia colonial. São Paulo:
Perspectiva, 1973, pp.31–36;
settlements (from then on transformed into villages
Renata Malcher Araújo, A
with a council hall) should adopt names of Portuguese urbanização do Mato Grosso no
cities. The assigning of these names was up to the século XVIII, discurso e método,
governors of each captaincy. The new urban toponymy PhD. thesis, Universidade Nova
was therefore supposed to mimic the seigniory de Lisboa, 2000; Luiz Felipe de
Alencastro, “O Rio de Janeiro e
nomenclature of Portugal, at a moment when the o Atlântico”, in Lorelai Kury and
hereditary donatories were becoming extinct in the Heloisa Gesteira (eds.), Ensaios
American territories. The Directory also prohibited the das ciências no Brasil. Rio de
use of the general language and obliged the indigenous Janeiro: UERJ, 2012.
people to speak Portuguese and to adopt Lusitanian
first names and last names. The policy of giving plots of
land (sesmarias) to the new indigenous villages ignited
landownership tensions and conflicts with the large
farmers and landowners, who saw their landholding
privileges threatened.
It is known that at the time of the signing of the Treaty
of Madrid there was a great deal of uncertainty in regard
to the use of the toponyms of the geographic features
in the different localities. The treaty’s text admitted
the fluidity of the nomenclatures, and the demarcation
expeditions were told to prepare maps precisely
indicating the different names of the places, in common
agreement between the commissioners of both crowns.
It was recommended that the copies be authenticated
onsite: “so there will not be the slightest doubt, the
above-mentioned commissioners will put the common-
agreement name on the rivers and mountains that did
not have them, and will label everything on the map as
specific as possible.”
The militarization of the external borders took
place through the construction of a line of forts in the
interior of the continent, with financial resources from
the Companhia Geral de Comércio do Grão Pará e
Maranhão [General Company of Commerce of Grão
Pará and Maranhão], established in 1755. Whether by
regular commerce or by military detachments in the
forts/trading-posts, the Portuguese crown managed
to set its territorial sovereignty, at least in regard to the
other powers.
The territorial reordering also led to the opening
of new internal routes of communication and in the

4. See Luiz Felipe de Alencastro
and Marcos Carneiro de
Mendonça, op. cit.
prohibition of old roads, used by local merchants
and those with thorough knowledge of the hinterland.
The authorities wished to restrict the smuggling of
merchandise and precious metals, which is why they
forbade the economic use of certain routes, such as the
fluvial route between the Arinos and Tapajós rivers. The
process of defining the external borders also affected
the way in which different colonial regions were linked
to one another. In the captaincy of Minas Gerais, gold
mining had been an important factor in spatial and
economic integration since the early 18th century. For
their part, the demarcation expeditions promoted the
militarization of society and the internal expansion of
the colonial frontier.
The successive Spanish invasions of the captaincy
of Rio Grande do Sul, the taking of Colônia do
Sacramento, and the occupation of Santa Catarina,
in the period between 1763 in 1777, obliged the crown
to reinforce the defense in the far West and North.
The strategy of alliances with the indigenous leaders
and the policy of forced resettlement of the local
populations strengthened the control over territories
that otherwise belonged to the vice kingdoms of Peru
and Nova Granada. The geographic reconnoitering
expeditions interiorized the occupation along a
2,400-kilometer stretch of the Amazon.
The 1777 Treaty of Santo Idelfonso gave to Portugal
the exclusive right to navigate along the Amazon from
its junction with the Rio Japurá to its mouth, at the
Atlantic Ocean. Navigation rights on the next stretch,
going upriver, from the junction with the Rio Japurá to
the junction with the Rio Javari—an extension of about
400 km—would be shared by the two crowns. From
Fort Tabatinga upward the river would belong to the
Spanish crown. The mediums of exchange in those
parts were salt, iron, tools and slaves. Along the Rio
Jauru, the Spanish and indigenous traders bartered
in bulls and mules, as well as some silver. From 1770
onward, the Portuguese crown began to concede
privileges to the merchants of the Companhia do
Comércio do Grão Pará for the sale of merchandise in
Spanish lands, with part of the profits going to gifts
made to the Spanish authorities. The Companhia
do Grão Pará also obtained from the Portuguese
crown a tax exemption on the sale of African slaves
from the slave-trading post in Guinea-Bissau to the
merchants in Mato Grosso.4 Thus, as can be seen,
the Portuguese deployed a military, commercial
and cartographic practice in order to materially and
symbolically effectuate their presence in those regions
of unconsolidated sovereignty.
 The Treaty of Santo Idelfonso also stipulated that the 222
governors of the border regions between the empires
should enter into an agreement about the recurring
problem of escaped African slaves, “without which,
for passing through a diverse realm, they obtain their
freedom”. There are numerous reports of military
personnel and merchants who were concerned about
slaves escaping through the forest, including along the
narrow forest waterways known as igarapés.
In a letter to the court in Madrid, the Spanish engineer
and governor Francisco Requeña complained that the
Portuguese were relocating Indians from the Spanish
settlements, founding Portuguese settlements in areas
that were otherwise Spanish and intentionally erasing
the traces of the previous ownership of the lands they
were aiming to take over. Without the cooperation of
the indigenous people, however, it was not possible to
penetrate into the heart of the forest. The attraction,
alliance and violent co-opting of the populations was
decisive, as evidenced by the reports of the demarcators
as well as the watercolors and cartography produced in
that context of forced interaction.
The map entitled Nova Lusitânia presents us with a
projection of the territoriality the colonial administration
was aiming for in the late 18th century. On it, the
interregional urban, road and fluvial networks are
hyperbolized inorder to evidence a fluidity and territorial
contiguity that did not always exist. The cartographic
work aimed to show the integration between the different
parts of the colonial mosaic, depicting it as more than an
archipelago of conquests. An overall analysis will note
the emphasis given to the interregional and macro-scale
flows of communication.
The perception of the geopolitical unity of Portuguese
America that is projected in the cartography of that era is
thus the result of a process of accumulation of experiences
acquired during the demarcation expeditions in the
regions where Iberian sovereignty was not a local reality.
The product of an enlightened reformism, this cartography
illustrates the axioms of the liberal economy (alienable
property, taxes per head, exemption from customs
tariffs and revocation of the commercial monopolies),
while projecting the image of a reasonably uniform
and homogenous territory, eliminating the colonial
enclaves where quilombos or maroon communities were
located—which were sometimes efemeral, not always
stable—representing it as a dense and cohesive network
of settlements.
Thinking about the territory in its everyday uses
requires that we progressively reconstitute the past
material infrastructures, imagining the terrestrial and
fluvial routes, the means of transportation utilized, the
difference between traveling in canoes, ox carts, on mule
back, or on foot for days on end. Ultimately, what maps
reveal to us are the projections of a sovereignty that
is being sought after, rather than one that has already
been achieved, as taught by geographer Antonio Carlos
Robert de Moraes.

Iris Kantor is a professor of

Iberian history at the University
of São Paulo. She coordinates
the Laboratory of Historical
Cartography Studies of the
Jaime Cortesão Chair and of
the Institute of Brazilian Studies
(IEB-USP). Visiting lecturer at
Stanford University and the
Centre de Recherches sur le
Brésil Colonial et Contemporain
of the École des Hautes
Études en Sciences Sociales
in Paris. She is the author of
Esquecidos & renascidos:
historiografia acadêmica luso-
americana, 2004. Member of
the Brazilian Historical and
Geographical Institute and of
the Iberian‑American history
of cartography network.
7
Geography of the
real estate market:
controversies between
the agenda of capital
and that of architecture
How unobstructed is the
agenda of the real estate
market against that of
architecture?
In discussing the Brazilian cities it is
indispensable to address the real estate
market.1 The built mass in cities and its
negative spaces—voids—involve, in one
way or another, real estate production on
every scale and in any location. Bringing
together investors, brokers, builders,
incorporators, advertising agencies,
banks, urbanists, architects, engineers,
consumers and the public power, the real
estate market is the main force shaping the
physical environment of cities.
To understand the practices of the real
estate market and that of the urbanists and
architects, it is necessary to understand
the core by which the academic and
professional bases of each are defined.
Although architecture courses have
existed since the beginning of the
19th century, and courses in urbanism
have been taught since the 1920s
onward,2 their academic structure has
gone through significant alterations;
in 1969 the disciplines merged. This
merging formalized the joining of the
aspects relative to buildings and to
cities, and strengthened the ideas
of multidisciplinarity, generality
and complexity.3 The guidelines for
structuring courses of architecture and
urbanism establish that they should offer
understanding in the fields of anthropology,
sociology, economics, the environment,
techniques of construction and
management, history and methodology.
Although the importance of this global
knowledge is emphasized for the student
to later take part in a competitive market,
no attention is given to questions relative
to the operations of the real estate market.4
Architectural and urbanistic practices
usually take place in the direct relation with
an individual client and his or her individual
desires—normally of small scale—or it is
linked to the public construction of the
social, urban space. Little consideration
is given to the largest mass of the built
environment, the one driven by pure
capital logic. Likewise, the perspective
presented by Claudio Bernardes in this
chapter is another one that have been widely
disregarded; the perspective that there is a
clear dissociation between the architectural
product and the product of the market.
In one hand, the corporate clients,
inserted in a marketing logic, are complex.
In part because their final objectives are
intrinsically linked to the generation of profit
but also because they move comfortably
within an economic and financial system for
which the architect has not been prepared
to. On the other hand, although they are
connected to the economy of the cities—a
point discussed in this chapter by Danilo
Igliori and Sergio Castelani—they do not
necessarily consider the sociological and
anthropological impacts their decisions may
have in the territory.
Nevertheless, the relation between
architecture-urbanism and the real
estate market is strangely mutual. There
are differences that are simplified as of
pragmatic or sensitive nature but that do
not necessarily have right answers. Should
it be dwellings, commercial centers,
shopping centers or factory buildings?
Horizontal or vertical? Permeable or fenced
off? Structured in concrete, iron or wood?
With natural or mechanical ventilation?
Commercialized, rented or donated?
Financeable or not? Located in central,
peripheral or detached areas? The list of
variables is extensive, and understanding
the effects of these choices in the economy
and in the dynamics of the city requires that
the two sides listen to each other.
The urgent need to bring together
architects and real estate investors to
construct points of common interest—
towards a less unequal society—is not
unknown to both parts. Nevertheless,
the mutual incomprehension of the
possibilities of action in the construction
of the cities has led to disagreements
between these agents. It is necessary to
understand that their relationship should
not involve rivalry or a game of right and
wrong, rather, there is the need to arrive at
a shared vision of what the city could be.
From this angle, the work by artist Renata
Lucas turns the spectator to the views from
Masp toward Avenida 9 de Julho to make
them ask themselves: was there a project for
the city here that was not executed?
This clashing between the two disciplines
needs to be seen as an unexplored
opportunity for the construction of an urban
space with more shared social experiences,
more possibilities and alternatives for the
population and, why not, better financial
conditions for the private and public agents
and users.
the MAP
In drawing up the map of the geography of
the real estate investments, the territorial
deformation reveals the different levels
of investment from region to region. The
markings of latitude and longitude were
altered according to the GDP of each
city: larger GDP indexes are represented
by larger quadrants. This makes it clear
how São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, by
themselves, have a weight of an entire Brazil.
Following a similar logic, urban areas
are assigned their monetary value, re-
drawing the country based on its price of
land. Populational concentrations and a
larger number of dwellings are inversely
proportional to the concentration of
income—another indication of inequality.
To give more weight to the analysis, the
urban infrastructural networks were added,
with highways and railways, indicating
that they also are significant variables in
the determination of the values attributed
to the real estate properties. In short, the
greater the price of land, the higher the
summits and the darker the color.
Adjacent to the cities and based on
data related to civil construction and to
the architectural and urbanistic practice,
bar graphs were added to represent the
quantity of companies and workers of each
sector. In this summary, the divergence
between the numbers relative to the
construction industry and those to the field
of architecture illustrate the wall that still
separates the two activities.
The last item of the quantitative analysis
focuses on real estate actions directed
to culture and leisure, with data on
shopping centers (quantity, target public
by social class, and types of offerings and
facilities, such as cinemas and theaters)
in comparison with the quantity of public
cultural equipment by municipality.
1. In Brazil, it involves horizontal
and vertical residential properties;
corporate and logistic facilities;
shopping centers and hotels.
2. The first course of architecture
in Brazil was proposed in 1816, by
King João VI, amidst the French
Artistic Mission. The Escola Real
de Ciências, Artes e Ofícios (later
the Escola de Belas Artes) trained
masters of Brazilian architecture
such as Lucio Costa, Oscar
Niemeyer and Roberto Burle Marx.
The first course in urbanism was
founded in 1935, in Rio de Janeiro.
3. In the definition of the Ministry
of Education, “the pedagogical
proposal for the undergraduate
courses in architecture and
urbanism should ensure the
training of generalist professionals,
able to understand and translate
the needs of individuals,
social groups and community,
with relation to the design,
organization and construction of
the interior and exterior space,
encompassing urbanism, building,
and landscaping, as well as the
preservation of the built heritage,
the protection of the balance of
the natural environment and the
rational use of resources.”
4. “One thing I consider important
is for us to understand that in
the capitalist world everything
requires capital. There is not a
single architect, who fights in an
area of such large investments,
who thinks that because he is
handsome, has good eyes or
makes a more curved gesture,
the capital will come and ask
him to help it. No. You need
to be concerned, architects,
in understanding in what way
you are going to achieve an
association with capital.” Joaquim
Guedes. Available at: http://www.
vitruvius.com.br/revistas/read/
arquitextos/14.163/4986. Retrieved
on: April 20, 2018.
Renata Lucas
aqui havia um projeto de cidade
[here, there was a project for city],
2018
Bárbara Wagner and
Benjamin de Burca
desenho/canteiro [plan/plat],
2014
Video collage, HD, color, sound,
12’12”
Mauro Restiffe
Itaquerão #2, 2014
Estacionamento Oficina
[Oficina Parking Lot], 2014
São Paulo – Viaduto Antártica, 2014
Photograph
interview: 244
Claudio
Bernardes

Claudio Bernardes (São Paulo-SP,

1954) is a construction executive.
He studied civil engineering at
Escola de Engenharia Mauá,
holds a master’s in engineering
from the University of Sheffield
and specialized in industrial
engineering for construction at
Fundação Vanzolini/USP. He has
worked as a real estate executive
for over 40 years, focusing on
the field of urban development
in the capital and interior of the
state of São Paulo. He is the
CEO of Ingaí Incorporadora S/A,
chairman of the advisory board
at Secovi-SP, where he has been
a and member since 1985, and
chairman of the management
board for the Department of
Urbanism and Licensing of the
City of São Paulo. He is a professor
of urban development on the MBA
program in Real Estate Business
Management at Escola Superior
de Propaganda e Marketing
(ESPM), a columnist for the
newspaper Folha de S.Paulo and
author of the books Plano diretor
estratégico, lei de zoneamento e
atividade imobiliária em São Paulo
(2005) and Qualidade e o custo das
não-conformidades em obras de
construção civil (1988).
Walls

What are the conflicts that distance

the practice of architecture from urban
planning and the real estate market?
The greatest barrier is academia, because
it disassociates the product “architecture”
from the product “market.” The product of
architecture, as an academic entity, has its
value, but oftentimes, when placed on the
market, from a practical standpoint, has no
value at all. It is important to understand
that a project will only get off the drawing
board if there is a market for it. Even famous
architects only find space in the market for
their projects if they work in a niche where
there is an economic and financial balance
that is receptive to their ideas.
There shouldn’t be any distance at all, but
sometimes there is due to market issues.
Normally, although people don’t believe it,
the real estate entrepreneur serves a social
function of balancing supply and demand.
For this to occur, he has to make products
that people want for a price they can pay. It
is a complex and difficult issue to resolve.
Sometimes, the product is not exactly what
a good architect or urban planner would
put out there. There is this confrontation
between the public sector, responsible for
the planning and growth of the city, and the
real estate sector, which needs to create a
link between the consumer and regulation.
When they say “a particular regulation
will benefit the real estate sector”, what it
actually means is that the rule will make
property more affordable for the consumer.
Of course there have been excesses; in the
end, there are sectors of the market that
want to maximize profit. But always in a way
that allows the market to function.

Evidence

What type of city does the segregation

between architects and construction
executives produce?
We have to understand that the real estate
market is a vehicle for transforming and
building the city. It can only do this by
following the regulations established by
those who create urban policy. The industry
has recently begun to understand that it
must participate in the process of discussing
the city and the master plan, to show urban
managers what will work and what will not.
Within the regulations, there is a
certain amount of flexibility. Promoting an
awareness in the real estate industry that
maximizing profit is not the only priority,
but rather earning enough, while letting
the city breathe a little, with more green
areas, is a concept that is gradually gaining
acceptance. This means that the regulations
have to be extremely detailed. The basic
mechanisms that guide urban development
should be contained in the regulations. And
there has to be an awareness that the city is
for everyone, to provide space for people.
Side effects
Where is the space for the low-income
population in the real estate market of
São Paulo?
Some years ago there was practically no
place for them. We see so many slums
precisely because there is no housing policy
to provide alternatives. We talk about not
maximizing profit, but the market has to
have some profit that keeps companies
alive, to pay their employees.
The Minha Casa Minha Vida [My
Home My Life] program is interesting
but presents a series of problems and
errors from an urban planning standpoint.
Crowding people together in a distant
location, because the land is cheap, means
that it will be much more expensive to
provide infrastructure. The merit of the
program was to create the conditions
necessary for the market to begin to serve
this population, which was only possible
because of subsidies from the government
itself. A large part of the population of
Brazil has an income so low that it is not
able to buy anything available on the
market. This subsidy made it possible to
serve the so-called “bracket one” families,
the lowest income group. In a short period
of time 3 million units were produced.
Despite all the urban problems, it is still
better than living in a slum alongside
a sewage-filled stream. But, without
subsidies, the only way you can do this
is to make the economy grow so people
can earn more, since the income gap is
extremely wide. As citizens, we need to
work toward narrowing this gap.
Behavior and micro-politics
Who is responsible for the house
imagery of the middle and upper
classes? What does the Brazilian middle
class desire in a house today?
The market creates products based on
consumer demand, or is it the other
way around? It’s actually a mix of these
two things. There are lots of things that
consumers don’t know they want until it
is presented to them. Quantitative and
qualitative studies are done to understand
what the consumer wants and there is
also the creativity of the architect and
the businessman to understand what an
interesting product would be. Perhaps
the function of the architect is to create
interesting ideas that will be filtered by the
developer and the consumer, so we have a
palatable product for the market
Experience in the discipline
How does Secovi-SP do its work given
the conflicting interests of government,
private initiative and the public?
Considering, for example, the Nova Luz
project.
The Nova Luz project was, first of all,
proposed by the municipal government.
They wanted participation from private
enterprise, but this was not economically
viable in the way that it was presented
to us. With some changes, we thought
we could create an important nucleus
in the center of town and that this could
unlock a process of development that, in
addition to revitalizing the center of town,
would create an interesting market. Many
people would like to live in the center of
town, which possesses good infrastructure,
despite the security issues. We envisioned
a project that would combine public and
private interests and the interests of the
people who would live there, but the project
was very poorly marketed. There were
adverse reactions, such as from the people
in neighboring Santa Efigênia. The project
would have completely made over this
street and transformed it into the largest
center for electrical and electronic goods in
South America, without displacing anyone.
But rumors circulated that properties were
going to be expropriated, unleashing a
series of misunderstandings. It was not
possible to move forward with the project,
but some regulations were brought forward,
such as the urban concession, which is an
interesting instrument.

Transformative potential

What are your expectations for urban

development and housing based on a
model of public-private partnerships
(PPPs)? What kind of government is capable
of regulating these partnerships and
ensuring the social function of urban land?
PPPs are a very interesting alternative
for the economic environment in which
we live, since the crisis is very deep and
government budgets are tight. These
partnerships should involve issues of
interest to the government and the people
and also provide profit for the investor. I
think it would be interesting, for example,
if the government took areas that are
completely run-down and offered them
to the private sector for terms of 30 years.
The company would probably invest to
transform the region and make the area
appreciate in value, returning it to the
government with a higher property tax base.
If the government has an asset that can be
put on the table and if it can regulate this
matter, I think that this is a winning model.
Instead of discarding it, we have to fight to
make it better.
 S ÃO PA U LO
This map was developed and designed in collaboration with
Mapping-lab (www.mappinglab.me) for this catalogue to highlight a
layer of the main exhibition map Geography of the Real Estate Market.
 Airbnb and the city
Number of households
Number of residents
Airbnb number of rentals
Airbnb average daily rate
Median household income

R I O D E JA N E I RO
Space and Danilo Igliori 250
market: a and Sergio
reflection on Castelani
the real estate
geography
and economy
of cities

The decision-making process that is cause and

consequence of the real estate geographies we
observe—buying, selling, renting, financing, building,
incorporating—is directly connected with issues
relating to the functioning of the city’s economy. Some
are of a macroeconomic nature, but others have a
microeconomic character.
Examples: how far can prices fall during a crisis? When
is the ideal time to buy or sell? When selling a property,
should I look at interest rates? Only in Brazil, or also in
the US? Should inflation and GDP growth expectations
be considered when buying a property? Or would it be
more important to map the potential changes in the city’s
master plan? Does the construction of more buildings in
the neighbourhood value or devalue my property? And
what about the creation of a new shopping mall, or a
school? Should we think of a property as a consumer good
or as a financial asset? Is it better to sell my apartment,
invest the money, and pay rent instead? Why, in some
places, do prices fall while others rise? What is the risk of
a quiet neighbourhood becoming a shopping area, or of
a low-valued area becoming more attractive? Will traffic
congestion increase or decrease in order to access my
neighbourhood? After all, what are the determinants of
real estate prices?
The above list, while extensive, is far from exhaustive.
However, it is clear that in order to understand the real
estate economy, it is necessary to combine a large set
of factors in a particular and complex way. In this sense,
three characteristics of the sector are essential.
First and foremost, real estate is a commodity of
enormous value, often higher than the monthly income
of the vast majority of people. This makes the real estate
market depend on the availability of credit, and, on the fact
that the decisions to buy, sell, or finance will need to take
into account extended timelines.
Secondly, real estate takes a few years to build (and
the cost of demolition is very high). This leads to strong
constraints on adjusting real estate supply to economic
changes—which in turn facilitates the formation of sharp
price cycles or the generation of bubbles.
Finally, real estate has an address. And, with that, it is
subject to the dynamics of the cities, neighbourhoods, and
streets where it is located. Here we need to understand
the relationships between agglomeration economies and
congestion effects that, together with the presence of
amenities, shape and transform economic landscapes, not
to mention the physical characteristics of the properties
themselves—size, number of rooms, parking spaces,
balcony, suites etc.—which obviously are also very relevant
in price formation.
It can be seen, then, that in fact real estate decisions
have temporal (when), spatial (where) and structural (what)
dimensions. Together, all of these elements make the
geography of the sector encompass numerous economic
connections, both macro and micro, which characterize
the economies of cities and present important challenges
for citizens, businesses, and governments.
A central question in the geography of the real estate
market naturally refers to the variation of prices within
space: why do properties with similar physical attributes,
but at different addresses, vary so much in price? The
answer to this question may seem simple or even
obvious: price variation stems from the qualities—or
lack thereof—that make one place more attractive than
another. But what attracts people to a particular place?
A little reflection indicates that the list of locational
attributes can be long and again involves factors that
explain the economy of cities.
In general, we can say that what happens in the
localities is the result of the clash between a set of
positive forces, which increase the local attractiveness,
and another of negative forces, which reduce it. These
forces are created inside and outside the markets in which
individuals interact, because they are close to each other.
These interactions can occur within the economic sphere—
proximity to work, customers, suppliers, competitors, and
shopping areas—or outside it—proximity to friends, family,
leisure, and entertainment areas. In addition, the spatial
characteristics, natural or built, count a lot.
From an economic perspective, localities should be
thought of as small, open spaces. Regardless of their size,
they tend to be subject to the free movement of capital
and labour. In an open economy context, people and firms
make location choices and “vote with their feet.” In this
way, the attractiveness of cities and their neighbourhoods 252
and streets can be seen through their labour markets
and real estate assets. Their incentives and restrictions
follow the supply and demand structures of these markets.
Labour and real estate markets are also connected, as real
estate prices and wages influence each other.
On a slightly more macro scale, we realize that cities are
not isolated entities either. They connect to form networks
or systems. Urban systems take on different forms and
structures. Municipalities have diverse sizes and also
distinguish themselves in a variety of aspects. Most
importantly, these urban systems are dynamic. People
and companies move across space over time, redesigning
geography, impacting on its economic functions and
transforming its real estate markets.
To understand the economy of cities it is essential to
draw on two fundamental concepts: increasing returns
to scale and externalities. For better or for worse, it is
the many manifestations of the relationship between
these two concepts are what lies behind much of what
we see happening in our cities. We say that a technology
exhibits increasing returns when, by increasing the raw
material used, we achieve more than proportional gains
in increased productivity. However, externalities are the
unintended impacts, positive or negative, that we cause
on our neighbours.
The best-known cases of increasing returns are
technological characteristics of productive and managerial
processes. Common examples are what occurs in many
factories, power plants, or hospitals, when they grow. On
the other hand, pollution – air, water, or noise – and traffic
congestion are classic examples of negative externalities.
Mixing the two concepts, the increasing external
returns to scale are found in labour markets, value chains,
and the generation and dissemination of knowledge. A
dynamic local economy does not explain everything, but it
certainly is important to understand real estate prices in
the surrounding area. An ocean view will always be worth
something, but if it can be close to good jobs, then the
potential will be enormous.
It is true that the dynamics of the housing market
go far beyond the city boundaries. This was more
than evident after the biggest global crisis since the
depression of the 1930s began exactly in the US housing
market, followed by a period of intense appreciation.
Could the real estate market in Brazil suffer something
like this? Part of the answer is immediate. The Brazilian
real estate market is very different from the American.
In particular, we have only just begun the development
of financial instruments that bundle various real
estate assets into marketable securities—so-called
securitization. And the abuse of these instruments was a
major cause of what happened in the US.
In fact, the securitization of real estate assets is part
of the natural maturation of the financial markets, and
this development is certainly welcome in Brazil. But on
the other hand, in the absence of adequate regulation,
securitization can be used to hide the real risks involved
in the financing that gives it structure and that allows it to
dramatically expand investors’ leverage.
In addition, despite the last decade’s significant growth,
real estate financing volumes are still modest in Brazil, if
compared to other countries. Especially considering that
the vast majority of those who contract a loan here do
this to acquire their first property. However, unfortunately,
these differences were not enough to produce a smooth
adjustment in the Brazilian real estate market during the
last recession—far from it.
The severity of the economic situation triggered
objective and subjective factors that played very strongly
against the health of the sector. In objective terms, we
had the association of the deterioration of the labour
market—more unemployment, less real income—with
more restrictive credit conditions (higher interest rates,
less risk acceptance). Subjectively, low confidence and
renewed uncertainties drowned out decisions involving
long-term payments. To complete the scenario, we
cannot fail to mention that, on the supply side, many
developers came out of a period of heavy investments
and suffered serious difficulties with the slower pace,
without considering the increase in cancellations, which
made this scenario much worse.
The interaction between the macroeconomic context
and the spatial factors creates the incentive systems that
are reflected in the patterns of land occupation and the
geographies of the real estate market. As in all countries,
the distribution of population, wealth, and economic
activity in space is very uneven in Brazil. We can look
at these inequalities in different ways. On the one
hand, we know that the Southeast region concentrates
a disproportionately large share of the product and
population. But on the other hand, it is also true that a
large part of the population already lives in large cities
across the country. And from a third angle, we know that
many of the economic activities are concentrated near
the Atlantic coast.
If these findings are true, there is no guarantee that they
will remain so. What is perceived is that there have been
deconcentration processes during the last decades. Other
regions of Brazil have accelerated their growth, surpassing
the rates presented by the Southeast. On the other hand,
we witness the accelerated growth of a group of medium-
sized cities scattered throughout the country. Finally, we 254
also witnessed the internalization of development, with
the expansion of Brasília, Minas Gerais, and the interior of
São Paulo, among other regions.
The structure of our urban system and the internal
configurations of our cities are the result of developments
that have taken place over the centuries—sometimes
domestic, but sometimes global. Our cities are the result
of migrations from all continents, voluntary or otherwise,
as well as internal migratory flows. What would São Paulo
be like without the Northeasterners? What would the
Amazon be like without the Southerners? However, in
general, we can say that the process of urbanization over
the last decades has produced in Brazil a marked urban
sprawl, associated above all with the tendency toward
private occupation of space. Larger distances between
work, leisure, services, and housing not only undermined
public resources inefficiently, due to the need to expand
the urban infrastructure networks, but also reduced
opportunities for interaction in public spaces.
More recently, however, we have observed movements in
the opposite direction. In some cities, there are indications
that a growing group of people has been choosing and
valuing an occupation of space that prioritizes public
facilities and interaction with the city. The impacts of
these changes on real estate geography are evident: the
construction of more compact housing, revalorization
of central areas, an increase in population density, and
the encouragement of mixed uses of space. There are
a number of positive points, such as allowing greater
interaction between firms and individuals, and rationalizing
infrastructure investments. But of course there are also
challenges: to expand access to public transport is
essential, and improving rules for cohabitation in higher
densities is urgent.
Finally, in spite of this incipient process of revitalization
of central areas, it is important to remember that a
significant part of Brazilian real estate geography and
economy remains on the outskirts of major cities. These
territories, marked by poor infrastructure, poor housing,
and informal land use often coexist with social indicators
comparable to those of poorer countries or even nations in
conflict. Differences within the built environment, between
rich and poor regions of large cities, are possibly equal to
the worst dimensions of inequality within the country.
Planning for urban development is by no means trivial.
However, the cost of not having a good strategy for our
cities is high. Urban capital is a public good and everyone
loses without it. And in this sense, understanding the
interfaces between space and market as materialized in
the functioning of cities, could not be a more central task.
Danilo C. Igliori (São Paulo-sp, 1970)
is a professor at the Department of
Economics of USP and chairman of
DataZAP Inteligência Imobiliária. He
holds a PhD from the University of
Cambridge, where he taught at the
Department of Land Economy and
received the Adam Smith Fellowship
in Political Economy of Pembroke
College. He is co-editor of Spatial
Economic Analysis and has worked
in the private and public sectors and
international organizations.
Sergio André Castelani (São
Paulo-sp, 1983) holds a PhD in
economic theory from the School
of Economics, Administration and
Accounting of the Universidade
de São Paulo (2014). A specialist in
econometrics, space economics
and urban economics, he is a
lecturer on the Urban Economy
course of the Continuing Education
Program of the Polytechnic School
of USP. He is chief economist at
DataZap Inteligência Imobiliária.
Time for us Eudoxios 256
to tear down Anastassiadis
this wall

muro mura a rua

a rua mura o muro
muro a rua mura
morte ao muro
arquitetura é rua1 1. [the wall encloses the street / the
street encloses the wall / the street
enclosed by the wall / death to the
wall / architecture is street].
There is a wall that separates architecture from the
Brazilian real estate market. An invisible, impenetrable
wall shrouded in a dense fog, as heavy as lead. This wall
separates two cultures, two atmospheres. In no other
country in the world is there a wall that is as high or
thick, one that stands out as a monument to separatism.
Most architects stick to one side of the wall, with their
own language, their influences, their culture. On the
other side, there are the property developers, with their
own rationales and culture. Without an open channel of
communication, the two sides have been waging a silent
war for over 40 years. The city suffers. The public suffers.
On both sides there are timid initiatives for peace and
coexistence. Analysts of the confrontation are split: some
say that there’s no way out, that the war has condemned
both sides to stagnation and decadence, that there will
never be peace. While others say the only way out for
architects and property developers is to reunite the two
sides and that it is possible to tear down the wall that
divides what was, until the 1960s, a united and prosperous
community. Who’s got it right? What does the future hold
for these two groups?
Just as walls separate properties from streets, people
from other people, the streets from people, people
from cultures and so on and so forth, this invisible wall
separates architects, on one side, and the designing of
houses, buildings, housing, shopping malls and hotels,
on the other. Architects limit themselves to working on
public projects that are socially relevant, and a small
number of family homes for well-heeled, aesthetically
conscious clients who worship their convictions. They see
themselves as fair, collaborative and socially engaged with
the citizenry and the city. Socialist ideology runs deep
through the group, which clings to outdated worldviews,
founded on the differences between left and right and on
the modernist paradigms of the 1950s, long ago put to rest
and studied as part of the history of world architecture.
They fight the property developers on the other side of the
wall, who are seen as capitalists that destroy architectural
culture with buildings of no cultural value and of dubious
quality in any sense.
Architects who one day cross from one side of the
wall to the other are practically outcast, accused of
having sold out, considered a felony offense. As soon
as they cross over, the dissidents are automatically
downgradede, to a lower realm. They become pariahs of
Brazilian architectural society. Few of their counterparts
will speak to them, architectural journals thumb their
noses at their designs, they are not invited to biennials,
award ceremonies or lectures at universities. And, if they
make some money, they are harassed and discriminated
against. These isolated “traitors” are embraced by
property developers who need their work, but they quickly
conform to their culture. Poor dissident architect: he will
be fed and domesticated as a pet by a race of beings who
have little respect for the art and culture of architecture.
Property developers are the last group of people for whom
they would like to work. They are greedy, pretentious,
old‑fashioned, money-grabbing; and generally know little
about design, history, nature, proportion and beauty.
Conversely, but with the same intensity, property
developers want to work with yielding architects, focused
on getting the most out of the land and building, who are
good at layouts and understand legislation, and who are
market‑oriented and able to accept direction from sales
and advertising companies. If they can also innovate,
as long as it doesn’t cost too much, better still; but it is
not a prerequisite. Normally, property developers are
good businessmen with domineering personalities, who
want their will to prevail. In the end, it is their capital at
stake, and the preservation of capital and the profit of
the enterprise are the main objectives. They have studied
engineering, economics, finance, law, administration, but
very few are architects. Nothing could be more capitalist,
right? The architect is just another service provider for
their industry of creating and selling cubic meters at some
profit. The architect is an input, like cement and steel. He
should be treated with respect, but he is not the leading
man in this field. Not even as a market strategy is the 258
status of the architect appropriately used; today, interior
decorators (many of them excellent architects, by the way)
receive more attention, not to mention the ever-present
decorated apartments.
The basic formula for property development has
changed little over the last 20 years: uninteresting
buildings, with outdated and cheap spaces and façades;
large, well-equipped common areas, flexible layouts,
which please most clients and finishings that are either
of low quality or absent. In this country, architects of
buildings go largely unrecognized, absent in marketing
efforts for developments, and even from building permits
displayed at construction sites. Property developers see
people on the other side of the wall as idealistic dreamers
with strong cultural backgrounds who are of little worth
in today’s business world. Ideological differences limit
the dialogue between the two, because architects don’t
know how to keep accounts and don’t prioritize profits.
So, although property developers need architects, they
restrict themselves to consulting and working with the
dissidents of that community, while completely ignoring
the other side of the wall.
How and why did this division begin? And what was
life like for these two groups before? In his recent work
São Paulo nas alturas [São Paulo on the Heights], the
journalist Raul Juste Lores provides a detailed account
of this history. Elegantly, the author demonstrates that
the architects actively participated, as vectors, or were
themselves property developers on most projects
undertaken in the São Paulo of the 1940s, 1950s and
early 1960s. Real partnerships that promoted the growth
and progress of the city were forged, with names like
Franz Heep, Henrique Mindlin, the brothers Roberto
and Artacho Jurado, Oscar Niemeyer, Rino Levi, Luciano
Korngold, Gregori Warchavchik, Maria Bardelli and
Ermanno Siffredi, Jacques Pilon, Giancarlo Gasperini,
Francisco Beck, Alfredo Duntuch, David Libeskind, Samuel
and João Kon, Israel Galman and Giancarlo Palanti, etc.,
resulting in the design and building of developments,
that were popular and still are adored today by the
architectural community. Buildings that combined good
design and fine, modern finishings, appropriate for a Brazil
full of optimism and expectations for growth. With the
end of the “golden years” of the JK era, and the rampant
inflation generated by the construction of Brasília, many
property developers went bankrupt and many architects
and property developers became impoverished. Shortly
thereafter, starting in 1964, the brutal repression of
the military dictatorship finished off the architectural
community and its business aspirations. Many architects

2. Research and documentation in
Brazil state that this building was
designed by a group led by Lucio
Costa (Affonso Eduardo Reidy,
Carlos Leão, Ernani Vasconcellos,
Jorge Machado Moreira and Oscar
Niemeyer), with Le Corbusier as
a consultant. See, among others,
Elizabeth D. Harris, Le Corbusier
– Riscos brasileiros. São Paulo:
Nobel, 1987; e Guilherme Wisnik,
Lucio Costa. São Paulo: Cosac
Naify, 2001. [n.e]
supported the Brazilian Communist Party, including
Vilanova Artigas and Oscar Niemeyer, for example. Many
were not only persecuted, but also marginalized from
the new housing projects launched by the government,
which were doled out to businessmen from many different
backgrounds. The creation of the Banco Nacional de
Habitação [National Housing Bank – BNH] and the
rationalization of the processes took away the space
needed to develop ideas. Architects hunkered down in the
few available trenches: in universities, in some civil service
jobs and in projects for homes for clients and admirers
with considerable purchasing power, who were interested
in buying something of prestige and quality. That was the
breaking point; in the words of Lores, the divorce between
architecture and property development.
We know that divorces are generally painful, and tend
to create gaps and resentment. Unfortunately, this is
what happened in our country. For example, you can
count on your fingers the number of commercial and
residential building projects designed by Brazil’s greatest
living architect, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, winner of the
Pritzker Architecture Prize and Golden Lion at the Venice
Architecture Biennale. The same can be said about Oscar
Niemeyer after 1964. In a city like São Paulo, with over
20,000 buildings built over the last six decades, why
are there so few projects by the two most important
representatives of Brazilian architecture? Perhaps it is
a matter of ideological differences; obviously not a lack
of talent. The thinking of leaders like these has a huge
influence on new generations of architects.
The import substitution policy, defended by the
military dictatorship for various sectors in the 1970s, was
convenient for Brazilian architects. This model allowed
them to design and build without any competition from
abroad and created a xenophobic attitude: since then,
no foreign architect has been welcomed. Instead of
being treated as influences and disseminators of new
technology, they were viewed as the enemy. The Instituto
dos Arquitetos do Brasil (Institute of Architects of Brazil –
IAB) pursued policies that fell in line with the usual mantra:
closed economy, Brazil for Brazilians. It was a mindset
that ended any chance of foreign architects working in
Brazil. Just the opposite of what happened when the
Swiss architect Le Corbusier came to Rio de Janeiro to
design the Ministry of Education building, in 1936.2 It
is unnecessary to mention the great influence that this
project had on Brazilian architecture and modernism. In
this complex cauldron, part of the wall was thus formed.
The same occurred on the other side of the wall. After
the end of the era of the property developer-architects,
others took their place and quickly introduced new ways
of building, based more on the fundamentals of industrial 260
engineering and finance than on architectural principles.
The Brazil of the 1970s was growing again, forming a
new cast of successful and confident businessmen, in a
scenario where production, money and companies were
valued. Architecture became an input; increasingly, it
was annihilated as a driving force behind the sector. The
side of the property developers ended up with lots of
work and lots of risk, but adapted quickly to the economic
game, despite the pitfalls and some frightening failures.
The architecture of the buildings was no longer a priority,
giving way to cost, supply and demand, real estate
financing and sectoral policies. The dialogue between
aesthetics, design, layout and trends became irrelevant.
The market became the grand master and conductor of
the entire machine. The result, unfortunately, is plainly
visible in cities: from 1960 up until today, after the wall
began to be built, the quality of architecture produced by
the Brazilian real estate sector fell dramatically. Property
developers, most of whom lacked the cultural repertoire to
hold such an important position, just made things worse.
With their certainties, based on commercial results, and
their conceptual shortcomings, combined with the power
and influence of money, they added to the width and the
height of the wall.
The results of this separation—and the consequent
decline of the parties involved—are devastating. To cite
some examples: (1) no leading school of architecture
in Brazil consistently offers courses associated with
property development. The same happens, with regard
to architecture, on bachelor’s and master’s degree
programs in property development. (2) There is practically
no dialogue between the two sides of the wall, which is
avoided at all cost; when it does occur, the discussion
is difficult, and interspersed with hard feelings and
accusations. (3) In our cities today we witness bizarre
sights, such as buildings in the Mediterranean or
neoclassical style (which dominated local real estate
production for decades), the direct result of lack of
discussion, dialogue and architectural culture. (4) If we
compare this to what was produced around the world
over the last 20 years, Brazil, which was at the forefront
of architecture and urbanism in the 1950s, has become
one of the most outdated and irrelevant markets on
the world architectural scene. (5) There are almost no
projects by important foreign architects, and the degree of
internationalization and openness of Brazilian architecture
is the lowest of the world’s largest 20 economies.
It is time for us to tear down this wall. And reunify
something that should never have been separated. We
need to create a dialogue and establish a culture in line
with the highest values from around the world without
delay. Architects and property developers need to adapt,
become collaborative, expand their knowledge and
share it quickly and generously, healing the wounds and
sitting at the table to build a new pact. We need to quickly
improve real estate market conditions, to create a fair and
collaborative environment, a vector for technology and
innovation. Schools and universities need to include these
sciences in their curriculums. We need to overcome our
fears and prepare ourselves to evolve on a global scale. We
need to remove politics from the professional debate that
holds us back and separates us.
Tearing down this wall will free us from the
backwardness, discrimination and hurt.
Death to the wall.
Architecture is the street.

Eudoxios Stefanos Anastassiadis

(São Paulo–SP, 1975)is a property
developer, administrator and
architect at heart. He has been
a partner at Anastassiadis
Arquitetos since 1993 and founder
and CEO of Alfa Realty since 2002.
8
Inhabiting the
house or the city?
the impact of the
Minha Casa Minha
Vida housing program
How generous are
the Brazilian housing
programs in offering
the right to the city?
The design of housing has been,
historically, one of the main tasks of
architecture. In the complexity of the current
Brazilian housing demand, however, the
architect and urbanist has had little space
in which to act in this sector. There is a true
wall, especially in what concerns low-income
housing—whether because of the structure
of governmental programs, the lack of
alignment with the real estate market, or
even because of self-construction.
This chapter discusses one of the
most recent processes for the production
of housing in the country, the Minha
Casa Minha Vida [My House My Life]
program  (MCMV). As explained by
Elisabete França and Rainer Hehl, it is
not the first Brazilian experience with
housing programs nor is it the only one
with doubtful outcomes for the cities.
Launched in 2009, in the administration of
then-President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva,
the program fundamentally consisted of
a federal macro-policy, implemented in
municipalities all over Brazil up to 2015.1
The goal, described in law, was to
subsidize the acquisition of new dwellings
by lower-income populations. The political
proposal was to create more than solely a
financial instrument, but a means to ensure
conditions for better housing. Not only
furnishing roofs, the program attended
to populations which, excluded from the
large centers by the high cost of land,
live in a precarious way, in areas without
infrastructure around the peripheries of
the Brazilian cities.
Like any product inserted in the logic
of the real estate production, the MCMV
program was conceived basically with
an eye to profitability, seeking the most
economic solutions possible, through
standardized, quick and cheap processes,
as described by Raquel Rolnik in her essay.
In terms of architecture, little
consideration was given to the way of
life of these populations, leading to
issues in the adaptation of the residents.
Reports about scenarios encountered
after the occupation of the projects
indicates a series of modifications in
the original designs,2 ranging from the
internal space to the outer walls. The
construction of large walls around the
single-story houses indicates how deeply
ingrained the wall is in Brazilian culture.
The design of the interior settings did not
consider ergonometric factors or familial
differences: the same units were occupied
by two people, as well as by much larger
families. The images by Carol Quintanilha
published here show the diverse ways in
which the same spaces were appropriated.
The MCMV projects involve further
questions. Among Brazilian dwellings, the
houses facing the street still predominate; in
the 2010 census, less than 13% of Brazilians
lived in apartments or condominiums. Life in
a walled community is not, therefore, natural
for a large part of the population. Moreover,
the families served by the program were
not used to paying condominium fees or
being charged for water and light. The new
life style often outstripped their budget,
pushing them into debt.
As stated by Marc Angélil and Rainer
Hehl, considerations like these were ignored
by the macropolitical field, even though
there is an economic apparatus in place for
maintaining the program. There was a lack
of planning that considered the people that
would become the residents of these places,
as well as a lack of qualified professionals
for programing this, such as architects.
From the urban perspective, consisting
mainly of large monofunctional housing
projects, the MCMV designs result in low
interaction with their surroundings, while
being, in their majority, detached from the
commercial and cultural areas of the city.
This is shown in the photographic series by
Tuca Vieira. Generally walled, they distance
their residents from basic urban services
(health, education, supply), depriving them
of a healthier shared urban experience. It
is nearly as though, in fact, the life of the
residents was restricted to their house —
my house, my life, in deed.
More than a strictly social program,
however, the MCMV program represented, in
the Brazilian macropolitical perspective, an
opportunity to reactivate sectors affected by
the 2008 worldwide economic crisis, such as
civil construction. The program generated
more than 5 million jobs and produced more
than 4 million housing units, which requires
work and skill.
Although merits are evident in the
MCMV program, the key point discussed
in this chapter is eminently quantitative
character of this initiative. In terms of
quality, its inconsistencies range from
the units themselves to all the social and
urban relations established by this housing
blocks. The scale and pace of production
were prioritized in detriment to aspects
such as materiality, spatiality, comfort
and urbanity. The result was therefore a
program established for sheltering the
population but devoid of further reflection
on what it means to live in society and the
role of housing in this context.
the MAP   Construção—CBIC, Perenidade dos
Prepared in collaboration with LabCidade
of FAU-USP and the Federal Institute of
Technology of Zürich (ETH), these maps
analyze the scope and consequences of
the MCMV program in Brazil in four aspects:
Territory, City, Neighborhood and Dwelling.
A timeline about the production of
housing in Brazil interrelates socioeconomic
aspects with political events to shed light
on generally imperceptible correlations.
The axes are structure in federal macro- and
micropolitical developments since the 1930s,
highlighting data such as housing deficit,
GDP, population and amount of investments.
A map of Brazil highlights scale of
the production of the MCMV program
in each municipality and its respective
demographic segment of users. Structured
based on the noteworthy support of
Rede Cidade e Moradia—a network of
autonomous teams from one private
and six public universities and two
nongovernmental organizations that have
studied the MCMV program since 2012—
maps of five selected cities show the units
produced for each demographic segment
in each census sector, colored according
to the average income per household. This
reveals the inequality of the production
within the urban perimeters and the
distance of the housing projects from the
economic centers.
Cases in Ceará, Amazonas, Pará, Rio
Grande do Norte, São Paulo and Rio de
Janeiro serve as a basis for analysis of
the different types of housing projects
in respect to their insertion in the
urban context. Finally, floor plans and
axonometric drawings detail the different
unit configurations and types of houses,
duplexes and buildings, showing the clear
rigidity of the architectural model applied.
1. Of the housing units contracted
for the program, 5.51% were in
Brazil’s North region, 24.3% in
the Northeast; 38.70% in the
Southeast; 19.38% in the South; and
12.02% in the Central-West. See
Câmara Brasileira da Indústria da
Programas Habitacionais. PMCMV:
sua importância e impactos de
eventual descontinuidade. Brasília,
2016. Available at: https://cbic.org.
br/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/
Perenidade_dos_Programas_
Habitacionais_2016.pdf. Accessed
on April 22, 2018.
2. Rafael Garbin; Andréia Saugo;
Dustin Ferrari; Gisele Loli; Luciana
Cristina Klein; Monique Danielli
Xavier, Avaliação pós ocupação
dos primeiros empreendimento do
Programa Minha Casa Minha Vida,
faixa 1 e 2 na cidade de Erechim-RS.
Universidade Federal da Fronteira
Sul, 2016. Simone Barbosa
Villa; Rita de Cássia Pereira
Saramago; Lucianne Casasanta
Garcia, Desenvolvimento de
metodologia de avaliação pós-
ocupação do Programa Minha
Casa Minha Vida: Aspectos
funcionais, comportamentais e
ambientais. Instituto de Pesquisa
Econômica Aplicada (IPEA), 2016.
Available at: http://www.ipea.
gov.br/portal/images/stories/
PDFs/TDs/07102016td_2234.pdf.
Accessed on: April 22, 2018.
Tuca Vieira
Marabá, 2013

From the series Viagem ao

Brasil [Voyage to Brazil]
Photograph
Carol Quintanilha
concreto armado
[reinforced concrete], 2014
Photographs
interview: 278
Drauzio Varella

Drauzio Varella (São Paulo-sp,

1943) is a physician, cancer
specialist and author. He studied
at Universidade de São Paulo
(USP), worked as a volunteer in
prisons, such as the now-defunct
Carandiru, in São Paulo. He was
one of the founders of Curso
Objetivo and one of the pioneers
in AIDS treatment research in
Brazil. He has become a constant
presence in the media, talking
about health to the public on
TV and radio programs. His
various books, including Estação
Carandiru (1999), illustrate
the breadth of his knowledge,
which spans from Amazon
forest medicines to the Brazilian
prison system.
Walls

What are the greatest challenges facing

national public healthcare regarding the
urban development of Brazilian cities?
Brazil experienced a very rapid and massive
process of urbanization. We are still dealing
with the consequences. During World
War II, 70% to 80% of the population lived
in rural areas; today that ratio is inverted.
This urbanization occurred without any
planning, with cities expanding from the
center to the periphery. In the 1950s and
1960s there was a huge boom in the São
Paulo real estate market; many people
came from the Northeast and were able to
find work immediately.
When I was a resident at Hospital das
Clínicas, I saw the consequence of this
uncontrolled urbanization: extremely high
infant mortality. During a twelve-hour
shift, we lost four children or more. Before
the Sistema Único de Saúde [Unified
Health System – SUS] was established
by the Constitution of 1988, people who
weren’t formally employed had no right to
healthcare, they were considered indigent.
SUS was a revolution, it brought healthcare
to the entire country. Brazil is the only
country in the world with over 100 million
inhabitants that was bold enough to offer
free medical care to the entire population.
We have made a lot of progress, but with
this urbanization it is very difficult to meet
the needs of everyone. The size of the
country represents the biggest challenge.
We have problems with organization and
lack of management.

Evidence

How does deficient housing and

infrastructure in slums and outlying
areas affect the public health system?
Because urban fringe areas grow without
any planning, it is difficult to provide water
and basic sanitation. How did we double
life expectancy in the 20th century? Basic
sanitation, vaccines and antibiotics, the
three great advances in public health
for the century. Over half of the Brazilian
population, the portion that lives on the
urban fringe, still has no access to basic
sanitation. So we have diseases caused
by infant diarrhea, complications from
infections. The health system requires
great organizational complexity to meet
these two types of needs: chronic diseases
and serious and contagious diseases.
Side effects
What are the effects of social
segregation between the center and
outskirts and the long commutes
between home and work on the
physical and mental health of the
low‑income population?
For a long time much of the population
encountered great difficulty in finding
enough to eat; today the greatest problem
is obesity. There are now many obese men
and women on the outskirts of town. First,
because carbohydrates are cheaper than
protein. Second, because many lead lives
that leave no time for exercise. They catch
the train, two hours to get to work, two
and a half hours to get home; they arrive
at 9:30 in the evening and go to sleep. The
following day they get up early to go to
work. On their Sunday off, the men sleep,
because they’re tired, and the women clean
the house. This schedule is very unhealthy,
because there is no extra time to take
care of one’s own health. People only have
weekends off, and that’s when the health
clinics are closed. If something becomes
more chronic, like high blood pressure, it is
difficult to schedule an appointment during
the week, for fear of missing work and
losing one’s job. People end up neglecting
their health, which leads to more serious
complications down the road.
Behavior and micro-politics
What is the connection between housing
conditions and urban crime? How does a
lack of job opportunities on the outskirts
of town affect the crime rate in major
Brazilian cities?
The main problem is that the poorer you
are, the more children you have. Today,
many women have children when they are
thirty or thirty-something, pushing the
limit of fertility, because they want to have
a career. It is the opposite of what happens
on the outskirts of town. At the women’s
penitentiary in São Paulo, I see 30-year-old
women who already have seven or eight
children. They start getting pregnant at
thirteen and have one child after another.
There are 28-year-old women who are
grandmothers; there are 40-year-old
women with three great-grandchildren.
You would also sell drugs under these
circumstances. What’s the alternative? You
stopped going to school. Men disappear
completely. In homes on the outskirts of
town, typically we see a 50-year-old woman
who looks eighty, one or two daughters
and grandchildren. The woman’s pension
supports the family. What kind of future do
these children have? The mother works,
spends all day out, and arrives home at 10
o’clock in the evening. The children spend
their time in the street.
There are three risk factors,
scientifically proven, with regard to
urban crime: first, abuse or lack of
affection during childhood; second, an
adolescence without limits or discipline;
third, living with violent parents. This is
the norm on the outskirts of town, and
it’s a wonder that Brazil isn’t more violent.
We find crime in every social bracket,
but in the poorest brackets crime takes
on epidemic proportions—this is what
we’re seeing now. In Brazil, 25% of young
people between 18 and 25 years of age
do not study or have a job. These kids
spend their time talking on street corners,
smoking marijuana. If you listen to their
conversations, they only talk about jeans,
girls, motorcycles, sunglasses, this is
their world. Young people that come from
poor families with lots of siblings are
raw material for organized crime. All the
ingredients needed for an explosion of
crime are there.
Experience in the discipline

Considering your experience in

the correctional system, how is the
overcrowding of prisons related to life
on the outskirts of town and the war
on drugs policy?
The main cause of crime is a lack of
prospects. Overpopulation is directly
associated with the war on drugs. In the
women’s penitentiary, 60% or 70% of
the 1,200 women were arrested for drug
trafficking. Trafficking is a way to improve
prospects, you can raise your children right,
give them what they ask for. Today organized
crime controls the prisons; these women
leave prison better connected. In prison,
people from different places meet who
would not otherwise, and this fosters the
formation of a criminal organization. When
they get out, most of the ex-convicts return
to drug trafficking, since no one gets a job
after spending time in prison. We have no
serious programs for social rehabilitation.
Those who have been able to save some
money open a small business, buy a cart or a
small bar. But this cannot compare with the
money that you can make from drugs.

Transformative potential

How can public housing and health

programs be integrated to promote better
quality of life in cities and fight crime?
Housing programs appear to limit
themselves to taking an area of the city
and building small houses or buildings
and that’s it. When you travel by plane or
car you see those small identical houses,
without a single square. Providing a house
is not enough. What are the minimum
conditions necessary for housing? Having
a house, a place for leisure, near schools—
so that children don’t have to travel into
the city—health clinics, health programs,
basic sanitation. All of this has to come
together. It’s the minimum amount of
public infrastructure necessary. Housing
has to be part of a larger project, and not
an end in itself.
 559 KM 315 KM

STAT E O F S ÃO PA U LO

This map was developed and designed in collaboration with

Mapping-lab (www.mappinglab.me) for this catalogue to highlight a
layer of the main exhibition map Inhabiting the House or the City?
Social housing landscape
Cities with 100,000 or more
inhabitants
Number of housing units MCMV
Social vulnerability
Non urban area
São Paulo city
Ways of Elisabete 284
living in the França
21st century:
my home
is my city

Large-scale housing production became a social issue

at the end of the 19th century, primarily in response to the
unsanitary conditions of industrialized European cities—to
which rural populations flocked in search of employment
and better opportunities. This was the unprecedented first
wave of migration to modern cities.
In the second decade of the 20th century, Europe faced
World War I, which divided the old empires and decimated
cities and populations; World War II broke out just two
decades later, which transformed the continent into a
battlefield and displaced millions of people from their
regions of origin. At the end of this troubled period, and
as a consequence of the destruction that devastated the
large European cities, the postwar governments had to
find solutions to produce housing on an industrial scale.
Many of these experiences serve as a guide today, most
importantly those in which housing, considered vital to
rebuilding the city, was integrated with services to meet
the needs of residents. Scale production was based on the
assumption that quality designs would meet the housing
needs of modern society.
In contrast to the good practices that were developed
mainly in European cities, other projects failed, primarily
as a result of low quality construction, the proliferation
of standardized, faceless designs, and the locations
selected on the outskirts of cities, which resulted in long
commutes for residents.
The experiments conducted in European countries in
the two postwar periods, with ramifications in the United
States, allowed the creation of a platform of knowledge
and expertise known as “good and bad practices”. If, on
one hand, the initial European experiences in large‑scale
building showed it was possible to insert social housing
into the urban environment in an integrated way with

1. Charles Jencks, The Language
of Post-modern Architecture.
New York: Rizzoli, 1984.
a series of public services, on the other, the housing
projects that proliferated in Soviet bloc cities, as well as
projects built in various US cities, resulted in the formation
of isolated enclaves, separated from the city by real and
imaginary divides, along social and racial lines. The
housing concentrated in these projects was not integrated
with services essential for city life, most importantly
access to health and education. As a consequence, they
were stigmatized as not being part of the city, or as
representing a danger.
In general, these housing projects followed patterns
defined by the modern movement: large residential
blocks interspersed with greens and other public
spaces. Over time, forgotten by the government, they
began to deteriorate, especially those built with low
quality materials; and then crime rates and alcohol and
drug use began to rise, primarily among young people
and adolescents.
The result of the experience of the large urban housing
projects was clearly illustrated when the American
architect Charles Jencks announced that “modern
architecture died in St Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972,
at 3:32pm”,1 at the exact moment of the implosion of
the 33 towers of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project. It was
believed that this model—so dear to architects who
subscribed to the concepts of the first International
Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAMs), influenced
by the ideas of Le Corbusier—could be replaced by new
ways of producing housing, especially when designed
for low‑income families.
Unfortunately, Jencks’ prediction did not come to pass
and, even in the 21st century, many countries continue
to reproduce the “bad practices” of the past. In Brazil,
where the modern tradition had and continues to have
a strong influence, the first large housing projects, built
in the 1950s, revealed a desire by architects to apply the
best standards of the modernist tradition to their projects.
Among various examples, the Pedregulho Housing
Project, built by the Department of Popular Housing of the
Federal District, under the direction of engineer Carmen
Portinho, and designed by the architect Affonso Eduardo
Reidy in 1947, is the most notable example, and stands
out for the elements that distinguish Brazilian modern
architecture internationally.
This sequence of good housing projects, which was
only getting started, was interrupted when the military
took power in 1964. The creation of the Banco Nacional
da Habitação [National Housing Bank], which proposed
transforming “the dream of home ownership” into a reality
for those in medium and low-income brackets, was one of
the central strategies of the new government, designed
to garner support from certain sectors of society for their 286
authoritarian project.
This period resulted in mass construction of housing
complexes that were generally of low quality, and that
reproduced inappropriate typologies for the land on
which they were built, while ignoring specific local
conditions, such as climate, or the need for materials
appropriate for each region. At the time, it was believed
that the dream of home ownership would strengthen the
economy, through investment in construction and the
creation of thousands of jobs.
Job creation and infinite resources: the same myths
surrounding huge engineering projects had been
perpetuated during the construction of Brasília. Inflation,
corruption and the displacement of people, sub-products
of the myth of grandiose projects as the solution for the
country’s ills, still haunt us today.
During the almost 20 years of the BNH, over one
million homes were delivered to low-income families,
most of them rapidly integrated into the enclaves and
thus isolated from the city. Living far from central
areas, families have no choice but to make exhausting
journeys—long daily commutes on public and informal
transportation—to get to their jobs or to public
equipment like schools and health clinics. Still under the
influence of the modernist tradition, the BNH housing
projects intended to fulfill only the function espoused
by the Athens Charter: a place to live. In this way, no
provisions were made for commerce and services,
which resulted in residents having to travel to do their
daily shopping or in the establishment of informal local
markets and service providers, which proliferated by the
thousand in the empty spaces of the condominiums.
In a short period of time, the BNH housing projects were
transformed into pens of symbolic exclusion so common
to Brazilian cities: a part of the urban territory that is not
considered as such.
Once again, a number of lessons could be extracted
from the results of adopting this approach to producing
housing. The same model, centered on the same solution,
for the entire country: housing projects built on cheap
land, in regions far from city centers, in opposition
to the existing city. In the model adopted by the BNH,
the principle of integrating housing with the city was
not a guideline; the project focused only on the mass
construction of housing units.
Some of the housing projects produced manu militari
have come to represent the mistakes made during this
period: Cidade de Deus and Vila Kennedy, in Rio de
Janeiro, and Cidade Tiradentes, in São Paulo. Each of
these complexes was inhabited by thousands of people,
 who were forced to travel for hours on a daily basis for any
of the advantages offered by the city: employment, health
and education services, and activities associated with
daily life, such as commerce and leisure.
In contrast with the solution found for Pritt-Igoe, the
housing projects produced during the BNH period, over
time, saw an increase in population, crime and isolation
from urban life. The residents, in their own way, sought
to reduce the deficiencies of these enclaves by seeking
out alternatives that would transform these places into
something resembling a city. They began by expanding
their houses—often occupying the entire lot—whenever
space was needed for a shop or local service. Next,
they envisioned the possibility of verticalization, by
building one, two or three new floors above the original
structure—to house growing families or new families
that had emerged, or to generate extra income through
the rental market.
To a certain extent, these neighborhoods have
remained isolated from the city, as a consequence of the
unreliability of public services; the absence from city
land records is not unusual for these areas. One of the
most dramatic consequences of this way of producing
housing was the exponential growth in urban crime,
coinciding with reduced access to quality education and
opportunities for employment.
With few exceptions, the housing production of this
time—a sad moment in Brazilian history—only expanded
the imaginary barriers that separate rich from poor, who
are still striving to integrate with the city. And, although the
results are plain, once again, no lessons were learned.
In contrast to what the strategists of the military
government envisioned, the growth of the cities
continued to occur on a progressive scale, accompanied
by urban sprawl. While the propaganda claimed access
to the dream of home ownership by the poorest segment
of the population, the reality is that housing production
financed with resources from the BNH served only a tiny
portion of the population.
The dream quickly devolved into a nightmare of never-
ending debt, due to the inflation and various economic
crises of the 1970s and 1980s, in tandem with the decay of
the housing projects. The nightmare would extend to the
group of cities that saw the number of slums grow within
their limits, which were classified in official discourse as
“subnormal,” “spontaneous,” “uncontrolled,” “informal”
or “marginal”. This was the type of land occupation
encountered by populations that were migrating to the
cities, and who began to compose the Brazilian urban
landscape, as a stark portrait of a non‑inclusive process
of urbanization, inattentive to the needs of the poorest.
21ST CENTURY: NEW TAKES ON OLD PRACTICES 288
And this is the urban environment that we find in the
21st century. Brazil has had a democratic government
since the start of the 1980s, with a new Constitution
in place since 1988. The urban population has risen to
80% of the country’s total. Metropolitan regions are
home to millions of people, with São Paulo and Rio de
Janeiro with populations of over 10 million, followed by
Belo Horizonte, Brasília and others. All with impossible
demands to be met in the short and medium term,
all with accumulated deficits in infrastructure and
public equipment.
In this process of urban expansion, the areas occupied
by the low-income population extend into environmentally
vulnerable terrain, such as conservation reserves along
streams, hillsides with accentuated slopes and tracts with
protected vegetation and natural springs. In addition to
the fragile state of these settlements, the lack of sewer
systems aggravates the conditions, resulting in high rates
of urban water pollution.
It was this state of fragility and growing precariousness
that prompted the Brazilian government, in 2009, to
reinstate the BNH model, concentrating efforts and
resources on the mass production of housing projects
which became the Minha Casa Minha Vida [My Home My
Life] program. The name already indicated the strategy
adopted in the configuration of the project: produce
housing on a large scale, with a view to meeting the
needs of low-income families, with high subsidies funded
through the federal budget—but primarily through the
Fundo de Garantia do Tempo de Serviço [Government
Severance Indemnity Fund - FGTS]—while also attracting
public support for a political platform of the party chosen
to govern the country in 2002, and its political allies.
Similar to the projects implemented by the BNH, the
same formula is repeated in the making of the new official
program: building housing projects in areas far from city
centers, as a consequence of the shortage of low-cost
land in more central zones; construction quality that does
not stand the test of time; and the adoption of typologies
that are not always suited to local conditions.
As a result, the problems continue, both with regard
to the quality of the buildings and the deficits in public
equipment and mobility that the municipalities have
inherited, with no financial means to correct them. In
February 2017, the Ministry of Transparency published a
study that found construction problems in 48.9% of the
program’s “bracket one” houses, set aside for families
that earn up to two minimum salaries. There were also
problems found with regard to the lack of community
equipment, as well as deficiencies in drainage, sewer
systems, sidewalks and public lighting.
In addition to the construction problems, residents face
the same old issues related to urban mobility: access to
public equipment and jobs requires long daily commutes.
In many cases, the new houses are abandoned and the
families return to their old neighborhoods, oftentimes
slums, that tend to be closer to basic urban services.
According to the propaganda for the program, it is the
largest in the history of the Republic, with around US$120
billion invested between 2009 and 2017. It is important to
note that only 21.4% of this amount was set aside for low-
income families, the so-called “bracket one” group. Once
again, the country invested in a single housing program,
whose return on investment will be a deficit in services and
problems for cities.
Like the BNH, the Minha Casa Minha Vida program
was not sustainable as a model to meet the demand for
new housing, nor reduce the country’s housing shortfall.
Nor did it contribute to reducing the number of slums or
families living in situations of risk. More recent numbers
show the growth of verticalization in existing slums, as
another perverse effect of the economic crisis that began
in the mid 2010s.
Over a period of 50 years of our history, government
administrations twice decided for the mass production
of housing projects as a way of attracting sectors of
society, especially low-income families, to the dream of
home ownership, always supported by segments that are
benefited by this policy and dependent on the significant
investment of financial resources. Both times, society saw
its dream transformed into a reversal of fortune that can be
illustrated by the daily reality of these areas detached from
the city: a case of generalized shortcomings, aggravated
by the spiraling violence, almost always associated with
drug trafficking.

BREAKING DOWN BARRIERS: NEW WAYS OF

PRODUCING HOUSING AND CITIES

In the last two decades, Brazilian cities have seen an

increase in inequality that has resulted in areas marked
by undesirable social segregation. To face the challenge
of transforming excluded areas, we have to courageously
break with the single solution approach so often seen in
government policies.
The city of the new century, the one we know and
in which we achieved our best desires, was built, in
part, using these official parameters. Another sliver of
the same city, however, was erected by the residents
themselves, who, lacking in mechanisms to access 290
official housing, built their own houses in areas that were
not of interest to the official city. Gradually, and through
collective efforts, they built the necessary infrastructure
to serve their immediate needs; only afterward did the
government begin to heed the priority concerns of these
poor neighborhoods.
An example to be followed in the search for housing
solutions can be found in the social networks that the
residents establish, which help them to endure the
difficulties of their daily lives. For these neighborhoods
and their residents, every effort should be made to build
a participative approach to public policy-making for
housing, unlike those used in the past. A long-term policy
that recognizes the diversity of our urban problems and
composed of various solutions, capable of resolving
each issue identified in the cities; that reactivates the
programs for urbanization of the slums, associated with
the production of new housing for families in situations of
risk; that invests in the use of existing housing in central
areas, as well as encouraging the production of housing
in this region; that prioritizes the legalization of these
neighborhoods, by including them in official land records.
The imaginary walls will only disappear against a
backdrop of diversity and belief in the collective building
of solutions that respect the diversity that exists in the
various territories that compose the richness of each of
our cities.
Elisabete França (Curitiba-pr,
1956) has a PhD in architecture.
For the past three decades
she has coordinated housing,
environmental and urban
development programs in the city
and state of São Paulo. Among
other works she has published
Arquitetura em retrospectiva: 10
Bienais de São Paulo [Architecture
in Retrospect: 10 São Paulo
Biennials –2017], a research
project originating in 2002 when
she was curator of the Brazilian
Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
The urban Raquel 292
invisibles and Rolnik
the walls that
confine them

August 2016. In the middle of the vote to impeach

President Dilma Roussef, Caixa, the public bank tasked
with operating the Minha Casa Minha Vida [My Home
My Life – MCMV] program, announced that, over the
previous seven years, it had contracted 4.5 million
houses and delivered 3 million units in 96% of Brazil’s
5,570 municipalities.1 1. “Minha Casa Minha Vida vai
Over 1,000 houses a day spread throughout the ultrapassar a marca dos 3 milhões
de unidades entregues”, Agência
urban and rural areas of Brazil, in a program focused on
Caixa de Notícias. Accessed
low-income families, with subsidies as high as 96% of on: 01/08/2016. Available at:
the price of the properties. Never before, in the history www20.caixa.gov.br/Paginas/
of Brazil, has a program achieved this scale or speed. In Noticias/Noticia/Default.
seven years, more housing units were produced than in aspx?newsID=3943, Accessed
on 13/03/2018.
the 22-year history of the Banco Nacional de Habitação
[National Housing Bank – BNH], an agency established
during the military dictatorship. Moreover, the housing
for the Minha Casa Minha Vida program was focused
on lower‑income brackets than housing policies of
the past.
January 2013. Cristine, a resident of Vivenda das
Patativas, a Minha Casa Minha Vida complex located
on the Estrada do Campinho, in the western zone of
Rio de Janeiro, ended up losing her job in a market in
Nova Iguaçu after moving to the complex: “They [the
employers] thought that the bus fare would be too
expensive. To get there, I would have to take three buses.
My husband works in the Barra, and has to take a bus to
Campo Grande and then another from Campo Grande 2. Alessandra Duarte and Carolina
to his place of work.” Carolina, another resident, adds: Benevide, “Sem transporte para
“Buses around here run only until 11:30pm. After that, Minha Casa Minha Vida”, O
Globo, 07/01/2013. Available at:
there are only vans.”2
oglobo.globo.com/brasil/sem-
In the introduction to a book that consolidated the work transporte-para-minha-casa-
of 11 research groups from different regions of the country, minha-vida-7224679. Accessed
organized by Rede Cidade e Moradia, the Minha Casa on 13/03/2018.

3. Caio Santo Amore, “Minha Casa
Minha Vida para iniciantes,” in
Caio Santo Amore, Lúcia Zanin
Simbo, Maria Beatriz Cruz Rufino
(eds.), Minha Casa… e a cidade?
Avaliação do programa Minha
Casa Minha Vida em seis estados
brasileiros. Rio de Janeiro: Letra
Capital, 2015.
Minha Vida program was presented in the following terms
by Caio Santo Amore:3
Let’s suppose a Brazilian had lived through the
years of struggle against the military dictatorship,
witnessing rapid and concentrated urbanization
and the emergence of urban social movements.
A Brazilian who had accompanied the road building
policy that encouraged horizontal urban growth and
sprawl, the authoritarian housing policy of the BNH,
which broadly benefited the middle classes and
built public housing complexes of low quality on the
outskirts of cities, and the “real” housing policies
that relegated lower-income populations to slums
and precarious settlements. Let’s suppose that this
Brazilian had fallen into a coma in 1986, isolating him,
therefore, from any news from Brazil or the world, and
that he had emerged from that coma in mid-2014.
Upon waking he would receive an avalanche of
news: he would learn of the constituent process and
the Citizen Constitution; the first directly elected
president after more than two decades, who would
have to, in the middle of his term, step down from
office after strong popular protests; of his successors,
who would all serve two terms in office: the sociology
professor, the blue-collar worker who led strikes in
the 1980s, and the militant of the armed struggle
during the years of dictatorship.
He would be informed of changes in the
currency, of years of recession, alarming levels
of unemployment at the start of the 1990s, which
led to a dramatic increase in crime in the slums,
of controlled and runaway inflation, and of the
resumption of growth. He would probably be
shocked to learn that 83% of our population is now
living in cities, and that urban problems have only
gotten worse: traffic, crime, pollution, occupation of
environmental protection areas, precariousness and
lack of housing. He would be informed that, in his
“absence,” BNH was closed down, urban and housing
policy was handed back to states and municipalities
and only after 17 years was a ministry established to
address the problems of cities.
They would tell him that a housing program
launched in 2009 achieved a scale and speed never
before seen, and that housing production was carried
out on an industrial scale. […]
Perhaps, after the initial shock, after imagining
that an urban revolution had taken place in Brazil
or that, finally, a socio-territorial pact of inclusion
for workers had finally been accomplished, if
our Brazilian friend were to visit our cities and, in 294
particular, the outskirts of the cities, he would
perhaps question to what extent any of this had
actually happened. […]4 4. Id., pp.11-12.
An analysis and understanding of a housing
program the size of Minha Casa Minha Vida requires
a broad and careful look at its political and financial
design and its indelible impacts on cities, which
go beyond a more immediate analysis of numbers
or urban and architectural appearances of the
housing projects.
Minha Casa Minha Vida is, above all else, a “brand,”
under which is organized a series of subprograms,
types, funds, lines of credit, housing typologies,
agents and methods of accessing the product “home
ownership,” this being the characteristic that unifies
the different experiences.
Minha Casa Minha Vida is, at its origins, an
economic program. It was conceived by the Ministry of
Finance and the Casa Civil [Chief of Staff], in dialogue
with the real estate and construction industries, and
launched as a Provisional Measure (MP 459) in March
2009, as a way of countering the so-called mortgage
finance crisis that had just resulted in the collapse of
banks and impacted the world’s financial economy.
At this time, the Ministry of Cities played a relatively
minor role. Since 2003, the ministry had been taking
a more measured approach to building policy for a
system of cities and housing of social interest. It had
tried to implement the National System of Housing
of Social Interest (SNHIS) and the National Fund of
Housing of Social Interest (FNHIS)—conceived in the
first bill of popular initiative, presented to the national
Congress in 1991 and passed in 2005—and conducted
a participatory process of drafting a National
Housing Plan. But the administration decided on
the proposal from the construction industry, which,
threatened by crisis, had already, by going public,
entered the global financial market, betting on the
economic potential of producing mass housing.
This anti‑cyclical move was predicted to create jobs
in a sector capable of mobilizing other associated
sectors, including the mining industry, producers of
basic construction materials and the furniture and
home appliance industry, which is activated as soon
as the keys change hands. […]5 5. Id., p.15.
The official presentations that accompanied the
launch of the program used quantitative data on
the housing shortage—at the time calculated to be
7.2 million units, 90% of them concentrated in the
income brackets of three minimum salaries or less,

6. Id., p.17.
7. Lúcia Zanin Shimbo, Habitação
social de mercado: A confluência
entre Estado, empresas
construtoras e capital financeiro.
Belo Horizonte: C/Arte, 2012.
8. Id., p.211.
70% in the southeast and northeast, almost 30% in
metropolitan regions—to show that MCMV would
reduce this deficit by 14%. Of the one million units
initially promised, 400,000 (40% of the target) were to
be set aside for families with incomes of up to three
minimum salaries, which would be made possible by
an investment of 16 billion BRL in federal funding (70%
of the entire investment).
The program took a simplistic view of the housing
problem, reducing the policy to the production of
new units, with private builders in charge, who, upon
compliance with the minimum requirements, were
tasked with purchasing the land and developing the
housing projects.6
The government would guarantee buyers for the
construction companies, and since the future residents
could get financing and subsidies, there was no risk
associated with the business. The program assigned
decision-making power regarding project location and
design to private agents. However, the only criterion
guiding the decision-making of these agents was
profitability. Given that the ceiling for prices and the
dimensions of the units are pre-established, the profit for
the builder is based on the cost savings achieved during
the production process. These savings are obtained
through standardization, scale (number of units produced),
speed of approval and construction, and the cheapest
possible land.7 The result of this financial equation is the
construction of large standardized projects in the city’s
worst locations, that is, where the land is cheapest. The
standardization of the housing typologies is closely related
to the standardization of the production process, which
involves the standardization of measurements, materials
and components as well as methods of execution and
management of the construction sites. This explains, for
example, how a company could have produced “40,000
units in one year, using only three housing typologies in
over 70 Brazilian cities”.8 The standardization, both in the
size of the units and their internal arrangements, results
in a mismatch with family size and, more importantly, an
inflexible layout, which, throughout the family cycle, does
not allow for the incorporation of economic activities or
accommodation of relatives.
The theme of location, in turn, is directly related to
the effects that easy credit and income growth had on
land prices, primarily in big cities. Given that, in most
Brazilian cities, jobs, services and economic and cultural
opportunities are concentrated in small portions of the
middle and high-rent areas, these locations saw their
prices skyrocket. For this reason, housing projects
for “bracket one” families are clearly spread around the 296
outskirts of cities, in places not only distant from central
areas, but also homogenous from a social perspective. If
the program was able to reach a segment of the population
that historically went unserved by federal housing
initiatives, it did not change the traditional pattern of
placing them on the city’s outskirts.
It is a concentration of large housing projects,
with standardized typologies, focused on a specific
income bracket and inserted in a monotonous urban
fabric, with little diversity of use—although, now, there
is a minimum of basic equipment and services in the
surrounding or neighboring areas.
If, on an urban scale, the location hides the presence
of poor people, by blocking access to the city, on a
neighborhood scale the shape of a closed and walled
condominium, required for vertical projects of the
program, reproduces fortified enclaves in the urban fabric
of the consolidated outskirts. This fabric, which was
created in a fragmented and disconnected manner, is not
transformed or revitalized by this policy.
On the other hand, a walled condominium requires
residents to pay a monthly maintenance fee. Interviews
with residents of MCMV in cities in the state of São Paulo
show that, although the mortgage payment is not seen
as burdensome, when the condominium fee is added,
the total jumps to almost 40% of income for “bracket
one” families. In many of the projects studied, residents
in arrears with condominium fees and conflicts resulting
from maintenance problems, the responsibility of
residents/owners, foreshadow a possible collapse in the
maintenance of the projects within just a few years.
The cost burden on residents is even greater if we
consider charges for water, electricity and gas. This impact
primarily affects resettled families, who have suffered
forced removal, since the new residence brings with it
expenses that many of them did not have before, because
they benefited from clandestine connections for water and
electricity, for example, and certainly because they did not
have to pay condominium fees.9 9. Raquel Rolnik, Guerra dos
This issue brings us to another side effect of the lugares: a colonização da terra e
da moradia na era das finanças.
program: the availability of an instrument to resettle
São Paulo: Boitempo, 2015.
families removed because they inhabited areas of risk or
were in the way of large projects. The program enabled
removal policies on a massive scale, resettling residents
of various slums into large complexes on the outskirts
of cities. In this case, the displacements contributed
clearly to “adjusting” the value of land, removing the
low-income families from more central locations and
resettling them in homogeneously very low-income
household regions.
 Since the times of the First Republic, slums have been
seen as unregulated, lawless places and, therefore, the
appropriate place for disorder, crooks and criminals. This
idea ends up justifying, for example, the destruction,
shootings and victims left behind by police when they enter
slum residences. This idea feeds another, and has been
repeated for at least 50 years in Brazil: that housing policies
should remove residents from these places and relocate
them in walled housing projects, formalized, legalized and
ruled by the market, with little or no dialogue with those
involved, based on a model that reaffirms exclusion and
confinement. In this way, despite the huge investment of
public resources, set aside for those who need it most, the
walls that define the pattern of socio-spatial segregation of
Brazilian cities are reaffirmed and updated by the program.

This text is based on a study on the program Minha

Casa Minha Vida [My Home My Life –MCMV] carried
out by a network of independent teams, who analyzed
different aspects based on a research project
approved by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento
Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) and the Ministry of
Cities, in a public notice announced in 2012. Rede
Cidade e Moradia [City and Housing Network]
included, in addition to the specific objectives for
each group, a common subject of analysis: the
urban insertion of housing projects. The following
groups took part: LABCAM FAU-UFPA (RM Belém and
southeastern Pará); LEHAB DAU-UFC (RM Fortaleza);
LaHabitat DARQ – UFRN (RM Natal); Praxis Escola de
Arquitetura –UFMG (RM Belo Horizonte); IPPUR-UFRJ
(RM Rio de Janeiro); CiHaBe PROURB-UFRJ (RM Rio de
Janeiro); Polis-SP; NEMOS – CEDEPE – PUC-SP (RM São
Paulo / Osasco); LabCidade FAUUSP (RM São Paulo and
RM Campinas); IAU-USP São Carlos + PEABIRU (RM São
Paulo); IAU-USP São Carlos (Administrative regions of
São Carlos and Ribeirão Preto).

Raquel Rolnik (São Paulo–SP, 1966) is an urbanist,

professor of urban planning at FAU-USP and
coordinator of LabCidade. She is a lecturer and full
professor at FAU-USP with a doctorate from New York
University, and has served as coordinator of urbanism
at Instituto Pólis, director of urban planning for the
City of São Paulo, secretary of urban programs for the
Ministry of Cities and special rapporteur for the UN
for the right to adequate housing. She is the author
of the books O que é a Cidade, A Cidade e a Lei, São
Paulo: história conflito e território and Urban Warfare:
Housing and Cities in the Age of Finance, also
available in portuguese and in spanish.
Minha casa, Marc Angélil, 298
nossa cidade: Rainer Hehl
on the
micropolitical
transformation
of housing
provision
in Brazil

MINHA CASA MINHA VIDA

With the slogan “My House My Life” the Brazilian federal

government launched in 2009 one of the world’s largest
social housing programs—Minha Casa Minha Vida was
introduced, on the one hand, to address the housing
shortage most acute for low-income families, and on
the other, as an anti-cyclical policy in the climate of
international financial crisis. Though the program has been
successful in terms of quantitative output and has been
instrumental in staving off the deep impact of the 2008
global financial crisis on the Brazilian economy, the spatial
quality and social equity engendered by resulting housing
developments are widely perceived to have fallen short.
The ambitious project stands for the contradictions
between economic performance and social agendas
and illustrates how urban resilience and the sustainable
development of cities can only be achieved through the
integration of micro-political movements. Most of the 3.64
million units (IBGE, November 2017) that have been delivered
since the program was started were developed top-down by
state institutions and large-scale construction companies
without consideration of specific local needs, resulting in
mono-functional commuter settlements that were poorly
built on the basis of standardized models.
Consequently Minha Casa Minha Vida schemes have
been implemented throughout the whole country in a
generic way without considering urban services and in
remote locations where land is cheap. Even though the
goal to turn low-income populations into homeowners
significantly reduced the housing shortage in Brazil, Minha
Casa Minha Vida ultimately fostered urban fragmentation
and social divide. The promise to change the life of
Brazilians by giving them a house neglected the fact that
houses inevitably constitute cities and the way we organize
social relations and collective life. What is more, the case
of the program also shows in an exemplary way how
housing provision is instrumentalized by macro-political
players in order to prioritize individual interests and
undermine micro-political movements.
As a matter of fact, the micro-political dimension of
housing production is of particular significance as it
concerns the private home, the most intimate place for
the production of subjectivity. But, at the same time, the
individual housing unit is also constitutive for the public
sphere reflecting macro-political conditions. The housing
question therefore always has to be approached from two
angles—from the top-down perspective of governmental
institutions and policies as well as from bottom-up
appropriation and popular production. In Brazil, the
dichotomy of micro- and macro-politics is most explicit in
the contrast between the self-produced living environment
of the favela and the standardized units of state-led
housing programs. Whereas popular production mirrors
the aspirations and negotiations of the people on the
ground, large-scale housing provision by the state rather
follows current modalities of capital flows and corporate
interests. How do these seemingly opposing models impact
the production of livelihoods? How do they determine the
relationship between individual and collective and how do
they influence our subjectivity? How do macro-political
conditions control the way we inhabit the city and how far
we can conceive micro-political action as a counter project
to the dominating logic of capitalist production?
The premise that the house determines the way we
conceive the society as a whole is double fold. New urban
realities that have been established through quantitative
models in order to subordinate individuals under the logic
of capitalism do not necessarily reflect the production of
subjectivities by the people. An inclusive approach that
would enable the co-existence of a diversity of social
entities therefore would depend on intensive interactions
between top-down governance and bottom-up actors. Is
the proliferation of invisible walls and the urban divide due
to the fact that macro- and micro-politics are disconnected?

CIDADE DE DEUS

If we look at the history of housing development in Brazil,

we realize that macro-political forces and micro-political
impacts have always been strongly entangled. The
case of Cidade de Deus [City of God] in Rio de Janeiro
is exemplary in this respect. Due to the book by Paulo
Lins, a former resident of the area, and the internationally
renowned movie, the neighborhood became stigmatized 300
as a ghetto—as a typical Brazilian favela dominated by
criminal factions and social decay. In reality, Cidade de
Deus did not begin as a favela at all, but was rather a new
town modeled as proto-suburb and built in the mid-1960s
on the western periphery of Rio, more or less in the same
way as the Minha Casa Minha Vida schemes would be
developed half a century later.
The model for the settlement originated in the United
States and was brought to Brazil under the Alliance
for Progress, a program introduced by President John
F. Kennedy in 1961 to establish economic cooperation
between the US and Latin American countries. There was
a geopolitical objective here, not least of which was to
stem the tide of Communism in the region and promote
political and economic reform across the continent. The
program promoted the spread of capitalism by encouraging
homeownership and providing decent living conditions as
a means of boosting the middle-class, an agenda identified
by historian Gerald Haines as the “Americanization of
Brazil”.1 The neighborhood was conceived to accommodate 1. See Gerald K. Haines,
roughly 10,000 people, manifesting a formal solution to Americanization of Brazil: A Study
of U.S. Cold War Diplomacy
remove favela dwellers from the city center and concentrate
in the Third World, 1945-1954.
the poor in a remote location requiring long commutes to Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield
places of work downtown. Publishers, 1997.
To house those displaced, two standard models were
brought in, the typical free-standing, one-story, single-family
house stamped out side by side, and five-story, walk-up
apartment blocks, or conjuntos, with 35-square meter units.
Over time, more and more settlers moved in and ongoing
urban to rural migration further exacerbated the dilemma
of an already overcrowded Cidade de Deus. Illegal building
activities soon ensued to make room for those displaced,
setting off an explosion of unregulated, ad hoc solutions to
expand on existing building types. In-between spaces were
filled, porches added, impromptu stores and workshops
inserted, and extra floors built on top of original houses, all
of which gradually created an ingenious bricolage of auto-
construction that basically removed the gloss of modernist
planning to reassert the popular culture of the informal.
Cidade de Deus degenerated into a crime- and drug-
ridden hellhole in the 1980s after the fall of the military
regime, becoming a full-fledged favela run by an alliance
of organized crime and corrupt police. In response to the
spiral of criminal action that was haunting the place, a
solution was sought in the late 2000s by deploying special
police units formed to pacify the troubled community and
win over residents traumatized by decades of violence:
the Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora [Peacekeeping Police
Unit - UPP]. The tactic worked and produced during a certain
time a popular neighborhood that in turn offered a potential
model of self-empowerment and urban rehabilitation. But,
according to recent reports, the transformation of Cidade de
Deus into a peaceful precinct was short-lived. Due to budget
cuts and the weakening of the UPP, the neighborhood is
gradually sliding back into its previous conditions.

DÉJÀ-VU?

It seems like déjà-vu when it comes to the comparison

between the history of Cidade de Deus and those of the
Minha Casa Minha Vida settlements. Laid out in a similar
manner, either with suburban single-family houses, or 5
story condominiums, most of the newly built settlements
have already started to degenerate after only a couple of
years. It is also striking to see how the program was equally
fueled by foreign capital in order to boost investment and
produce an emerging consumer middle-class for the
expansion of the capitalist market. Are we now witnessing
the repetition of the Cidade de Deus debacle multiplied by
millions of units and distributed nationwide?
The comparison might not match all the various
manifestations of Minha Casa Minha Vida settlements that
have recently been built on the outskirts of the Brazilian
cities. But a closer look between the political conditions
back then and now actually reveals another uncanny
resemblance. Whereas the implementation of mass housing
schemes in the periphery of the cities in the 1960s has to
be read in the context of the coup d’État by the military and
the installment of an oppressive regime, we are now facing
another kind of take-over by the elites of industrial and
financial capital, which largely outpaces the scale and the
impact of corporate power relations. What is striking is not
only the quantity of the ongoing production of mass housing
compared to the output half a century before, but also the
way in which power is exercised and consolidated, following
now perfidious strategies that go far beyond the direct and
violent oppression characteristic of the dictatorship during
the military regime. With the installment of Michel Temer
as president after the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, the
political agenda was radically geared towards the interests
of large scale market players and international investment
capital. While an alliance between corrupt politicians, jurists,
the financial elite and the media is cementing their power
by changing the Constitution and removing opposition
politicians through dubious scandals and criminal
investigations, social agendas and democratic institutions
are systematically dismantled.
The turn toward an autocratic system that just follows
corporate interests is not only undoing the achievements
stemming from decades of bottom-up mobilizations and
social struggles. According to psychoanalyst and culture 302
critic Suely Rolnik, the new strategy of the financial elite
also consists in directly influencing and manipulating the
way subjectivity is produced.

While (in the wake of the second phase of the coup

d’État) the macro-political operation of dismantling the
Constitution and the national economy is intensifying,
the micro-political operation of production of
subjectivities by manipulating the desires of the people
is also intensifying. With this double-fold operation
of two facets that cannot be dissociated, another
third and ultimate phase of the coup d’État is about
to be prepared: the complete takeover of political and
economic power by globalized capitalism.”2 2. Rolnik, Suely, A nova modalidade
de golpe de Estado: Um seriado
em três temporadas. Avaiable
It is not surprising that the standardized units of Minha
at www.outraspalavras.net/
Casa Minha Vida are matching the housing types as they brasil/666381. Accessed on March
were developed in the early phase of mass housing in 16, 2018. Translation by the author.
Brazil. Conceived as a tool to promote and consolidate
capitalist production, housing provision was ultimately
established in order to direct and control the reproduction
of life itself. It is also clear that this strategy is far from
aligning with the goal of producing sustainable and
equitable urban environments.
While the outlook for a change in dominating
macro‑political constellations seems hopeless at the
moment, the focus on micro-political transformation might
be more promising. With the mobilization of bottom-up
strategies and civic engagement the people themselves
can again take control over the way their livelihoods
are produced. But, as the case of Cidade de Deus also
illustrates, if popular production takes over and appropriates
standardized models provided by the market, it still remains
uncertain whether informality and popular appropriation can
lead to more inclusive and sustainable environments. What
sort of micro-political counter‑model, would truly allow the
production of sustainable and equitable cities?

TOWARD COOPERATIVE PRACTICE

It seems ironic that the same program that was producing

urban fragmentation and a social divide also bears a
potential solution for the dilemma of standardized social
housing provision dominated by market interests. As
Minha Casa Minha Vida was introduced under the leftist
government of President Lula da Silva, it also factored in
the promotion of self-management and auto-construction
by communities and non-governmental organizations. The
idea to create a special branch of the program dedicated
 to self-organizing entities was based on the mutirão [joint
effort] model developed by the municipal government
of São Paulo under mayor Luisa Erundina between 1989
and 1992. With the introduction of public housing policies
that encouraged cooperative development, assisted
auto-construction cooperative associations were given
autonomy in the management, financing and design of the
project, which also led to an increase of operating entities
and offices for technical assistance. The experience of
the Municipality of São Paulo triggered similar housing
developments in other cities, and subsequently, the State
Government of São Paulo established guidelines and state
regulations for the promotion of housing cooperatives.
Accordingly, knowledge gained in São Paulo left its mark on
federal programs, such as the Crédito Solidário [Solidarity
Credit] initiative introduced in 2005, and finally within the
framework of the Minha Casa Minha Vida program.
Even though only 5% of the overall budget was dedicated
to Minha Casa Minha Vida – Entidades [Entities], it enabled
local organizations to build-up capacities for housing
models that are adapted to the needs of the inhabitants
and to the specific conditions of the local context. The
Entidades program is standing for the attempt to integrate
bottom-up organization within the framework of top-down
institutional practice and it can be considered a first step
towards inclusive housing provision empowering micro-
political mobilization within the macro-political scale.
There still might be a long way to go until cooperative
and participative practice will be considered an integral
component of sustainable urban development. While
dominating macro-political power constellations are
increasingly threatening the production of inclusive and
equitable cities, the lesson from the social housing history
in Brazil shows us that the next urban revolution will
depend on cooperation and micro-political empowerment.

Marc Angélil (Alexandria, Egypt, 1954) is Professor
at the Department of Architecture of ETH Zurich.
His research focuses on social and spatial
developments of large metropolitan regions
world wide. He is the author or editor of several
books, including Cidade de Deus! on informal
mass housing in Rio de Janeiro, Indizien on
the political economy of contemporary urban
territories, and Cities of Change Addis Ababa on
urban transformation in developing countries. He
practices architecture at agps, an architectural firm
with ateliers in Los Angeles and Zurich. Marc Angélil
is a member of the Board of the LafargeHolcim
Foundation for Sustainable Construction.
Rainer Hehl (Rottweil, Germany, 1973) is an architect/urban
designer and is currently guest professor at the TU Berlin
and visiting professor at Yokohama National University,
Graduate School of Architecture. Between 2010 and 2013
he directed the Master of Advanced Studies in Urban
Design at the ETH Zürich conducting research and design
projects on urban developments in emerging territories
with a focus on Brazil. In addition to having lectured widely
on urban informality, popular architecture, and hybrid
urbanities, Hehl was advisor for the development of new
guidelines for the mass housing program Minha Casa
Minha Vida. Rainer Hehl holds a PhD from the ETH, Zürich,
on urbanization strategies for informal settlements,
focusing on case studies in Rio de Janeiro.
9
Solid divisions:
borders within the city
How unrestrained is
the trespassing of limits
between disparate
urban fabrics?
The chapter Solid divisions explores the
theme Walls of air from the urban scale, a
subject familiar not just to architects and
urbanists, but also to anyone who lives in
a city. Although the themes in previous
chapters all have  repercussions on the
urban environment, here the purpose is to
discuss the barriers that physically exist
in neighborhoods and between buildings.
Barriers that are easily perceived by
its inhabitants.
In Brazil, over 160 million people live in
urban environments, a group that is larger
than the total population of countries like
Japan, Mexico or Germany. Urban dwellers
are distributed over 100,000 km2 and the
building of Brazilian cities to accommodate
this contingent was characterized by
inequality and segregation on local and
regional scales. As Rodrigo Agostinho
writes in his essay, the population did not
arrange itself in the urban space in the best
possible manner, but rather as best it could.
Although the majority of the Brazilian
population live in cities, the urban
population increase has not always meant
higher densities. Instead of concentrating in
central areas, the population is distributed in
an irregular manner. The old urban centers
were not able to host the new inhabitants,
who came from other countries or regions in
Brazil, and they ended up settling in distant
neighborhoods with less infrastructure
and amenities. The population dispersion
is widespread in Brazilian cities and, at
the same time, is not restricted to the less
privileged parcel of the society.
Even with the denser areas of cities being
seen as places of entertainment, culture
and work, urban problems such as pollution
and insecurity—which escalated between
the 1970s and 1980s—began to affect the
daily lives of the inhabitants, encouraging
people with higher income to move to
non-central areas. Added to this fact are
models of urbanization imported from the
United States and England, a constellation
of suburban neighborhoods is being created
at a time when the urban fabric is spreading.
The promise of better family life, away
from congestion and guided by the use of
individual transportation, has transformed
closed condominiums into a frequent
scenario in Brazil. The urban centers, in
turn, due to the lack of housing policies for
the low- and middle-income population
and the centrifugal movement described
above, were increasingly being emptied and
homogenizing their functions.
As the Brazilian metropolises are
seeding—or failing to fight against—these
expansion movements, several externalities
of the lack of planning become common
to all of them: insufficient infrastructure;
channeled and polluted rivers; lack of green
areas and public spaces of coexistence;
excess of highways without efficient public
transport, etc. Gradually the urban territory is
fragmented into disconnected pieces and the
wall, a misplaced solution for the mediation
of spaces, becomes the protagonist of this
landscape, now divided and monitored. Life
is less and less public and shared only among
people from the same social groups, inside
controlled enclaves.
Although the history of the urbanization
of Brazilian cities has praiseworthy
proposals to overcome barriers in cities
and rethink their spatial configurations, it is
noticeable how many times the destruction
of a barrier ends up with the construction
of a new one, as pointed out by the groups
GRU.A and OCO in their essay. The Flamengo
Park, in Rio de Janeiro, for example,
spectacular from a technical standpoint
and as a public space, hides social,
economic and environmental issues, which
are contradictory to its original proposal.
Infrastructure that, instead of
connecting parts of the city, create physical
barriers, are also common elements in
the urban landscape. This is a recurring
theme in work by the Spanish artist Antoni
Muntadas, represented here. Drawing
parallels between large transportation
works and public monuments, he criticizes
the transformations in the urban landscape
that result in technical or economic
progress only in detriment of local identity.
Against this challenging backdrop,
there are also those experiments that
present opportunities and possibilities
for change. The essay by Bruno Santa
Cecília refers to notable results created by
architectural projects such as the Copan
building and Ibirapuera Park. In addition to
governments, he reminds us, the private
enterprise also plays a fundamental role in
the creation of qualified urban experiences.
Alternatives for reinventing the collective
space are also the theme of reflections
by Marcos Rosa. Why not look at streets,
avenues and highways as possibilities?
The opening of emblematic roadways
such as Paulista Avenue to pedestrians, on
weekends, and the public demonstrations
held on the streets of large Brazilian cities
are ways of confronting urban barriers.
Reversing the logic of segregation that
has been created in Brazilian cities is not
a simple task. Unlike the right to collective
urban space, the privatized physical wall is
regulated by the Civil Code.1 A new approach
to think about cities is needed for the
building of a less unequal society, as Gilson
Rodrigues proposes in his interview. The will
and necessity of resistance to the diffusion
of these patterns of exclusion is not minor,
and is represented here in brief records on
the 2013 protests in Rio de Janeiro through
the eyes of Pedro Victor Brandão.
To conclude, this chapter is closely
connected with the projects selected in the
public call and presented in the final section
of this book. If here walls are identified,
there proposals for how to breach them are
presented. Ideas such as the walkway by the
architects Sauermartins + Metropolitano
or the Escola sem muros [School without
walls] by Sem Muros Arquitetura Integrada,
are solutions capable of bridging the
adverse conditions that surround them.
Farol da Maré [Maré Lighthouse], by Pedro
Évora, and the project by the group Gru.a
and Pedro Varella are fine examples of the
possibility of overcoming physical barriers
by opening new views from which to reflect
about the city. Each of the seventeen
projects fight in a specific way against the
conditions of impediments imposed by their
contexts, not restricting themselves to the
present limitations but imagining alternative
possibilities. They remember, as the
geographer Milton Santos put it, that “[…]
The world is a set of possibilities and not
just a set of realities […] other worlds can be
created from the same materials”.
The map
The map proposed to draw attention to the
problem of intra-urban borders, brings a
selection of 30 Brazilian cities, distributed
among the five regions of the country.
Each of them presents the overlap of
topography and road infrastructure to
create their background. This information
is, however, treated with a graphic
abstraction that omits markings of coastal
line, water, green areas or any other
elements conventionally used to represent
cities. On this resulting canvas, urban
barriers are drawn.
Large ruptures in the urban fabric and
stark contrasts in the built morphology
of cities, which suggest moments of
division, are identified from the rich
database developed by QUAPÁ (Quadro
do Paisagismo no Brasil), a research
developed at FAU-USP since 1994 that
examines the main structures of the urban
form and the systems of free space of
Brazilian cities This research is the source
from which the different types of physical
divisions were extracted to be displayed on
the map. Of the 23 categories surveyed by
QUAPÁ, 10 were considered barriers to be
shown in the Solid Divisions map.
To these categories colors were applied—
to differentiate them from each other—over
satellite images—to show the reality on the
ground. The resulting mosaic becomes
a mixture of painting and map, with the
beginning and the end of each city not
clearly marked, where the fragments of the
extracted divisions construct a patchwork of
real moments of urban separation.
1. ” See Brazil, Law no.10.406,
January 10, 2002: Código Civil
[Civil Code]. Available at: http://
www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/
leis/2002/l10406.htm. Accessed
on: 24/04/2018.
Antoni Muntadas in collaboration
with Paula Santoro
On Translation: Comemorações
urbanas, 1998-2002, São Paulo
Bronze plaque, postcard,
and website
Pedro Victor Brandão
From the series Mitigação sem
impacto (Convite à pintura)
[Mitigation Without Impact
(Invitation to Painting)], 2013
Inkjet print on cotton paper
interview: 318
Gilson
Rodrigues

Gilson Rodrigues (Bahia, 1984) is a

community leader in Paraisópolis,
a favela in the south region of the
city of São Paulo. He was president
of the Paraisópolis Residents
Union and one of the creators of
Instituto Escola do Povo [IEP –
People’s School Institute]. He
is one of the main forces behind
the Nova Paraisópolis project,
created in 1994 to enhance life in
the community through several
local initiatives.
Walls

What are the main social and political

divides separating Paraisópolis from the
rest of the city of São Paulo, especially
the so-called “formal” city?
The main divide is social inequality.
The more one advocates the separation
between our rich neighbor [Morumbi]
and Paraisópolis, the wider the gap
between us.
What has recently changed in
Paraisópolis is that the rich families,
who have lived in Morumbi for many
years and exploited the workforce of
the favela, have come to understand
that we need opportunities to be
equal. Paraisópolis today has doctors,
administrators, educators.
Today what separates a rich person
in Paraisópolis from a rich person in
Morumbi? I believe that once we pull
down the “walls” in our minds and create
opportunities for this population to get
ahead, our country will make greater
progress. What will unite us, and already
does, is not money, but knowledge, access
to art and culture. These walls tend to
shrink when people realize their potential.

Evidence

What physical barriers enhance the

divide? And what are the dynamics
of their construction and destruction
over time, considering how fast the
community is changing?
The main barrier is the state. Paraisópolis is
in a special situation, since the government
decided it would be completely removed
one day. The idea was to oppress more and
invest less, increasing the violence until
people couldn’t handle it anymore. Then
the state would intervene to repossess
the land and remove people. However,
the community started organizing itself
and resisting.
Few neighborhoods in Brazil have clear
boundaries of where they start and end. In
Paraisópolis, when you cross the street
 you know you’re in Morumbi, especially
because of the mansions. There is a clear
boundary, but there’s no wall stopping
access to the other side.
In this sense, the last thing the
inhabitants of Paraisópolis wanted was
an avenue cutting across the favela. When
Paulo Maluf was mayor (1993-96), there
was a plan to open an avenue called
Itapaúna. We were for it, but running
outside the neighborhood. So we started
“rerouting” it towards more vacant areas,
so fewer people would be removed, which
resulted in the current Hebe Camargo
Avenue. The community’s concern was to
avoid the avenue becoming a scar inside
the neighborhood, which shows our desire
for integration.
Side effects
What are the greatest side effects of such
segregation for the city of São Paulo?
Situations such as that of Paraisópolis, the generation we are educating.
Antonico stream or the Grotão area1 affect
human development.
Today, Morumbi faces the issue of street Behavior and micropolitics
funk parties. Youngsters from Morumbi
come to Paraisópolis to enjoy these dances, Do you believe there is resistance to
which used to be exclusively frequented
by locals. This affects the region, and
the government’s failure to regulate
these events reverberates throughout
the city. The same has happened in other
neighborhoods. People pay attention to
what goes on in the most famous favelas,
like Paraisópolis and Heliópolis, and that
has an impact, both positive and negative.
So our duty is to set an example to
other communities.
Experience in the discipline
What barriers do you strive to overcome
with your “Nova Paraisópolis” [New
Paraisópolis] project? How can your
experience (as community leader)
contribute to pulling down walls and how the outskirts. When the private sector
can it be passed on to other people?
When we created the “Paraisópolis das
Artes” [Artistic Paraisópolis] project, our
goal with the cultural activities was to
change the way people viewed the favela,
to make them think of its good points. To
think of (projects like) Gaudí, Berbela,2the
Orchestra (Paraisópolis Philharmonic)
and not of violence, crime or poverty. To
talk about walls today is a hindrance,
especially those that don’t exist. The main
tool to spread our ideas is cultural action,
attracting people who imagine they will
come up against a wall and showing them
instead an open door. People naturally ask
me about my background. One aspect that
has favored good interaction is seeking
relationships that do not limit or overpower
us. We were able to establish relationships
that strengthened Nova Paraisópolis and
have shown that a community can achieve
what it wants by organizing itself.
There is still much to be done, but we
want to finish what we have started and
pass on our beliefs and desires to the new
such change within Paraisópolis itself?
The divide emerges when we start
addressing political issues. At the current
moment in Brazil, when everything is
branded as corruption, someone might say
that what we are doing is wrong. As in Brazil,
in Paraisópolis there are also different lines
of thought, but we are always seeking to
build something that is common to all.
We built Nova Paraisópolis with a
campaign called “All United for a New
Paraisópolis”. And what is Paraisopólis?
A neighborhood. Regardless of political
views, skin color or religion, we all want
paved streets. That’s how we move forward,
seeking consensus. We need to work
for people to have the opportunity to be
whatever they wish to be.
Paraisópolis harbors the outskirts of
and governments invested in urbanizing
Paraisópolis, some families were able to
improve their living conditions. It is a very
enterprising community: initially there
were three organizations, today there are
62. Educational and cultural opportunities
have expanded significantly. Nevertheless,
some families have been unable to respond
to these opportunities, especially those
suffering greater impact from issues such
as drugs or violence.
Today in Brazil there are 25 million illiterate
people and it is in the interest of certain
classes that they continue being unable
to read and write. This has an important
impact, both economically and socially.
While some had every opportunity possible
in life, others had none.
of an informal space that wishes to be
formalized. However, it may not be possible
to fit into existing rules, we must develop
new processes.
1. Areas marked by high-density
occupation, precarious housing
and frequent flooding – in the case
of Antonico – and landslides – in
the case of Grotão.
2. Estevão “Gaudí” Conceição
adorned his house with stones and
other ceramic artifacts bought over
the years. The nickname comes
from the similarity with the Spanish
architect’s work. Edinaldo “Berbela”
da Silva, mechanic, uses automotive
parts for the construction of
handmade sculptures.

Transformative potential

What potential for change do community

initiatives have? To what extent can we
apply such lessons on a metropolitan scale?
People are impressed by how much has
been done in Paraisópolis and the extent
of the community’s commitment to and
mobilization for change. Ten years ago it was
all wooden shacks, fires and removal threats.
As we struggled to improve the streets,
people started renovating their houses, the
community became more agreeable, local
businesses were regularized and new ones
were attracted.
Recently we have suffered a setback due
to politics, with occupations, widespread
fires and landslides. This is an example
of what happens when investment is
discontinued and we lose a few million reais
because works are interrupted.
In some neighborhoods of São Paulo
one sees no people in the streets, they
are isolated behind walls. And one good
thing about Brazil is life itself—so it’s a
good thing when people can make contact,
relate, exchange experiences. Paraisópolis
provides that, but such exchanges can
generate both good and bad experiences. So
we are preparing a generation with greater
opportunities. It’s an ongoing process. I
believe Paraisópolis is the greatest example
 City center

Paraisópolis:
the most populous
slum in São Paulo

This map was developed and designed in collaboration with

Mapping-lab (www.mappinglab.me) for this catalogue to highlight a
layer of the main exhibition map Solid Divisions.
Educational attainment
Undergraduate/graduate degrees
High school
Basic education
Incomplete basic education

S ÃO PA U LO U R B A N A R E A
Contesting Marcos 324
urban borders: L. Rosa
cultural
practices,
design and the
construction
of urban
situations

PRELUDE: FLYOVER SÃO PAULO

A helicopter flies over central São Paulo. From above, one

peeks a homogeneous verticalized city sprawled over
its topography. Away from its very center, road arteries
cut through the territory, fragmenting large plots of land,
characterized by uniformly built neighborhoods of one to
three-story buildings, eventually interrupted by clusters
of high-rises, other lower buildings enclosed in gated
communities, business districts, shopping malls and other
commercial enclaves, some more sparse mono-familiar
housing neighborhoods and favelas.
At a newspaper stand, postcards exhibit a panoramic
view, showing an extensive landscape of high-rises. That
image “allows one, as they say, to capture the city at a
glance”.1 However, that panoramic image does not match 1. In “Paris: Invisible City”,
the multitude of images produced by urban life on the Philosopher and Anthropologist
Bruno Latour takes a critical
ground. In an exercise and effort of approximation to the
view on the panoramic vista
lived city, the apprehension of the city from (a distant) used to represent a city, due to
bird’s‑eye‑view becomes problematic as it reveals the fact its distance and simplification
that the virtual, “branded” image has been separated from of the real city. In that work, the
the real city, that of everyday experience. static “virtual” image of Paris is
later deconstructed based on
A closer look at that territory demands a gaze at processes that are unpacked on
particular issues and the local scale: it demands an the local scale. See: Bruno Latour,
approximation with different agents and their perspectives. Emilie Hermant, Paris, Invisible
At first glance, one might not see the city of the City. Paris: [n.d.], 2006, p.6.
relationships. But the acknowledgement of several ways
through which different actors collaborate in making
place throws light on forms of co-production of the city.
That point of view questions the boundaries that enclaves
and a car-oriented urbanism have imposed on urban
design, indicating forms of experimenting in the planning
and operation of collective space, resulting in innovative
practices that overcome those same limitations.
 In order to learn from the different actors, their
questions, their demands and their agency, one ought to
observe, to listen, to read, to question what one sees, to
learn how to look at things from diverse perspectives; thus
unveiling layers of the coproduction of the city beyond
those designed by the architects or legislated for by policy
makers. To unveil these “others” from a more palpable and
complex perspective, a series of processes of mediation
are unpacked: the structures, the relationships, and the
operations behind the “static picture”.

ON THE GROUND

At ground level, the image of sequential high-rises in

postcards sold at newspaper stands makes little sense.
On the ground, life is busy and streetscapes are often
not homogeneous, including sociability and cultural
multiplicity. Buildings occupy the plots differently: from
one-story houses to two to three story buildings, with
doors by the sidewalk; from attached units to detached
high-rises, set back on the lot and eventually isolated by
walls and fences. In front of those buildings, to the side
of them, behind them, across from them, what could be a
hard frontier often makes space for a negotiation zone.
Everyday life unfolds in public space: self-made paving
on sidewalks host chairs and tables; a barbecue stand
and an improvised bench; a sarau, an evening reading
session, overflows onto the street; an open air cinema is
installed by the curb; a theater piece from the windows
of a building attracts an audience sitting in car lanes;
street food vans; pixo and street art covering façades;
cardboard pickers” carts parked by the curb; plants
cultivated on the sidewalk, a dinner on the footpath,
doorsteps used as benches; piled up plastic chairs await
to be put outside later at night.
Unlike a space where everyday life follows a
pre‑established script, life unfolds in unexpected ways in
urban space, brimming over, blurring and re-defining the
preset walls, borders and limits. The observation of those
traces reveals social and cultural practices that have been
offering innovative insights about how to re-define borders,
rethinking our relationship with collective space, the politics
of use, the management and the making of urban space.
Despite the lack of awareness about the operational
intelligence embedded in those situations, those are everyday
urban practices that offer insight into the possibilities of
reinvention of the site: from the experience of the space, to
proactive participation in the operation of sites, collaboration
in the making of place and in policy‑making and the
development of innovative design processes.
A CITY OF OPEN BORDERS? 326
São Paulo has often been described as a fragmented
city, appearing to be not the result of order, but of chaos.
The industrialization boom that began at the end of the
nineteenth century and that has demanded successive
migratory inflows to supply the city with a workforce,
led the twentieth century to experience an increase in
population of 7200 percent: from 239,820 (1900) to almost
20 million inhabitants (2011).2 2. Marcos L. Rosa, From Large
Another reading of that phenomenon depicts the city Scale Utility Infrastructures
to Operational Networks: The
as an agglomeration of buildings and people, built by the
Qualification of Local Space
free exploitation of land (targeting profit), in which “urban at Existing Large Scale Utility
space does not exist and has never existed, [what exists Infrastructure: A Method for
is] just a process of juxtapositions, discontinuities and Reading Community-driven
fragmentation, one that does not stop and that transforms initiatives, The Case of São Paulo.
Munich: Technische Universität
the entire city into an autophagic movement of value München, 2015, p.334.
production and segregation”.3
The idea of a fragmented city is demonstrated in
3. Leandro Mendrano, Luiz
“borders” that today have been materialized into physical Recamán, “Espaços públicos na
barriers such as walls, fences and surveillance cabins; região central da cidade de São
examples are the gated communities, the shopping malls, Paulo. O Telecentro Elevado Costa
business centers and even the slums, promoting life e Silva”, in Vitruvius Arquitextos,
confined within controlled areas, protected and vulnerable, São Paulo, n. 07.075, August
2006, p.1. Avaiable at: www.
of high or low income. This fragmented space is an anti- vitruvius.com.br/revistas/read/
city with new forms of urbanity based on the denial of arquitextos/07.075/326. Accessed
contact with the other.4 on: March 3, 2018.
The confirmation of this fragmented territory—
discouraging social interaction— contrasts with a São 4. Raquel Rolnik, São Paulo. São
Paulo of open borders, perceived in the wealth of its Paulo: Publifolha, 2001, p.77.
ethnic formation (based on miscegenation, particularly
in the last century): “[A city] that opened up the concrete
possibility of individual and collective human development
through the intensity of trade and social interactions”.5” 5. Id., ibid.
Furthermore, it contrasts with a city that has recently
experienced an intense cultural remix and resulting
transformation of urban life. In Brazilian cities, this can
be observed in “countless unpredictable events [that]
establish temporalities, allowing for the emergence
of situations, places and relationships otherwise
never imagined”.6 6. Wellington Cançado, “Utopias
The observation of São Paulo opens up the possibility to recreativas”, in Piseagrama, Belo
Horizonte, n. 6, 2011, pp.43-48.
value and recognize its cultural diversity and its social
groups, aligned with practices that impact the city’s
urban culture as well as the experience of space in this
contemporary city. A constellation of small-scale urban
situations—triggered by a new attitude towards the use of
urban space—relates to the production of urban culture
and the reinvention of collective space.
That phenomenon reveals the effervescence in the
production of space in that city—both by architects and

7. The Observatory of the 11th São
Paulo Architecture Biennial has
been set as an archive in process
of construction, to support and
guide the curatorial work of that
edition of the event. It compiled
an archive exhibited in different
supports with hundreds of
initiatives. See: Marcos L. Rosa
et al, Catalogue: 11th São Paulo
Architecture Biennial. São Paulo:
Meli-melo, 2018, p.270.
non-architects—, and offers new voices that contribute to
the understanding of practical collaboration and a notion
of collectiveness shared in the coproduction and operation
of the urban (space), thought as a place to encounter, to
inhabit and to live together.
Through the organization of an Observatory, from
2016 to 2018, we have identified and documented urban
practices with focus on São Paulo, and in relation to
other initiatives in Brazil and the world.7 The compiled
cases became an archive in construction that focused
on the “operational relationship” of people with the city,
contesting its fractures and fragmented spaces at various
levels through a vast array of methods:
–– The production of another imaginary of the city—
present in cartographies, urban walks, photo
essays, audio-visual material, performances,
literature, devices for listening, signalization, guides,
experimental acts etc.—; revealing, traversing and
subverting invisible walls;
–– New experimental practices—including temporary
constructions, prototyping, test-actions, act drafts,
gaming, mockups, place making, retrofitting etc.—;
acting provocatively on urban scars previously
produced in the city;
–– Social innovation and technology applied to the urban
context—found in slum upgrade programs, social
housing policies, strategies for the improvement of
urban settlements, manuals, open source projects,
apps targeting collaborative management etc.—;
exploring ways to overcome invisible walls present in an
unequal social geography;
–– Architectural practices that allow for one to rethink
the impact of design in the urban space—initiatives
that focus on the acknowledgement of forms of use
and occupation of urban spaces, capable of informing
legislation—; thus proposing a design practice that
supports the real city and its urban culture, rather than
one that fractures and discourages diverse forms of
expression in the city.
The nature of urban design can be re-thought based
on this observation of our contemporary cities. Design
practiced at different fronts—such as the ones listed
above—and forging diverse levels of collaboration, may
generate structures that are open for life to unfold, thus
transforming its initial framework. Perhaps these should
be conceived as an open and unfinished membrane, rather
than impermeable barriers that discourage encounters.
In light of a contemporary urban culture, design might
be employed to define the city as a structure that is open to
different temporalities, constantly establishing new codes 328
in the physical space. As in the Theory of Moments,8 design
would conceptualize the space to host situations, using the
idea of “play” as a subversive strategy to change the modern,
spectacle city, turned into a city full of (ludic) possibilities. 8. Developed in parallel with
Situationist International, for which
the “play” element and the “playful
man” (homo ludens), prepared
THE REINVENTION OF URBAN SPACE the site to turn into a city full of
ludic possibilities. For the IS, play
“Space, itself, is social.”9 The political nature of the is a subversive strategy to change
social act, of participating in the reinvention of the place, the modern, spectacle city. See
“The Theory of Moments and
offers chances to operate with the goal of convening the
the Construction of Situations”,
collective into a common project. “The space, as agent Internationale Situationniste, Paris,
and product of social action, is a cultural record. It records n. 4, june 1960. Available at: www.
in its inhabited morphology the site as it was, the action notbored.org/moments.html.
that built it and the possibilities for its reinvention.”10 Accessed on: March 3, 2018.
In spite of that, to a great extent, the design of
our urban spaces fails to respond to the demands 9. Geographer Milton Santos
observed in the use of space itself. It is there, that social argues that the territory is formed
by the technical basis plus social
relations and cultural manifestations collide with their practices, or a combination of
spatial materialization. technical and political. Milton
The forms of contestation of the spatial limitations Santos, A natureza do espaço:
acting as borders—from the wall to the road artery— técnica e tempo, razão e emoção.
carried out by architecture and cultural practices, situate São Paulo: Edusp, 1996. p.260.
alternatives to reinvent common space.
The proposed dive, from the bird’s‑eye view to the 10. Id., ibid. p.22.
eye-level perspective, suggests an approximation of
architectural practice to other knowledge, with the goal of
revealing forms of contestation of the barriers and walls built
in the city, materialized in interventions in the urban space.
This study of design in relationship to life in urban
spaces supports a direct criticism of the correspondence
between content and form, materialized in the modern
discourse, and questions the universalization in design
proposed by the implementation of that idea. In doing
so, it alludes to the possibilities of manipulation and
intervention by people and the design practice that
could be offered by those spaces, as an alternative to
the normative discipline and prescriptive character of
the functional city, which, as described by Cançado11 still 11. Wellington Cançado, op. cit.
determines a controlled city that keeps trying to overrule
the drifts and derivations, typical of the urban nature.
Eventually the “wall”—in the various ways it presents
itself—serves as an architectural support for human 12. Marc Augè describes lieux
action, or provokes its own transgression, leading (places) as spaces defined
to the construction of situations and “places”.12 It is through their relationship
then re-codified as meeting points, from which one with the history and identity
apprehends its own quotidian in a transformed way, re- formed by that relationship.
See Marc Augè, Não lugares.
purposing the relationship with the neighborhood, based introdução a uma antropologia da
on the integration of fragmented structures through supermodernidade. São Paulo:
common activities. Papirus, 1994.
Marcos L. Rosa (São Paulo-sp, 1980) is an architect and
urban planner (FAU USP) and holds a doctorate degree
in Regional Planning and Urban Design (Technical
University of Munich). His work includes research,
teaching, publishing and design, with focus on urban
strategies. He has researched at the Alfred Herrhausen
Gesellschaft (with the London School of Economics)
and taught at the Technical University of Munich,
Escola da Cidade and the Swiss Federal Institute
(ETH). He has published extensively, given lectures,
participated in critiques and workshops worldwide.
His books include Microplanejamento: Práticas
Urbanas Criativas (2011), Handmade Urbanism, From
Large Scale Infrastructures to a Operational Networks
(2013) and Co-designing the City (2017).
Bridging and Rodrigo 330
breaking down Agostinho
barriers

People have chosen the city. Over 84% of the

Brazilian population lives in urban areas (IBGE,
2010). According to the United Nations, by 2050,
cities will gain an additional 3.1 billion inhabitants.
Unfortunately, the driving force behind this trend
is not always so noble, and largely ignored by
decision-makers. Millions of people have adapted
as they can to a life packed together in large urban
centers, many subject to an appalling scarcity of
quality public services and high rates of exclusion
in every sense.
In 5,570 Brazilian cities, 11 million people live
in slums (IBGE, 2010), whole areas lacking basic
sanitation. In the absence of the state, indicators
for violence are horrifying: over 60,000 homicides
annually (IPEA, 2017). Brazil also has 12 million
unemployed (IBGE, 2018), the worst traffic jams in
the world—which rob years of life from everyone—
and the fourth highest motor vehicle fatality rate on
the planet, with 47,000 victims per year (WHO, 2016),
more than any armed conflict today. What can be
done? How can we address these problems and
challenges? What are the real obstacles? How do
we deal with the lack of resources and affordable
projects? (And all of this without considering the
new—and major—challenges that may arise in the
future, with climate change: cities without water,
threatened by forest fires or submerged under rising
seas. Perhaps the most resilient are prepared for the
change, but what about the rest?)
On the other hand, Brazilian cities are also the
largest public and private hubs for health, education,
science and technology, with more and better
jobs, transportation, digital inclusion, spaces for

1. Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the
City. New York: Penguin, 2011.
2. Jan Gehl, Cities for People,
Washington: Island Press, 2010.
3. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life
of Great American Cities. New
York: Vintage Books, 1992.
practicing sports and a diverse and cosmopolitan
culture. It is in this sense that Edward Glaeser holds
up the city as society’s best invention in his book
Triumph of the City.1 Cities need to reconnect people
with each other, with efficient services and quality
public spaces. According to Glaeser, the mixture of
ideas, values and cultures that occurs in the urban
environment does not only expand the frontiers of
knowledge but also makes us more empathetic,
productive and creative.
Many successful experiments recently conducted
in Brazilian cities point to more sustainable paths and
solutions. Organizations like Instituto Ethos, Rede
Nossa São Paulo and Rede Social Brasileira por
Cidades Justas e Sustentáveis have demonstrated
this with their Sustainable Cities Program, which
uses an immense database of good practices and
management approaches based on indicators for
the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the United
Nations (Agenda 2030). Today, 172 Brazilian cities,
responsible for 50% of the country’s population, have
already joined the program.
Never before has there been so much talk about
habitability, mobility, inclusion, protecting rights
and entrepreneurism. Strategies to cope with
these challenges are being discussed everywhere.
Cities are now receiving titles—intelligent, creative,
healthy, educational, resilient, sustainable. So it
would appear that people already know what they
want. But how do we get there? How do we make
cities more attractive than repellent, integrate
more than segregate and unite more than disperse,
as Jan Gehl proposes in his book Cities for
People?2 According to the author, cities possess a
human dimension. First we shape them—and then
they shape us.
“How can we ensure the health of these large
living organisms that are cities?” asks Jane Jacobs
in The Death and Life of Great American Cities.3
Written in 1961 and the first to call for change in the
way we build our cities, the book is still current today.
How do we produce quality urban planning,
capable of providing affordable solutions and
transformations for large urban agglomerations,
as proposes Anthony Ling, creator of the website
Caos Planejado? And moreover, how can we
recycle and renovate existing spaces under a
new paradigm of cohabitation? How do we make
the city, this real manifestation of human culture,
actually serve its purpose, without walls and visible
or invisible barriers? According to Ling, there
are urban management tools, involving public 332
and private spaces, that could help us with this
challenge: equalization and optimization of urban
land use; elimination of zoning that segregates
residential and commercial activities and mandatory
setbacks; land legalization; the creation of shared
spaces; municipal ownership of sidewalks and the
elimination of parking spaces. These measures
may appear controversial, but would help to change
urban planning.
For other problems, solutions can be found
through technological development: in the Fourth
Industrial Revolution, everything will be monitored,
cars will be autonomous, lighting will be controlled
at a distance and cities will be self-cleaning.
Everything will be operated through the Internet.
But experiences from around the world show
that solutions to these problems already exist and
they don’t necessarily need to be associated with
technology. Oftentimes small, simple and cheap is
best. And sometimes, the solution is hidden in plain
sight. A current example is the war on cars. Streets
and avenues are being closed to cars, to make room
for cyclists and pedestrians, and parking spaces are
being eliminated; in turn, the public is increasingly
occupying public spaces in a healthy manner. These
are relatively simple approaches, but can change
people’s lives and the face of cities.
Perhaps the pursuit of more inclusive and
sustainable cities requires the participation of the
public in all phases of drafting public policies. Yes,
that same dialogue that existed in the Agora of
ancient Greece over 2,000 years ago, and which
has been gradually left by the wayside. Bureaucrats,
designers, the real estate market and authoritarian
public administrators stopped listening to people.
And this is how our cities have gotten to this place.
Jane Jacobs emphasizes: “We cannot treat cities
as one big architectural problem.” To face the
unexpected urban challenges that arose with the
rural exodus of the 1960s, many types of rules were
created for cities—zoning laws, municipal codes,
construction regulations, land apportioning laws
and master plans—but always with a great distance
from the public and local reality. It was urban
planning conducted behind closed doors.
History shows that this does not work. It is
important to work with residents, with each of
the living sectors of a city. Planning has to take
into account the needs of people. Unfortunately,
despite this knowledge, the recently implemented
program Minha Casa Minha Vida [My Home My
Life], the largest affordable housing program in
the country’s history, involving millions of units,
repeated the same mistakes of programs of the
past—notably, taking people to distant locations
away from central areas, where the price of land
is low and the availability of basic public services
is poor. The program could have taken advantage
of urban spaces to make cities more compact, for
shorter commutes. It is not a matter of disparaging
the project or its merits: thanks to this program
many people who did not have a place to live
now have a roof over their head. But everything
could have been different if the public had been
sufficiently consulted.
In 2001, after a broad debate and long
maturation period, and with engagement from
institutions like Instituto Pólis, Federal Law no.
10.257 was passed, establishing the Statute of
the City, and regulating articles 182 and 183 of
our Federal Constitution. The law is clear. It is
designed to promote full development of the
social functions of cities and urban property,
whereby urban policy is conducted through
democratic management, with participation
from the public and representative associations
from various segments of the community in the
formulation, execution and monitoring of plans,
programs and projects for urban development. In
this way, participation was established in law and
required in transforming instruments, such as
master plans. But what kind of participation are we
talking about? The kind that legitimizes political
processes? Or the kind that takes advantage of
local knowledge to build sustainable strategies?
Perhaps we should consider this for a moment.
Participation that involves a wide variety of
social actors and government is key to determining
strategic measures capable of breaking down
existing paradigms and barriers. And this process
of building and empowering spaces with multiple
levels and actors is more transparent. It is a
pursuit of innovative and sustainable solutions
coproduced by citizens and government. Civil
society knows this. In many Brazilian cities, even
in the absence of government, people gather
together, discuss and propose creative solutions
to urban challenges. In the megalopolis of São
Paulo, hundreds of entities discuss and transform
the city, even when the government doesn’t appear
to be interested in listening.
 Experiences with Rede Nossa São Paulo, which 334
recently monitored the entire process of developing
the city’s Master Plan, and that of Arq.Futuro, which
transparently discussed each of the major urban
themes, deserve a round of applause. Even local
initiatives, like efforts by Fundação Tide Setúbal
to transform a very underprivileged neighborhood,
like São Miguel, in the city’s eastern zone, into a
national benchmark, show that it is possible to make
a difference.
Recently, the World Bank recognized, in its World
Development Report (WDR 2017), that the decision
about who is allowed a seat at the negotiating table,
in the process of designing and implementing
public policies, can determine the effectiveness of
the solutions ultimately proposed by authorities.
In other words, participation in the formulation of
public policies is decisive for their success. The
report also said: “The success of policies depends
on governance. To be effective, they need to improve
commitment, coordination and cooperation.”
This is nothing new: many other studies have
concluded the same thing, defending democratic
societies. None of them, however, had the backing
of such an inscrutable institution as the World
Bank, which in the past has financed government
projects marked by an absence of social control,
by accusations of corruption and for irreversible
damage to the environment and traditional
communities—in addition to not necessarily being
very successful at promoting development and
quality of life.
In the same direction, initiatives began to
emerge that dialogue with the New Urban
Agenda adopted during the United Nations
Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban
Development (Habitat III), in Quito, Ecuador, at
the end of 2016. The document advocates that
cities and settlements be participative; promote
civil engagement; engender a sense of belonging
and appropriation among all of their inhabitants;
prioritize safe, inclusive, accessible, green and
quality public spaces, appropriate for families;
strengthen social and intergenerational interaction,
cultural expression and political participation.
In Brazil, the pursuit of participation in the life
of cities is relatively recent: gathering strength
only 30 years ago, with the approval of the
Federal Constitution of 1988. Cities began to
create thematic councils with the participation
of civil society organizations. Many of these
 councils evolved from mere advisory functions,
or exclusively consultative, into deliberating
bodies, with equal standing and social control.
In some cases, the formation of councils for
urban equipment became common. It is true that
amongst this large group of councils there were
some that were unmotivated and devoid of agenda,
existing only to legitimize the investment of
resources. But the progress is undeniable. Public
hearings, conferences, participative budgets,
ombudsmen, applications and participative
plans became routine in Brazilian cities. These
are institutional spaces that emerged and have
become ingrained, in theory, despite little
tradition of participation. In many cities, Social
Observatories began to emerge, formal or informal
structures that provide a clear analysis of the
effectiveness of governmental spending and
the results of public policies. Perhaps this is the
right path to take in a country where corruption
has historical roots and in many places is almost
routine, a metastasizing cancer draining resources
that could make a difference to the most vulnerable
portion of the population.
Instituto Arapyaú, an NGO that works in this area,
is assessing the participation of residents of cities
founded on the building of strategic plans with a
long-term vision of the future. It is little different
from conventional plans, in which participation is
a mere ingredient required by law. One of these
assessments was conducted in Sobral, in the state
of Ceará, made famous internationally for having
been the place where Einstein’s theory of relativity
was proven, in 1919, and also for its high indicators
of education today. In partnership with Instituto
Votorantim, Arapyaú conducted 56 workshops
with over 2,000 residents to develop the document
“Sobral de Futuro” [Sobral of the Future]—which,
then, served as inspiration for government plans
for those seeking the office of city mayor, and is
now being transformed into budgetary law (PPA –
Participative Pluriannual Plan) and into a plan of
objectives, with the support of Instituto Pólis.
In Três Lagoas, in the state of Mato Grosso do
Sul, the capital of cellulose, another experiment
along the same lines is underway, with a different
methodology. A survey carried out—also in
partnership with Instituto Votorantim—in 1,060
households and territorial and thematic workshops
resulted in 129 indicators and strategies for the
future, laid out in the document “Três Lagoas
Sustentável” [Sustainable Três Lagoas]. The content 336
served as the basis for the city’s Master Plan and
for the development of the Participative PPA and
the Plan of Objectives for the city. In this case, a
methodology developed by the Inter-American
Development Bank (IDB) under its Emerging and
Sustainable Cities Program, is present today in six
Brazilian cities: Florianópolis, Vitória, João Pessoa,
Goiânia, Palmas and Três Lagoas.
To evaluate these plans for the future, a
partnership was created with the Center for
Sustainability Studies at FGV—Fundação Getúlio
Vargas (GVces), which resulted in the publication
online of Construindo a participação em agendas
para cidades sustentáveis [Building participation in
agendas for sustainable cities].4 It extracts important 4. Available at: mediadrawer.
lessons from these and other initiatives. In addition gvces.com.br/publicacoes/
original/2017_participacao-
to Sobral and Três Lagoas, the proposal focused on
cidades-sustentaveis-final.pdf.
projects in Curitiba and in the metropolitan region of Accessed on: March 3, 2018
Rio de Janeiro, like Casa Fluminense.
Among the lessons learned is the need
for sectorial planning to harmonize policies,
instruments and spaces for decisions; for resources
that ensure the means necessary for participation
and implementation; for an inclusive dialogue,
which balances technical knowledge and the real
experience of citizens; and, finally, to generate
fundamental mechanisms of social control,
transparency and monitoring, catalysts for social
capital and capacity building. In other words, it is
not only participation, but a qualified process that
will produce sustainable spaces.
Despite being isolated cases, these experiences
demonstrate the importance of using participative
processes in decision-making on the future of
Brazilian cities. Public participation is long overdue.
Technical and political decisions need to be built in
conjunction with the community if we want to live in
sustainable cities.
Together perhaps we can overcome and break
down these barriers.
Rodrigo Agostinho is an
environmentalist and specialist
in strategic management. He
has served as City Councilman
(2001-2008), Secretary of the
Environment (2005-2008) and
Mayor (2009-2016) of Bauru,
São Paulo.
Building Bruno Santa 338
free spaces Cecília

Architecture cannot be dissociated from the urban

environment and social life. Although it is generally the
result of individual actions, its effects are felt collectively.
This is because built objects shape our experience of the
urban space, establishing gaps through which we move,
act and interact with others. That which we recognize as
a city—walkways, streets, squares, plazas, parks, etc.—is
nothing more than a collection of free spaces which are
left over between the walls that delimit private property.
In this sense, land use in Brasília stands out as one of
the most masterful, insofar as it expands the presence
of free spaces and prevents architectural objects from
creating excessive barriers in the urban space. The
Pilot Plan (1956) drawn up by Lucio Costa proposed
eliminating the land lot as the basic urban unit in favor
of a spatial arrangement that coordinated architectural
objects and free spaces, while also anticipating
desirable relationships between them. Particularly in
the superquadras [superblocks], elevated buildings
create public space at ground level, overthrowing one
of the fundamental principles of the capitalist city. This
precept – which has received little scrutiny from modern
vanguards – considers the gaps situated between
architectural objects and the street as naturally private
[fig. 1]. The interdiction of private areas in the Pilot Plan,
especially in the superquadras, returns to the community
all the areas that would be wasted with lot-by-lot land
use, eliminating the private areas between the buildings
and the street as provided for in almost every Brazilian
land use code. Contrary to popular perception, Brasília’s
spatial configuration was designed to make it a walking-
friendly city. What makes walking unappealing in the city
is the lack of diversity and large areas of single-purpose
use that have resulted from the monofunctional zoning
found in many different sectors. In this sense, recurring
criticisms of Brasília are aimed at the wrong target, its
spatial structure, when they should be directed at the
barriers created by the urban legislation.
In addition to the invisible barriers created by urban
land use codes, we are faced daily with a series of other
barriers produced by elements that shape the urban
space, such as specialized transportation infrastructure:
overpasses, expressways and railways. It is important to
note how these elements interrupt the continuity of free
spaces and significantly affect the daily experience of the
city, shaping our perceptions and guiding our movements
through the public space. Architecture that results from
the parceling of urban land into blocks and lots is, however,
just as obstructive as the fissures caused by the elements
of transportation infrastructure. Even though in that land
use model most buildings do not fully occupy the area on
which they stand, the ubiquitous presence of fences and
walls configures an exact correspondence between the
perimeter of the lots and private property. Therefore, in
that model, the urban environment is reduced to a few free
spaces situated between an impenetrable mass of walls
and buildings, limiting the use and the enjoyment of the
city almost exclusively to its transportation system.
Although free spaces are responsible for hosting a
large part of human interaction and public events, they
make up only a tiny fraction of the land area, especially
in Brazilian cities. Restricting the experience of urban
space to streets and sidewalks—split unequally between
vehicles and people—diminishes the freedom of action
and interaction of individuals, since this is only possible
on a very small portion of the land area. This disproportion
between public spaces and private enclaves ends up being
perpetuated by the immobility of the urban land structure
itself. Today, not only are the great urban renovations of
the past—such as Hausmann in Paris, Cerdá in Barcelona,
or Lucio Costa in Brasília—improbable and in many cases
undesirable, any kind of effective transformation of the
collective environment is inevitably blocked.
To understand this context it is necessary to assign to
each individual architectural gesture, to each built space—
and not only to planning and urban design—the task of
expanding the availability of free spaces that shape the
daily experience of cities. In this sense, the breakup of the
unnecessary barriers between public and private domains,
or between the city and buildings, could return more free
spaces to the public and positively impact the experience
of the urban space. In dissolving the physical barriers that
segregate this space, some types of architecture are less
obstructive than others when they are implanted in the
city. A set of design strategies can be used to integrate the
[Fig. 1] Superquadra [superblock]
SQS308, Architects Marcelo
Campello and Sérgio Rocha.
Photography: Joana França.
[Fig. 2] Edifício Copan, Architect
Oscar Niemeyer. Photography:
Joana França.
[Fig. 3] Museu Brasileiro da
Escultura, Architect Paulo
Mendes da Rocha. Photography:
Joana França.
buildings with the city, preventing architectural creations
from becoming barriers to the free space of human events.
Below are some good examples of Brazilian architecture to
illustrate other ways of building cities.

BREAKING UP THE BLOCK

A concrete example of this dissolving of borders between

public and private domains, or between the city and its
buildings, are the galleries and urban passageways that
took hold in major European cities throughout the 19th
century and currently help to maintain the vitality of the
central areas of some Brazilian cities. The idea behind
creating these spaces is to break up the solid occupation
of the urban space with shortcuts and alternative routes,
in general conveniently protected against the elements, in
order to attract the largest possible number of passersby.
David Libeskind did this with the Conjunto Nacional
(1954–58) by making the ground floor an extension of the
urban space. Besides the absence of obstacles to the free
circulation of people, Libeskind cancels out the opposition
between building and city by creating generous internal
passageways with the same paving as the adjacent
sidewalks to bring together passersby, residents, workers,
shop owners and clients in the same space.
Oscar Niemeyer adopted a similar strategy in the design
of Edifício Copan (1951–66). Opening directly onto the city,
the Copan building’s galleries feature an internal pedestrian
pathway that is completely independent from the street
system, enabling commerce that would otherwise remain
invisible and inaccessible [fig. 2]. In the Copan building,
the ground floor employs a complex geometry in order to
accommodate the difference in elevation between Avenida
Ipiranga and Vila Normanda. In this way, Niemeyer broke
up the excessive differentiation between vertical circulation
and habitable horizontal planes, avoiding a simplistic
solution of creating impenetrable floors linked only by
specialized circulation elements. The topographical shape
of this artificial terrain emphasizes the public character of
the building by dissolving the differences between city and
architecture in favor of a spatial and perceptual continuum.

REDESIGNING THE GROUND

In certain circumstances, the strategy of manipulating

the design of the ground itself to disguise the presence
of architecture can contribute to preserving the integrity
of free spaces in a city. In other words, using the building
as a topographic intervention in order to intentionally
dissolve the borders between the built object and the
urban landscape. This strategy can be seen in the Museu
Brasileiro da Escultura (Brazilian Museum of Sculpture –
MuBE), by Paulo Mendes da Rocha (1986–95). The design
is based on a topographic reconstruction of the area in
order to create a free space that is joined on two levels:
a lower plaza, which receives visitors, and an upper
plaza which is used as a public garden [fig. 3]. As the
architect himself explains, the museum does not reside
in the closed spaces of the built object, but rather in the
open spaces that unfold onto the garden of sculptures
in the upper plaza, in the amphitheater outside and in
the shade created by the roof. Taking advantage of the
topographical variation of the adjacent streets, Mendes
da Rocha placed the building in a vertical space between
these two plazas, making it disappear as a built object.
This apparent disappearance of the building prevents the
architecture from creating obstructions that compromise
the use and enjoyment of the free spaces. Expanding on
its function as cultural equipment, the MuBE attests to
the possibility of a peaceful coexistence between built
artifact and free spaces.

ELIMINATING THE WALL

Generally associated with public buildings, the strategy

of eliminating walls as a way of expanding the availability
of free spaces in a city can also be applied to private
buildings, as Oscar Niemeyer did in the residential
building located in Praça da Liberdade, in Belo Horizonte
[fig. 4]. The unusual absence of dividing walls at ground
level dissolves the borders between the public and private
domains, leaving an area with pilotis on the ground
floor as a natural extension of the walkway. At the same
time, the gap between the horizontal platform on the
plaza level and the unevenness of the terrain generates
a habitable space in the basement, partially used as a
parking lot, originally freeing up the ground floor for use by
people. Like a covered public square, the building favors
continuity and openness to the exterior over a closed
space—a Brazilian architectural tradition since Oscar
Niemeyer’s first experiments in Pampulha. Almost entirely
lacking in external closures, marked by the continuity of
the Portuguese sidewalks leading inward, the building
introduces features that are commonly associated with
urban spaces.
Perhaps the most noteworthy example of the dissolving
of the wall in architecture, however, is in the design of the
Ibirapuera Park Marquee (1952), in São Paulo [fig. 5]. With
a built area of around 28,000 m2, the marquee serves

1. For an extended discussion
on the infrastructural character
of this and other buildings, see:
Carlos Alberto Maciel, Arquitetura
como infraestrutura, doctoral
thesis. Belo Horizonte: Escola
de Arquitetura da UFMG, 2016.
as a link between the park’s various cultural facilities
and offers real shelter against sun and rain. Niemeyer
conceived the building merely as a roof, without any sort
of compartmentalization or lateral closure. It is surprising
that an architect was able to erect a building of this
size with no predetermined function, except perhaps to
project its own shadow on the ground. This type of relaxed
mediation between different domains—built and not
built, interior and exterior, building and landscape—takes
advantage of the pleasantness of the Brazilian climate,
which enables the use of exterior spaces practically year-
round. Undoubtedly, it is the absence of walls and other
determinations that allowed the marquee to significantly
expand the capacity of Ibirapuera Park to host all sorts
of events.
INHABITING INFRASTRUCTURE
Besides the design of buildings, there are situations
where urban infrastructure can be transformed from a
barrier into habitable space. The most notable example
of this strategy is, undoubtedly, the Bus Station Platform
in Brasília [fig. 6]. Situated on the main crossroads of the
federal capital, it is the result of the appropriation of the
shadow generated where the Freeway and Monumental
Axis cross over each other. Although it occupies the most
important crossroads of the Plano Piloto, the building is
not immediately recognizable and almost imperceptible to
passersby. The invisible nature of the building as an object
is one of its main virtues, since it reinforces its status as
urban infrastructure and intensifies the set of relationships
that it establishes with the city.1 It is a strategy that
deliberately avoids the monumental, individualistic and
self-referencing work, and instead concentrates on
building the landscape by weaving the urban fabric.
Although architecture is unable to determine how human
interaction will occur in these spaces, an excessive physical
presence can easily inhibit this interaction. The wall is, by far,
the most perfect manifestation of the obstructive capacity
of architecture. Recognizing the conflicts that result
from this excessive presence instates a new perspective
concerning which unnecessary material infrastructural
works can be undone and how cities can be composed
essentially of free spaces. Proposals for building these
free spaces are based on the principle that excessive
materiality in architecture is one of the greatest obstacles,
if not the greatest, to the spatialization of human events.
The idea of designing an absence of construction can be
understood as a reaction to the excessive determination
[Fig. 4] Edifício Niemeyer, Architect
Oscar Niemeyer. Photography:
Joana França.
[Fig. 5] Ibirapuera Park Marquee,
Architect Oscar Niemeyer.
Photography: Nelson Kon.
[Fig. 6] Brasília Bus Station
Platform, Architect Lúcio Costa.
Photography: Joana França.

2. João Cabral de Melo Neto,
“Fábula de um arquiteto,” in:
Obra completa: volume único. Rio
de Janeiro: Nova Aguilar, 1994,
pp.345–346.
imposed by the solidity of the built material, because it is in
these free spaces that all the possibility of indetermination
lies. Affirming the leading role of free spaces as an
essential urban reality implies that what a building looks
like is completely irrelevant. This is because the value of
architecture is not in its image or materiality, but in the free
spaces that it shapes and the relationships that it creates.
Creating architecture consists, therefore, of building free
spaces to host human events.
There is a beautiful and well-known poem by João
Cabral de Melo Neto which describes, in my opinion, the
essence of the work of an architect:
Architecture like building doors,
that open; or like building openness;
building, not to isolate or imprison,
nor building to keep secrets;
building open doors, as doors;
homes simply doors and roofs. 2
Building doors instead of walls, openings instead of
closures, continuity instead of breaks, integration
instead of segregation. Cities resulting from this type of
architecture are environments that promote collective
life better than the ones we now inhabit. Although cities
without walls, with open doors, only exist in the domain
of literary imagination, the power of this poetic image
inspires the building of spaces with greater freedom. If
cities like this someday become a reality, it will not be
the result of grand urban gestures, but the sum of small
actions that build each of the spaces that shape them. The
task of expanding the supply and the quality of free spaces
that shape the daily experience of the city is therefore a
matter of each individual architectural gesture, each built
element. Building openness, not only as a poetic image but
as a concrete action, is the architecture we need today.
Bruno Santa Cecília (Belo Horizonte-mg, 1977) is an
architect and urbanist (2000). He holds a master’s
in project theory (2004) and a doctorate in theory,
production and experience of space (2016) from the
School of Architecture at Universidade Federal de
Minas Gerais (UFMG), where he is also a professor in
the Project Department. He is also a partner-holder
at Arquitetos Associados. He lives and works in Belo
Horizonte, Minas Gerais.
Cutting, GRU.A + OCO 346
filling and
boring

THE ACTIONS THAT TRANSFORM AND THE TRACES

THAT REMAIN IN THE CITY OF RIO DE JANEIRO

Situated on a wetland, with the presence of large rocky

massifs, the city of Rio de Janeiro has been marked, over
the course of its urbanization, by a series of operations
that radically transformed its geomorphology: cutting and
boring of hills and filling of the ocean, lagoons. If, on one
hand, these operations allowed a growing population to
settle, on the other, they radically modified the distribution
of the population, generating important political and social
impacts. In this city, a transformative approach forged
a landscape based on human desires, where the limits
between nature and action are not clearly defined.
The present essay is part of a study conducted by
two associations of architects, GRU.A and OCO, both
headquartered in Rio de Janeiro.1 In addressing the theme, 1. Participants in the study, for
we strive to steer clear of foregone conclusions and face GRU.A (Grupo de Arquitetos),
Caio Calafate, Pedro Varella,
the contradictions that these operations raise. If, on
André Cavendish, Júlia Carreiro
one hand, the cutting, filling and boring activities were and Isadora Tebaldi; and for OCO,
responsible for bridging physical elements that were seen Juliana Sicuro and Vitor Garcez.
as obstacles to urbanization, on the other, they resulted in
the creation of new barriers—or walls of air—since many
of our examples are infrastructure projects that show little
regard for mediation between different scales.
Although they created extraordinary possibilities in
terms of urban experimentation—as in the case of the
Flamengo landfill project—these interventions were
also responsible for changing distinctive elements of
the landscape, showing little interest in reconciliation
with pre‑existing elements. Nevertheless, we strive to
build an open discourse and contribute to deepening
our understanding of cities and their multiple layers
of significance.
 N 1KM 5KM

GUANABARA
BAÍA DE
34
36 34

28
01 - 17

32
16
29
RIO DE JANEIRO 30
31
18
19
23 20
21
24 22
25
26
33 27
02. lagoa da sentinela OCEANO ATLÂNTICO
07. região portuária
08. lagoa da pavuna
11. lagoa de santo antônio 01. túnel martim de sá 18. túnel do pasmado 26. túnel de são conrado
12. lagoa do boqueirão da ajuda 04. túnel joão ricardo 19. túnel novo 27. túnel do joá
13. lagoa do desterro 05. túnel nina rabha 20. túnel velho 29. túnel da covanca
14. aterro do flamengo 06. mergulhão z. portuária 21. túnel major rubens vaz 30. túnel geólogo enzo totis
23. lagoa rodrigo de freitas 03. morro do senado 15. túnel santa barbara 22. túnel sá freire alvim 31. túnel enaldo c. peixoto
28. ilha do fundão 10. morro do castelo 16. túnel noel rosa 24. túnel rafael mascarenhas 32. corredor tancredo neves
34. ilha do governador 11. morro de santo antônio 17. túnel rebouças 25. túnel dois irmãos 33. túnel jose alencar

ATERRAR DESMONTAR PERFURAR

04. perfuração do túnel joão

ricardo
05. perfuração do túnel nina rabha
06. perfuração do túnel 450 anos
07. aterro da região portuária
08. perfuração do túnel josé de
alencar
09. aterro da lagoa da pavuna
10. perfuração do mergulhão da
praça xv

GUANABARA
BAÍA DE
11. aterro da lagoa de santo
01. perfuração do túnel martim de sá antônio
02. aterro da lagoa da sentinela 12. desmonte do morro do castelo
03. desmonte do morro do senado 13. desmonte do morro de santo
antônio
14. aterro da lagoa do boqueirão
da ajuda
15. aterro da lagoa do desterro
1KM 16. aterro do flamengo
17. perfuração do túnel santa
barbara

[Fig. 1] Mapping of geo-morphological

transformations in the city of Rio
de Janeiro.
[Fig. 2] Main geo-morphological
changes in the center of the city of
Rio de Janeiro.
 P_ A_ D_ P_
M³ D_ desmontar

M² A_aterrar

M P_perfurar

01. túnel martim de sá 02. lagoa da sentinela 03. morro do senado 04. túnel joão ricardo
date 1977 date 1779 date 1880 date 1921
size 304m area 8 168m² volume 6 005 960m³ size 293m

P_ P_ A_ A_ A_

05. túnel nina rabha 06. mergulhão z. portuária 07. região portuária 08. lagoa da pavuna 09. lagoa de santo antônio
date 2013 date 2015 date 1910 date 1749 date aprox. 1600
size 80m size 1 480m² area 175 000m² area 28 913m² area 20 665m²

D_ D_ A_ A_ A_

10. morro do castelo 11. morro santo antônio 12. lagoa do boqueirão 13. lagoa do desterro 14. aterro do flamengo
date 1920 date 1950 date 1780 date 1643 date 1920-65
volume 10 847 760m³ volume 11 259 960m³ area 55 866m² area 23 421m² area 2 581 165m²

P_ P_ P_ P_ P_

15. túnel santa bárbara 16. túnel noel rosa 17. túnel rebouças 18. túnel do pasmado 19. túnel novo
date 1963 date 1970 date 1962 date 1952 date 1906/49
size 1 357m size 720m size 2 800m size 220m size 250m

P_ P_ P_ A_ P_

20. túnel velho 21. túnel major rubens vaz 22. túnel sá freire alvim 23. lagoa rodrigo de freitas 24. túnel rafael mascarenhas
date 1892 date 1963 date 1960 date 1922 date 1971
size 182m size 220m size 326m area 1 497 295 m² size 500m

P_ P_ P_ A_ P_

25. túnel dois irmãos 26. túnel de são conrado 27. túnel do joá 28. ilha do fundão 29. túnel da covanca
date 1971 date 1971 date 1967 date 1952 date 1997
size 1 522m size 165m size 344m area 3 703 120m² size 2 187m

P_ P_ P_ P_ P_

30. túnel geólogo enzo totis 31. túnel enaldo c. peixoto 32. corredor tancredo neves 33. túnel josé alencar 34.ilha do governador
date 1997 date 1997 date 2016 date 2012 date 1978/99
size 161m size 153m size 1 337m size 1 112m area 5 536 337

[Fig. 3] List of geo-morphological

transformations in the city of Rio
de Janeiro.

2. The following cartographic,
bibliographical and audiovisual
references were fundamental to
the writing of this essay: Mauricio
de Almeida Abreu, Geografia
Histórica do Rio de Janeiro (1502-
1700). Rio de Janeiro: Andrea
Jakobsson Estúdio & Prefeitura
do Município do Rio de Janeiro,
2010. Verena Andreatta, Atlas
Andreatta: Atlas dos planos
urbanisticos do Rio De Janeiro
de Beaurepaire-Rohan ao Plano
Estrategico. Rio de Janeiro:
Vivercidades, 2008. Eduardo
Barreiros Canabrava, Atlas da
evolução urbana da cidade do Rio
de Janeiro – Ensaio – 1565-1965.
Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Histórico
e Geográfico Brasileiro, 1965. Entre
morros e mares, Ana Luiza Nobre
(concept and script). Available at:
www.youtube.com/watch?time_
continue=1&v=9CWZdZDdI6w.
Accessed on: March 11, 2018.
ImagineRio. imaginerio.org.
Accessed on: March 16, 2018.
In this sense, we tackle the theme in question by
delving into two different sources: on one hand, a rich
iconographic and textual body of work produced over
time by geographers, architects-urbanists, literati and
historians,2 and, on the other, records of the daily life of
people who inhabit the city, the impressions of a present
time that, in addition to producing irrefutable proof about a
past to be uncovered, leave traces that allow us to imagine
voids and point to possibilities.
In the following pages, a set of figures will be presented,
the first of them a table that lists each of the 37 operations
of cutting, filling and boring found in the research,
including quantitative data and dates. Together with the
table, a general map of the city and an enlarged view of
the center of Rio indicates the location for each of these
operations [fig. 1, 2, 3]. Together, the map and table are
designed to quantify the operations and situate them in
time and space.
Three different periods, during the entire urbanization
process for the city of Rio de Janeiro, concentrate most of
the interventions in question. In the first period—between
the mid-17th century and mid-18th century—the city
expanded from Castelo Hill toward the nearest lowland.
Wetland zones are filled, one after another, and the five
lagoons that existed there—Pavuna, Desterro, Santo
Antônio, Boqueirão da Ajuda and Sentinela—disappear
from the area where today sits the city’s financial center.
At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century,
a new sequence of transformations occurred, which
was more intense and similar to urban renovations
that occurred in certain European cities. During this
period, Senado Hill and Castelo Hill were leveled to
create a flat, dry zone in the central region of the city.
Contemporaneously, various transportation infrastructure
projects were built that expanded the city to the south and
north, and involved both the creation of tunnels—like the
Velho Tunnel and the Rua Alice Tunnel—and landfills, such
as the one that gave rise to Beira-Mar Avenue and to the
new Port of Rio.
Again, in mid-20th century, the city underwent large-
scale transformations. Cutting began on Santo Antônio
Hill—which had been slated for leveling since the start of
the century. With the land from the cutting, a landfill was
created along Beira-Mar Avenue, where Flamengo Park
sits today. At the same time, large infrastructure projects
were built, like the Perimetral Avenue and Rebouças
Tunnel, which were designed to link vehicle traffic between
the southern, northern and central zones.
Over the last decade, Rio de Janeiro has undergone an
intense process of urban transformation, this time driven
by the hosting of major sports events—2014 World Cup
 350

ladeira da
misericórdia

[Fig. 4] situation – Castelo Hill.

[Fig. 5] trail – what is left of the
Misericórdia Slope.

3. One of the celebrated writings on
Castelo Hill dates from 1905: a set
of short stories published over the
years by Lima Barreto. See Lima
Barreto, O subterrâneo do morro
do Castelo, Correio da Manhã,
April 28-29 1905, May 2-10 1905,
May 12 1905, May 14-15 1905, May
19-21 1905, May 23-28 1905, May 30
1905, 1/6/1905, June 3 1905.
and 2016 Olympic Games—and the city’s 450th anniversary.
These recent works demonstrate that a certain culture of
transformation is as present as ever and reinforce how
current the theme still is.
Finally, we have selected three cases as examples:
the cutting of Castelo Hill, in the center of the city, today
known as the Castelo Esplanade; Pavuna Lagoon, in the
area surrounding Uruguaiana Street; and the opening of
the Santa Bárbara Tunnel, between the neighborhoods
of Botafogo, in the city’s southern zone, and Catumbi, in
the central zone. In describing these cases, it is our aim to
explore graphically the layering of time in space, in order
to provide a complementary interpretation to the two-
dimensional cartography.
To these assessments, short stories on daily life are
added to help us shine a light on the material presence
that underpins the transformations made in the city—and
encourage us to think about the layering of time in the
space that we inhabit. These are traces that, devoid
of their original functions, end up opening a sphere of
symbolic possibilities.
THE CASTELO ESPLANADE AND THE ENDLESS HILL
The leveling of Castelo Hill (1922) is one of the most
important geomorphological transformations of the Rio
landscape. Interest in this part of the city dates back to
before its demolition, and is justified by the importance
that the hill had in the earliest occupations of the area by
Portuguese colonists.3
One of the routes up Castelo Hill was the so-called
Misericórdia Slope, of which only the initial stretch
remains today, measuring a little over 100 m. If you were
to walk up the slope today, you would find your ascent
interrupted unexpectedly, without any type of physical
mediation between the remaining section and the
demolished stretch. Today, the slope is an oblique plane
that cuts through time and history; however, contrary to
what the reader may think, there is nothing here that would
suggest a concern for the past that is common in areas of
historic relevance in large urban centers of the Western
world. For those who inhabit the city, as well as those who
visit on holiday, the endless slope—referred to here both in
the sense of its absence and its specific purpose—is rarely
included on any itinerary.
Only in recent years, in the context of the proliferation
of street carnival blocks that spread through Rio during
Carnaval, have we had the opportunity to revisit the place.
It is relevant that it is in this context, when our wandering
is freed from our daily pragmatism, that the endless slope
 SAARA

[Fig. 6] situation – Pavuna Lagoon.

[Fig. 7] trail – waters return to the
surface in a wetland area.
reappears in our imagination, presenting itself both as a
remnant of time that we did not experience and a tragic
reminder of a current urban condition of the center of
Rio. The unmistakable stench announces that the slope,
which we thought served no purpose, is actually being
used systematically as a huge unofficial bathroom for
the homeless.

SAARA AND THE PERSISTENT LAGOON

In the region today known as Saara, although few are

aware, there once stood a lagoon bordered by a street.
Today, Uruguaiana Street is home to a popular market of
the same name, and perhaps the city’s most important
commercial center. In 1749, then Governor Gomes Freire
de Andrade ordered that the Pavuna Lagoon be filled
in on the pretext of extending the urban fabric into the
center of town.
The area covers almost 30,000 square meters. Today,
in a place where this grid composes the vibrant fabric
of commercial streets, the well where indigenous
peoples and outsiders once bathed lies inert. Layers
of urbanization erase from view the largest of the
filled-in lagoons in the center of the city, of which there
were five. Its existence, however, resonates in secret,
clandestine subterranean fabrics, which man does not
see, but that in the blink of an eye appear as a trace of the
erased landscape.
This resonance is felt in Rio de Janeiro every summer,
when the tropical climate tends to bring intense storms.
Ten minutes of a typical Rio downpour is enough to turn
the streets of the Saara into veritable canals, which quickly
and, without asking permission, enter the buildings. Shop
owners try to shut their doors, but the slats cannot hold
back the water that slowly corrals people down the back of
their premises. Water seeps from the asphalt that covers
the ground above the old lagoon and, to be able to leave,
one must cross improvised bridges or wait for the waters
to slowly subside.

THE CATUMBI NEIGHBORHOOD AND

THE LOOKOUT SMOKESTACK

Catumbi, one of Rio de Janeiro’s oldest neighborhoods,

experienced the city’s different phases of urbanization.
Its name, indigenous in origin, is a direct reference to the
geographical condition of the humid and shaded valley.
On the wet ground, country houses and stately homes
were built during the colonial period. With the expansion
 chaminé
da fábrica

[Fig. 8] situation – Santa Bárbara Tunnel.

[Fig. 9] trail – silo of demolished
industrial building.
of the city toward the seashore, the neighborhood lost
the prestige it had achieved as an enclave for the wealthy,
giving way to factories, such as Cervejaria Brahma and
Refinaria Ramiro, also known as Fábrica de Açúcar Brasil,
inaugurated in 1888 and 1855, respectively.
The construction of the Santa Bárbara Tunnel,
together with the roadway that provides access to the
neighborhood, coincides, however, with the expropriation
and subsequent demolition of the sugar refinery in
the 1960s. What remains of this building is a fragment
that today stands in full public view. Its presence does
not hinder the pragmatism of metropolitan flows. The
old smokestack is one of the few vertical references in
an essentially horizontal landscape, protagonized by
transportation infrastructure. Having lost its specific
function—carrying the vapors produced in industrial
processes into the sky—the tower has become an element
suggestive of an ascendant movement, accentuated by
the steel ladder clinging to its brick surface. It has become
something of an improbable lookout of dizzying height.

Caio Calafate (Rio de Janeiro–RJ,

1987) studied architecture at
PUC-Rio (2010) and is a partner
at Grua (2013). Pedro Varella (Rio
de Janeiro–RJ, 1987) studied
architecture at UFRJ (2012) and is
a partner at Grua (2013).

Juliana Sicuro (Rio de Janeiro–RJ,

1988) studied architecture at
PUC-Rio (2010) and is a partner
at Oco (2014).

Vitor Garcez (Rio de Janeiro–RJ,

1988) studied architecture at
PUC-Rio (2011) and is a partner
at Oco (2014).

Contributors: Julia Carreiro (Rio

de Janeiro–RJ, 1993) and Isadora
Tebaldi (Niterói–RJ, 1993).
10
The encryption of
power: disobedience
and exclusion in
the city
How liberating can
pixo be in revealing the
city’s power logics?
 It’s like São Paulo is a giant notebook,
and the pixador fills in the blanks.
– Pixobomb, pixador1
As put by a long-time pixador from São
Paulo, the activity of pixo regards the city
as a notebook and each wall is a sheet,
chosen and marked with notes that are
simultaneously personal and collective.
All literal walls that make up the city are
the focus of The Encryption of Power.
It analyzes how pixo—black letterlike
sprayed graphics—challenges the power
dynamics in the city, as well as its potential
in breaking the boundaries between public
and private while denouncing critical issues
in the urban environment.
Often concentrated in central areas of
the city, pixo is at the same time revealing
and concealed. Pixadores (those who
practice pixo) consider the practice of
painting messages in the walls of the city
as a form of protest. This dates from the
resistance against the authoritarian military
regime in the 60’s. Back then, however, the
writings were clear and supposed to be
read by anyone. In the early 80’s, influenced
mainly by the punk movement, a young,
marginalized portion of the population
started to explore these messages as
a means of communication that would
reach only their own social group. Thus
the messages started to be encrypted, in a
type of personal coding that functions both
as a personal signature of the pixador and
as a mark of their group—one that belongs
to a socioeconomic spectrum excluded
from civil society and overlooked by the
State. The messages encrypted on the city
walls are intended to be seen by many, but
only understood by a few.
Although codified, pixo reveals the
underlying power dynamics that define
inclusion and exclusion in the metropolis.
It exposes issues such as the abandonment
of buildings due to market dynamics and
the uneven distribution of capital among
different areas within the city; bureaucracy,
and urban legislation; the privatization of
public spaces; and finally, the government’s
negligence towards a class that has few
outlets of expression. In an activity that
involves a statement of civil disobedience—
after all, pixadores appropriate both public
and private spaces without permission—a
marginalized population is able to express
themselves, occupying a territory in which
they are usually not welcome.
In his interview for this chapter, São
Paulo-based pixador Cripta Djan—one of
the biggest names of the pixo scene—talks
about pixo as a response to such spatial
segregation, and its role in reclaiming the
right to the city. The symbolic occupation of
spaces where the pixadores are unwanted
is, according to him, their contribution to
the public space.
In fact, as pixo spreads in the city both
horizontally and vertically, it confronts
many of the symbolic roles of architecture
within the urban environment. Much in the
same way tall buildings have been long
regarded as architecture’s expression of
humanity’s ambition, corporate power
and modernity in materials, their height is
of value to pixadores, too. Appropriating
these significances, pixadores make the
act of “spraying” mostly in black paint at
the top floors of multi-story buildings as
an assertion of their power to contest the
establishment of the socioeconomic order,
as well as its spatial expression.
The other aspect appropriated by
pixadores is the defiance of the law. On the
one hand, Cripta Djan explains that as part of
the pixo culture, on the other, Judge Kenarik
Boujikian from São Paulo’s Justice Court
discusses the challenges of the Brazilian
judiciary system regarding activism, and
punishment in the cities. Her description
of the spatial concentration of punishment
in the margins of cities suggests that the
concentration of pixo in their centers is also
an expression of the reclamation of space
on the part of the segregated communities
taking part in the practice.
The presence of this specific portion
of the population as antihero activists on
the streets is further discussed by Victor
Carvalho Pinto, Judge specialized in
infrastructure and urban development. The
author, in his essay for this chapter, details
the manners in which legal aspects of city
administration complicate the role of law
and public policy in recovering lost public
spaces in the city, as the social aspect of
the urban area is increasingly transferred
into private ones.
And while pixo takes place in these
lost public spaces, its private aspect
is guaranteed in the encryption of the
messages sprayed in the walls. The
specificity of the language of each pixador
is an expression of their identity in the
group and of the pixo community. Paulo
Orenstein writes about the process of
decodifying encrypted inscriptions found
in Rio de Janeiro’s walls, revealing an
unexpected mathematical complexity
behind the outlaw expression of the urban
peripheries communities.
All these aspects are made visible in
select artworks that bring yet another
perspective to the research. Ivan Padovani
photographs the “blind façades” that
characterize the city of São Paulo and
constantly serve as one of the white sheets
of a pixo notebook. Pablo López Luz, on the
other hand, photographs the encrypted
messages on the walls of downtown São
Paulo, picturing the aesthetic level of this
spatial phenomena.
The research proposes a new reading
of pixo, associated to a broader vision of
the urban context where it is employed. It
avoids the discussion about the presence
or absence of art in pixo to investigate
instead the social divisions that generate
it in the first place. With the wall as an
indispensable element of the pixo practice,
“The Encryption of Power” considers the
theme Walls of Air, both materially and
conceptually, through a marginalized form
of expression in the urban environment.
known as the birthplace of this practice.
Using data collected from 12.853 Instagram
posts—also highlighting the importance
of social media in contemporary urban
culture—it is possible to visualize the
geographic distribution of the mentions of
“pixo”, “pixação”, and “xarpi” through their
locations in the city. On top of that, the fines
applied to the offenders and news from
the last thirty years mentioning  Pixo are
georeferenced and displayed with their date,
media vehicle, and headline. Combined, this
information provides a depiction of the ways
in which society sees this practice and the
logics of punishment that it entails.
Lastly, the map cross-references this
data with over 40.000 entry points of
building’s square meter prices as well
as with emblematic cultural institutions
the pixadores have sprayed at in the past
in order to reflect on the concentration
of power and the expression of this
marginalized activity in the city.
1. From Joao Wainer’s movie PIXO
(2009). Such is the description of
the city as seen by Pixobomb, a
pixador in São Paulo.

THE MAP

In order to reveal the places where the Pixo

attacks happened and to reflect on the
city’s power logics through Pixo, the map
focuses on the expanded central area of
São Paulo, the city that is emblematically
Ivan Padovani
Campo cego [Blind Field], 2014
Digital photograph. Inkjet print
on cotton paper over aluminum
plate and composite of cement
and cellulose
Pablo López Luz
Pixo III, 2015
Photograph
interview: 372
Cripta Djan

Djan Ivson (São Paulo-SP, 1984),

or Cripta Djan (as he is known in
the streets and in the art world),
is a pixo artist and activist. He
began with pixo at 13 years of
age, when he entered the gang
Cripta, to which he still belongs
today. He has participated in
emblematic pixo movements in
São Paulo, such as the invasion of
the Centro Universitário de Belas
Artes and the 28th Bienal de São
Paulo (2008); the documentary
film Pixo, directed by João Wainer
(2009); exhibitions such as Né dans
la rue, at Fundação Cartier, Paris
(2009); and the Berlin Biennale of
Contemporary Art (2012). Currently
he records his pixo on video and
works to bring this culture to other
parts of the world.
What are the social and the political
barriers you are trying to expose and
contest with pixo? What do you confront
first with your work?
The first act of confrontation is
civil disobedience: confronting the
government, not following established
laws. There is the issue of visibility, the
pursuit of existential promotion. Pixo
decries rights to the city, which are
denied to most people. The city is
governed by private property and real
estate speculation that push people to
the outskirts. Public space is becoming
a utopia; everything is private. Pixo is
a retaking of the city by those who are
excluded. We symbolically occupy places
that were not designed for us. It’s a public
way of participating in the city.

Evidences

What are the signs of geographic

separation that you want to challenge
with pixo? What are the criteria for the
choice of location to be sprayed with
pixo?
Pixo takes on a life of its own. The wall
separates people by class, pixo creates
dialogue through conflict. Every time a
wall emerges, it will be sprayed with pixo.
Do you get it? It’s a consequence. These
divisions are increasingly reinforced:
gated condominiums, places completely
monitored. I believe that pixo is the best
response to the spatial segregation of São
Paulo. We use guerrilla tactics, an M.O.—
traditions, codes of conduct. In relation
to the city, we have an instinctive artistic
vision. We want beautiful pixo, we want to
follow the pattern of the architecture of
the location. We always view the city as
being in a state of transformation. Each
wall that emerges, each building that is
erected, always evaluating the structures,
where to climb up, the best place to spray
pixo. Once you become a pixo artist, you
look at the city like this. It is a type of
extreme sport from the outskirts of the
city. You confront, disobey laws. Crime is
the price that we pay for our freedom.
Side effects
What are the different ramifications
of pixo as a political statement and as
artistic expression?
The act is political, it is a popular resistance
movement, it is self-taught. You have the
opportunity to re-create your name, be
someone different, with your own aesthetic
identity. This takes time. I’ve been doing pixo
for 21 years. You write under pressure, upside
down, hanging. You use your body, put
your life on the line. Maturing your identity
involves lots of love and dedication. Pixo is
born out of the absence of the state. When
we go out to spray pixo, confrontation and
hate fuel our occupation of a place that was
not built for us. The way we are oppressed
and attacked on the outskirts of town.
Inequality is violent. Without equality there
is no democracy, there is no way for the city
to become a collective body. These divisions
serve to increase the pressure. The guy is
down and out, he lives in a geographically
disadvantaged place, pushed to the riverside,
to flooded areas, to the forgotten outskirts.
There are people getting rich off of this
poverty—how can you not be angry? Pixo is
the response. We are considered criminals,
pixo artists have already been killed for doing
pixo. The values are inverted, they value a car
or a wall more than a life.
Experience in the discipline
With regard to the aspect of
cryptography—and the fact that pixo is
incomprehensible to non-pixo artists—
what kind of dialogue does the pixo
artist establish with other inhabitants of
the city?
Actually it’s an internal dialogue. The
language developed and became
increasingly codified due to the
competition in creativity. Originality is
very important, you have to have your
own style. Understanding the language
requires study; today, many supporters of
pixo have developed their eye for it, they
are able to read something. Each pixo
artist has their own aesthetic world; if
someone says that something is an R or
an L, we have to accept that. What’s cool
is this openness. Pixo addresses a very
human issue: despite living in collective
environments, we have an individuality
that we need to accept, however much we
judge. Today I view ugly as a style: if the
guy changes he’ll be ridiculed, if he uses
beautiful script it’s not him.
Behavior and micro-politics
What experiences of bridging borders
do you believe occurred in the attacks
on the art exhibition spaces, like the
Centro Universitário de Belas Artes and
the 28th Bienal de São Paulo?
These incursions into the field of art
occurred in a kind of predestined manner.
Our friend, Rafael Pixobomb, went to study
at Belas Artes and saw the status of pixo
there. He began with a vision for his final
paper: since we had already sprayed pixo
everything else—buildings, stairs, windows,
churches, police stations, courthouses—
why not spray pixo on a thesis presentation?
I said, “Rafael, they will expel you, what will
you tell your mother?” and he said, “Fuck it,
it’s for the good of pixo.” We did it. He was
expelled, failed and arrested. There was a
huge amount of coverage in the media. In a
debate on MTV, the curator of the art gallery
Choque Cultural questioned the stance
of Belas Artes. That gave us the idea of
conducting an intervention there. Our gang
went there and sprayed pixo on everything:
paintings, ceiling, magazines. We took it
by storm. It was the breaking down of a
paradigm. The gallery reported it to the
police, they showed us their true colors.
Later Rafael said that we had been
invited by the Bienal because the curatorial
proposal Em vivo contato [In Living
Contact] was open to urban interventions.
Our “point” leaked, the curators then held
a press conference threatening us. We People accuse pixo of being aggressive,
did it anyway. The guys were ready for but it is the wall that is really aggressive.
a confrontation, in the first pixo a brawl
broke out with security, it was a fight from
beginning to end. These attacks created
a wave within pixo: we turned away from
our internal struggles to defend pixo
collectively in areas that we had never
imagined. It was a different kind of magic.
Even after receiving recognition from
the biennales, pixo continues to be a
transgression, continues to be a crime,
continues to be despised. We don’t want
this to change. We are not interested in
dialogue with the arts to gain acceptance.
It was so they couldn’t ignore us. The more
they repress us, the more visibility we have,
because what drives us is refusal.

Transformative potential

By attempting to reveal the exclusion

experienced by certain segments of
society, how do you believe that pixo
can contribute to changing inequality
between social classes and activate a
space of common struggle?
I believe that pixo can be used
increasingly as an instrument of political
change, using confrontation to pressure
the state. It is, above all, a symbolic and
peaceful war. Pixo may be an assault on
aesthetics, but it’s just paint on a wall. I
think it’s very democratic to raise political
issues with paint. For as much as people
say that pixo is authoritarian, it is offensive,
it is a silent cry. It is symbolic vandalism,
not physical. The sprayed place can still
serve its function, what changes is the
meaning. It is a fight between dominators
and the dominated: you simply don’t
accept the aesthetic of the upper classes,
you impose your own aesthetic standard
on the city. When they build a building or a
shopping mall, the public is not consulted.
They go there, build a wall on that path,
and I cannot spray pixo on it? The wall is
a permanent, physical intervention, pixo
is an ephemeral, aesthetic intervention.
The wall is authoritarian, an imposition.
interview: 376
Kenarik
Boujikian

Kenarik Boujikian (Kessab, Syria,

1959) is a judge at the Tribunal de
Justiça de São Paulo [São Paulo
State Court]. Graduated from
Pontifícia Universidade Católica de
São Paulo (PUC-SP). Volunteered in
the now extinct Carandiru prison,
is co-founder and president of
the Associação dos Juízes pela
Democracia [Association of
Judges for Democracy] (AJD) and
advisor of Fundo Brasil de Direitos
Humanos [Brazil Fund for Human
Rights]. She takes part in the
Imprisoned Women Study and
Work Group. She was granted
the 19º Franz de Castro Holzwarth
Human Rights Award, from the
Ordem de Advogados do Brasil
[Order of Attorneys of Brazil] (OAB)
de São Paulo, in 2002, Year of
Peace, among other prizes.
Walls

What are the major challenges facing

the Brazilian judicial system in terms of
guaranteeing human rights? How far can
the judicial court go to defend citizens
from possible arbitrariness of executive
power?
As I understand it, the urgent challenge
is the need need to change the culture
inside the judiciary itself. We notice
that many members don’t see clearly
their role as guarantors of fundamental
rights, human rights. This goal will
be hardly attained if it’s not seen as
the judiciary system’s real mission in
democratic society.
The Judicial system has no limits of
power in relation to the executive, since
the court is the last to decide on any issue.
Its only limit is the federal Constitution,
where the fundamental guarantees
are kept. For instance, the budget is
submitted to the Executive and the
Judiciary for approval, but the judiciary
can interfere if other powers don’t act
properly. An iconic case decided by the
judiciary was on the lack of nurseries, a
problem faced in many cities. Many say
the judiciary should not act upon such
issues, because it would interfere in the
budget, a bill voted each year. So how
far can it go? It was decided that basic
education is a fundamental right. It is
written in the Constitution that children
have the right to a full development. The
integral development of a child is a right
granted by the Constitution.

Evidence

Which situations disclose the culture

of punitivism in city spaces?
Punitivism is not an exclusivity of the
judiciary. It’s a culture that cuts across
every power, from the creation of laws
up to their approval and the way they are
executed, until reaching the judiciary.
Punitivism in the cities reflects the place
where the system chooses to act. And it
acts mostly in the suburbs, even though
the fact doesn’t necessarily take place
there. Punitivism finds marginal people
and begins the selection from there. The
state, such as the police, begins to act
upon these people, followed by the public
prosecutors, and then the legal process
brings in the judiciary. It’s a kind of network,
a web. This design is reflected by the
punitive system, in convictions and inside
the prisons.
Side effects
What does a military intervention in
Rio de Janeiro represent to Brazilian
democracy today? How is it possible to
regulate the practices and impacts of
this measure of exception?
It will be very difficult to regulate
something that was not meant to be
regulated. Military intervention is inserted
in the whole—the state of exception
established in Brazil since the deposition
of president Dilma. A series of changes
start in the structure, which becomes
deeper in order to strengthen this state
of exception, involving the three powers.
Since the ouster of the president, we lost
many validated rights, meaning more
and more intense setbacks everyday. CLT
reform [Consolidation of Labor Laws]
breaks with the historical achievement of
fundamental rights. Freezing the budget
for 20 years will have an impact on all
fundamental rights. The International
Charter of human rights states there
should be no withdrawal concerning
rights; we should always step forward.
The military intervention is the state
of exception deepening to the brink of
force. Military power means maximum
use of force. What they want is not little:
free access to people’s lives, without
being subjected to any Comissão da
Verdade [Truth Commission]. They
already foresee, because they know the
proposals. We will collect the bodies.
We will collect the pain. We’re already
doing it.
Behavior and micro-politics
How do selective justice and
arbitrariness affect power relations
in society, especially considering the
most vulnerable citizens, those living
in urban conflict zones?
Who is in charge of issuing collective
search and seizure warrants? The judiciary.
And collective warrants are issued only
in shantytowns. Who does the military
intervention reach? The shantytowns, where
the state is different for a selected population.
Children being searched? Can I imagine this
happening to me? Human rights implies
being just like the other, putting yourself
in someone else’s position. The damage
is done. Now the Federal Supreme Court
infringes upon the Federal Constitution by
deciding for the applicability of jail sentences
after the ruling of the first appellate court,
which I expect to be reverted.
Disciplinary experiences
You were sentenced by São Paulo
State Court for having released eleven
inmates who had already served their
sentences. What does this controversy
say about deadlocks in Brazilian justice?
Eleven were considered in the process, but
documents proved there were almost 50
cases. It was evident there are two different
worldviews inside the judiciary. In the
National Justice Council (CNJ) trial, it was
said I was being judged for my worldview.
This case shows the punitivist thinking.
The state elected an enemy, someone with
different thoughts, as in the recent past
under the civil military dictatorship, when
an enemy was present. Today, the new
enemies are certain people, treated almost
as if they had no rights, dignity or human
value. If I don’t see you as human, I do as I
please with you, in my most convenient way.
Either for you or to show society something
through your absence of value. The enemy
is chosen. The walls are up. The wall is
clear in the military intervention in Rio de
Janeiro, although it can’t be seen.
Transformative potential

What struggles are advancing in

guaranteeing human rights, in and
outside the judiciary? How can society
strengthen and protect the struggle for
rights in a country where activists are
increasingly threatened?
I don’t know if there has been any advance.
Brazil is one of the champions in the
number of murdered activists—either
rural or urban, in any activity. All related to
fundamental rights, particularly economic
rights. Why are so many indigenous people
dying, so many people linked to land
issues? Now we’ve the murder of Marielle
Franco, someone engaged in monitoring
the violations of the military intervention, a
voice to control and show the danger Brazil
is going through.
There is a strong group of people
struggling and an increasing number of
citizens rising up in relation to everything
that has been happening in the last years.
We have to break the barrier, nobody
will do it in our place. All inside our own
limits, whatever is possible—talking
to family members, engaging in public
demonstrations. My position as judge can
be useful only to guarantee fundamental
rights and fight for human rights. We have
to gain the streets. In fact, we already had
the path set in 1988. Everyday we watch the
Constitution being torn apart. We still have
time, we have to keep on reacting, can’t
lose heart.
This map was developed and designed in collaboration with
Mapping-lab (www.mappinglab.me) for this catalogue to highlight a
layer of the main exhibition map The Encryption of Power.
 Instagram’s hashtag #pixo

- posts + posts

- likes + likes

Irregular settlements

S ÃO PA U LO M E T RO P O L I TA N A R E A
The Paulo 382
probabilities Orenstein
in pixo

I can still vividly recall the first time I saw the mysterious
symbols, hidden in an underpass in the heart of Rio de
Janeiro. It was clearly a language to conceal meaning,
with characters that combined the otherworldliness
of hieroglyphs and the decisiveness of runes. They
could be found on the city’s walls in crowded streets,
abandoned alleys, by the banks of a lagoon or facing
the city’s Botanical Gardens. The strokes themselves
had a geometric precision to them, buried in a haze of
meaningless characters. One could spend a long time
contemplating them, but to me, more than just art over
a concrete canvas, those symbols were a tantalizing,
sprawling puzzle. [fig. 1]
It was 2011 and I was halfway through my
undergraduate studies. A professor close to me had
read an article about an enigmatic artist, called Joana
César, who wrote the ciphered inscriptions I had seen
all over the city’s walls. Pixo is not usually written to be
broadly understood, but this was different: these weren’t
disfigured letters upon the walls, but an entirely new
alphabet. In the article, Joana said she was laying bare all
of her innermost feelings for the city to see, but hidden
so no one could read them. Her diary was coloring Rio’s
urban landscape: she wrote in giant letters about her
childhood goals, failed dreams, grievances, recollections
and wishes, even erotic fantasies. Yet, no one could
know. She was playing a game of hide and seek with the
entire city.
The professor, Carlos Tomei, challenged me and one of
his postdocs, Juliana Freire, to make sense of this intimate
and intentional mess. After all, seen through the right
prism, this was a fascinating mathematical problem. His
advice: to read through the muddle of characters using the
algorithmic precision of a computer.

1. See Persi Diaconis, “The Markov
chain Monte Carlo revolution”,
Bulletin of the American
Mathematical Society, n. 46.2,
2009, p.179.
2. There are many other encryption
methods she could have used,
besides the plain substitution
of a symbol for a letter; she had
told a reporter that she invented
this alphabet when she was very
young, which lead us to believe
this was such a cipher, known as a
substitution cipher.
So how does one turn street symbols into mathematics,
and then mathematics into language? Years prior, a
Stanford professor wrote a paper suggesting a way to
do it.1 The author, Persi Diaconis, was trying to read
ciphered messages exchanged by inmates in a Californian
prison; our task didn’t seem that much different. And, as
mathematical ideas run at an abstract level, they can be
reshaped to fit many purposes. In our case, we wanted to
make this distinct kind of pixo legible.
Here is one way to start: collect all the characters
used by the artist. For now, let’s assume we have
26 symbols, just like our alphabet, and fix them in
any order we want [fig. 2]. We can write all possible
ways of organizing the 26 letters in our alphabet to
match Joana’s cipher: [abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz]
is one, where the first symbol is ‘a’, the second ‘b’,
etc; [bacdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz] is another,
where the first symbol is ‘b’, the second ‘a’, etc; and
[mlpnkobjivhucgyxftzdrseawq] is yet another, where the
first symbol is now ‘m’, the second ‘l’, etc. Of course, there
are many ways to organize these 26 letters, but we know
one of them must be the actual cipher being used by the
artist.2 [fig. 2]
We have now turned the symbols into mathematics:
the task of finding the right cipher is as simple as finding
the right configuration of the 26 letters in the alphabet.
We can think of each possible combination as a point
in space [fig. 3]. We could then just get a sample of the
artist’s writings on the wall, and use a computer to try
each possible configuration to turn her symbols into our
alphabet. Most of the attempts will be incorrect, and return
a completely meaningless array of letters, but, once we
stumble upon the correct one, we should just get back
faultless Portuguese. [fig. 3, 4]
The problem with this approach is that there are many,
many possible combinations of the 26 letters in our
alphabet to try. If we went about decoding at random, even
with a computer trying a million ciphers per second (and a
person checking whether the result resembles Portuguese
at the same speed!), it would take far longer than a trillion
years to get it done. What could be a better way?
First, while computers are really fast, humans are
generally not. Hence, it would be helpful if we taught the
computer to automatically recognize Portuguese. That
way, once it tries decoding the artist’s symbols with a given
cipher, it can automatically detect whether what it reads
looks like Portuguese or not (much like Figure 4, with runic
characters being translated to English). Put another way,
we wanted the computer to look at a collection of letters
and decide how much it resembles Portuguese as opposed
to just a random string of characters. We had to give the
[fig. 1] examples of the ciphered
symbols across Rio de Janeiro.
[above] Map of Rio de Janeiro
with location of pixos reproduced
on the opposite page.
[fig. 2] transforming the symbols
back to our alphabet, with many
possible ciphers.
[fig. 3] visualizing ciphers as points [fig. 4] trying to decode a text with
in space; there is a single correct runic characters using two different
one we are looking for, marked in ciphers; the first guess doesn’t look
the figure. like English, but the second does.

3. For what a “usual Portuguese
text” looks like, we used the
frequencies of pairs of letters
found in Machado de Assis’
Dom Casmurro, which is as
representative a text in Portuguese
as Melville’s Moby Dick is in English.
computer a way to assign a number, or a grade, that should
be high if the characters were from a Portuguese text and
low, if not.
Intuitively, if pairs of letters that appear often in the
decoded text also appear often in Portuguese, then it
is more likely the decrypted text is in Portuguese. In
English, the most popular pairs are ‘th’, ‘er’, ‘on’, ‘an’, and
a configuration used for decryption should be deemed
more plausible if the text contains many such pairs.
More mathematically, here is a way to assign such a
“plausibility grade”:
Plausibility (C) = ∏ (port(pair)codC(par))
letter pairs
In words: call C a given configuration of letters, say,
[mlpnkobjivhucgyxftzdrseawq]. Now use that configuration
to transform the artist’s codes into a text with our usual
characters, so, after fixing an arbitrary order for her
symbols, the first one becomes an ‘m’, the second an
‘l’, etc. To assign a grade to C
​ , go through every pair of
letters in the alphabet, aa, ab, ac, …, zz, and count how
many times we see that pair in a usual Portuguese text,3
and exponentiate that by the number of times we see that
pair in the decrypted text; finally, multiply together the
resulting number for each pair. This way, configurations
with high grades are the ones that make pairs of letters
that show up frequently in Portuguese appear often in
the decrypted text. To summarize, the above formula lets
the computer assign a grade to each configuration, with
a higher grade if that configuration returns a text that
resembles Portuguese. [fig. 5, 6]
Now that the computer can judge whether a particular
configuration of letters is likely to be correct, we just
need to navigate through them until it finds the right
one. As we saw before, trying ciphers at random
would take forever. How can we make the computer
navigate these possibilities in a smarter way, using
our grades? Here is an idea: to define a notion of
‘neighbor’ cipher, start with any given configuration,
let’s say [abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz]. Consider the
combinations that could result from switching any two
letters, so, switching ‘a’ and ‘b’ in the configuration gives
[bacdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz], switching ‘a’ and ‘c’ gives
[cbadefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz], all the way to switching
‘y’ and ‘z’ to get [abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxzy]. There are
325 such combinations. Suppose the computer adds a line
from one point to the other if they are connected this way
[fig. 7]. This means the computer can navigate through
the points by getting to a configuration, looking at the 325
neighbors, and then picking one at random and trying it.

[fig. 5] for each cipher, we can
assign a grade; it is, the more
correct the decrypted text looks.
[fig. 6] pictorially, each dot (a cipher)
now has a grade attached to.
[fig. 7] joining points (that is,
ciphers) that can be reached by
swapping a pair of letters.
[fig. 8] we assign a grade and a set
of ‘neighbors’ to each cipher; the
computer can walk around looking
for the cipher with the highest grade.
The advantage is that now, at every point, we only need to
consider moving to its neighbors, not all possible ciphers.
By itself, however, this idea doesn’t add much: we’re still
just navigating randomly. [fig. 7]
But here’s a better way to pick which neighbor to
follow using our plausibility grades: select one of the
325 at random, and if the grade is higher than the point
where we’re currently at, go to that configuration (that is,
switch the letters in the cipher). If it doesn’t, pick another
neighbor. Keep doing that for a long time, until there are
no neighbors with higher plausibility grade; then stop and
use that final configuration as your solution. Note that, by
design, whenever we switch to a different configuration,
the plausibility grade increases, so hopefully after a long
time we find a configuration with a very good plausibility
grade. This seems like a straightforward idea, but note we
now only need to search through a much smaller number
of configurations, since we never follow the ones with low
grades. That is enough to reduce the computation time
from trillions of years to mere seconds. [fig. 8]
Finally, we add one extra ingredient to our algorithm. If
we always go to a configuration that improves the grade
among the neighbors, we might end up trapped in a
configuration that is strong relative to its neighbors, but
still not quite Portuguese—just because there are no better
neighbors doesn’t mean it is right. Hence, instead of never
following configurations with lower grades, every once in a
while we allow the algorithm to pick a configuration whose
grade is worse. Remarkably, adding just the right amount
randomness to this otherwise deterministic process
usually helps.
Now, we are done with the algorithm! We can pick
a configuration at random, and let the computer keep
switching letters in that configuration to generate new
ones. If we randomly pick a neighbor to the current
configuration that has a higher grade, change to that
configuration; if we randomly pick a configuration with
a lower grade, then with high probability pick another
neighbor, but with low probability change to that
configuration. Run this for a minute or two, and then print
the pixo from the artist using the cipher found.
Although the algorithm is finished, in reality there is
much more to the problem than that. From a mathematical
standpoint, deciding just how often we go to the neighbors
with lower grades is far from a trivial matter, and requires
intricate calculations. There were other, non-mathematical
challenges, as well: for example, Joana, the artist,
wasn’t using 26 characters, there were 32. Some could
be punctuation marks, or accents, or they could just be
bogus symbols intended to confuse anyone that tries to
read it. We also didn’t know if she was actually writing in
Portuguese, or English, or any other language. Perhaps 390
she was writing from right to left? We didn’t have much
information to go with, but we did make some adjustments
to the algorithm to account for these possibilities.
Furthermore, we needed data! For everything to work, the
algorithm must first translate her ciphered texts, so we had
to go through the streets of Rio de Janeiro photographing
and copying down what she wrote, until we had almost
2000 characters. Then, finally, we were ready.
After running the algorithm for a minute, we got back
some meaningful sentences. Translated to English, it
would look like:

NIMNAPERSONVROMTHISCRAZYCITY
or
VAMILYOVVILTHYPIGGS.

It was clear there was some work to do. For example,

we were getting Vs in place of Fs. Also, some letters
seemed duplicated, while others lacked duplication.
But these were fixes we could solve with some manual
modifications to our solution cipher, and soon we could
read almost all of her secrets. From then on, every time
we walked about town, we would discover something
new about her: some first love memories forgotten on
a bridge, some medical issues left on a bus stop. Each
corner of the city gave us a new perspective on this
unknown, but now intimate, person.
While the puzzle was solved, the story was far from
over. Over the following months, and after some hesitation
on both sides, Joana and I communicated, and finally we
agreed to meet. At first, we were both apprehensive: when
I showed her the broken cipher, she reacted with a snarl—
“bastard!”. However, the fact that we intended to keep her
cipher a secret created an immediate bond between us.
Very soon, Joana and I became good friends. In fact, she
once told me she had considered erasing everything she
had written when she learned someone could read it, but
after our meeting she realized there was no need. It was
still an intimate and intentional mess, but now shared with
three more people.
Indeed, a recurring theme in Joana’s work is the idea of
concealing. There was more to it than just using a made-
up alphabet: for example, she would often paint over
her works, sometimes dozens of times, so her thoughts
became literally buried. Fortunately, after having her
words read by us, she became more willing to expose her
paintings in art galleries. Today, she is a well known artist
in Rio de Janeiro. While her work can still be seen in Rio’s
urban landscape, she has lately been hugely successful
painting on canvases.
 In the following months after we met, Joana would often
take me on many of her painting forays. She had her own
alphabet, and I had one too: mathematics. I didn’t invent
mine, however: many amazing people had helped craft that
language, and it indeed stands out as one of humanity’s
greatest accomplishments. We painted together in many
places, from architectural exhibitions to favela rooftops.
I’m now pursuing a PhD at Stanford, being advised by
Persi Diaconis—the same professor who wrote the original
paper with the idea we used to make meaning out of Joana’s
codes. He’s fond of saying one can find mathematics
everywhere: from the stars above, to the rivers below, from
arcane magic tricks to the mundane bubbles in a coffee
mug. Now, if you pay some attention, you can also find it
spattered across the walls in Rio de Janeiro.

Paulo Orenstein (Rio de Janeiro-RJ,

1989) holds a bachelor’s degree in
economics and a master’s degree
in mathematics from PUC-RJ. A
doctoral student in statistics at
Stanford University, he develops
research in the areas of stochastic
simulation and machine learning.
His fields of interest include
artificial intelligence, probability
and randomness.
The city Victor 392
and the law: Carvalho
the role of Pinto
law in the
recovery of
lost urbanity

THE PROCESS OF URBANIZATION AND THE FORMATION

OF THE DISPERSED AND FRAGMENTED CITY

Since the middle of the last century the urbanization of

the main Brazilian cities has been characterized by low-
density horizontal sprawl, with the poor living in suburbs
without infrastructure, often formed by clandestine
settlements and slums, and the rich occupying central,
well-equipped areas.
More recently, this arrangement has been replaced
by another, equally noxious one, represented by closed
condominiums or subdivisions, and shopping centers far
from the urban perimeter, aimed at higher income classes
and accessible only by car, while the central areas become
degraded and occupied by the low-income population.
The result of this process has been the emptying
of public spaces, with all sociability transferred to
private spaces. The buildings, isolated or assembled as
condominiums, close themselves up and do not dialogue
with the streets, which become merely a road system
pushing the pedestrian away.

THE DEGRADATION OF PUBLIC SPACE

In the traditional model of the city, the space for urban life
par excellence are the common spaces, which belong to
the municipality: streets, squares, parks, sidewalks, cycle
paths, etc., are classified as “public property for common
use”.1 These spaces are the physical means for the exercise 1. Law 10.406/2002 (Civil Code):
of some of the civil and political rights that are dearest to “Art. 99. Public property are:
I – those of common use by the
democracy, such as the freedoms of movement, assembly,
people, such as rivers, seas, roads,
and demonstration, and for recreational and cultural streets and squares […]”.
activities typical of modern urbanity.
 The breakdown of the Brazilian public space can be
explained by a series of factors. Among them is the fact
that in many subdivisions the entrepreneur is not required
to build sidewalks or bicycle paths, but only the road
system. The lands destined for squares and schools are
left abandoned, favouring the formation of slums or their
transformation into garbage dumps.
In addition, several municipalities accept the parcelling
of the land in the form of condominiums and not as
subdivisions, thereby giving up the right to gain any
public land in exchange. Although built by the local
authority itself, many housing estates for the low-income
population reserve insufficient public space for communal
sites and amenities.
Zoning regulations push buildings away from the
sidewalks by demanding setbacks on the front and sides of
buildings, and by tolerating the construction of walls and
electric fences that destroy the urban landscape and make
the public space less safe.
In informal settlements, there are no public lands,
but alleyways, many of which are too narrow for car
traffic. Although this impairs access to public services—
health, safety, and garbage collection, which depend on
ambulances, patrol cars, and trucks—these pedestrian-
only accesses have in many cases produced pleasing and
communal public spaces. The growth of violence, however,
has emptied these spaces, which have now become
controlled by criminal organizations.
The pedestrian is the main victim of this process, since
many areas of the city do not even have sidewalks, and
those that exist have their conservation left to the owners
of the contiguous lots without any standardization,
guidance, support, or inspection. The condition of some
sidewalks is so precarious that pedestrians, especially
those with disabilities or reduced mobility, are left to use
the road system intended for cars.
Even when the sidewalks are satisfactory, the absence
of stores open to the street, due to strict zoning regulations,
and retail confinement in large shopping centres
and hypermarkets, makes the pedestrian experience
monotonous, uncomfortable and often dangerous.
It is not surprising, in this context, that the streets are
progressively taken by marginalized segments and that the
walls come to serve as screens for unauthorized pixo.

THE ROLE OF URBAN LAW

Although Brazilian law is imperfect and defective in

many respects, it provides enough elements to contain
this perverse process of urbanization.
 The Constitution requires that every city with more
than 20,000 inhabitants be endowed with a master plan
for development and urban expansion, and that private
property observe its provisions. In addition, to ensure
proper use of urban land, it authorizes municipalities to
make subdivisions and building compulsory.
The City Statute offers municipalities various tools for
managing urban land and for real estate value capture.
Through agreement with the landowners, the Statute
also allows the Local Authority to directly promote land
subdivisions or construction on idle land, replacing
original properties by new units of equal value.3
The Urban Land Subdivision Law submits any
urbanization to an urban project compatible with the
master plan, based on guidelines established by the
municipality, in which various duties can be outlined for
the developers, such as the allocation of public lands
and the implantation of urban infrastructure.4
The Land Regularization Law facilitates the integration
of informal settlements into urban land planning
and requires that this be done through appropriate
urban design.5
HOW TO FOSTER THE COMPACT CITY
The revitalization of public space in Brazil is subject to a
set of known but difficult to implement measures and a
necessary revision of concepts.
In the first universe, it is necessary to prevent the
formation of new subdivisions and condominiums far from
the urban perimeter, focused on the private car. To this end,
the perimeter of urban expansion areas should be outlined
in the master plan, and applications for subdivisions
whose execution proves to be inopportune or inconvenient
should not be granted permission.
The absolute priority should be the occupation
of existing lots and the recovery of degraded areas,
in order to promote the best possible use of the
installed infrastructure.
In the case of idle lots, it is important to raise
taxation based on the value of the land, and reduce or
eliminate taxation on building, in order to discourage
the retention of land as a store of value and to stimulate
its occupation. Degraded areas, in turn, may require
land redevelopment operations to generate public
areas, and the amalgamation of old lots, thus enabling
the construction of higher buildings. In both cases, it
is necessary to revise and possibly eliminate building
restrictions that prevent the occupation of the lots at
high density, and which make public transport and
394
2. Federal Constitution: “Art. 182. […]
§ 1 The master plan, approved by
the Câmara Municipal, mandatory
for cities with more than 20,000
inhabitants, is the basic instrument
of the policy for development
and urban expansion. § 2. Urban
property fulfils its social function
when it meets the fundamental
requirements of city ordinance
expressed in the master plan. […] §
4 – The municipal Local Authority,
by means of a specific law for any
area included in the master plan, is
allowed, under federal law, to require
the owner of un-built, underutilized
or unused urban land, to promote
its proper use, under penalty,
successively, thereof: I – compulsory
allotment or construction; II –
progressive urban and territorial
property tax over time; III –
expropriation with payment through
public debt securities […].”
3. Law 10.257 / 2001: “Art. 46,
§ 1. A real estate consortium
is considered to be the way to
make urbanization planning,
land regularization or renovation,
conservation or building
construction viable, whereby the
owner transfers the property to
the municipal Local Authority and,
after completion of the works,
receives, as payment, real estate
units duly urbanized or built,
with the other units remaining
incorporated as a public asset. “
4. Law 6,766 / 1979: “Art. 7. The
City Hall […] shall indicate, in
accordance with the state and
municipal planning guidelines: I –
the existing or projected streets or
roads, which make up the city and
municipal road system, related to
the intended allotment and which
must be respected; II – the basic
layout of the main road system; III
– the approximate location of land
intended for urban and community
amenities and free areas for
public use; IV – the sanitary land
strips necessary for the drainage
of rainwater and non-buildable
strips; V – the zone or zones of
predominant use of the area,
indicating compatible uses. “Art. 22.
From the date of registration of the
allotment, the roads and squares,
public spaces and areas for public
buildings and other urban amenities
included in the project and its
technical plan shall be included in
the Municipality’s domain. “
5. Law 13.465 / 2017, arts. 9 and 36.
6. Anthony Ling, Guia de gestão
urbana. São Paulo: Bei, 2017.
7. Law 10.257 / 2001, arts. 5 to 8
and 46.
8. Victor Carvalho Pinto,
“Ocupação irregular do solo e
infraestrutura urbana: o caso da
energia elétrica”, in Temas de
direito urbanístico 5. São Paulo:
Imprensa Oficial/Ministério Público
do Estado de São Paulo, 2007.
walking unfeasible, such as lateral and frontal setbacks
around the buildings, minimum parking spaces, and
low‑density rates.6
Development, when necessary, should concentrate
on the lands contiguous to the urbanized area and be
conducted by the Local Authority. This is a possibility
opened by the Constitution and regulated by the Statute
of the City, through the combination of two instruments:
compulsory subdivision and real estate consortium.7
The first requires the owners of lands, necessary for the
execution of public plans, to individually or collectively
carry out their development. The latter offers these owners
the option of swapping their land for lots of equivalent
value, transferring to the Local Authority the responsibility
for carrying out the works.
If revitalization of the formal city is a difficult task, the
integration of the informal city is a much greater challenge.
Built without any urban or environmental care, clandestine
settlements and slums not only lack infrastructure and
public spaces, but also in many cases are located in risk
and environmentally sensitive areas.
Regardless of the causes of this phenomenon, it is
necessary, first of all, to contain it, through the control of
land use and of public utilities, which should not contribute
to consolidate illegal settlements in the absence of
urban planning.8
UNEXPLORED OPPORTUNITY:
SELF-FINANCED URBAN DEVELOPMENT
The proposed measures are feasible despite the context
of fiscal crisis, since good urban planning generates
value that is greater than its cost. The challenge for the
Local Authority, therefore, is to find ways to recover the
real estate value generated by the interventions, so as to
enable them independently of budgetary subsidies.
Several techniques of urban self-financing are employed
internationally and are included in Brazilian legislation.
In a country whose main cities are still in an accelerated
growth process, it is fundamental that land development
results in sufficient public lands and infrastructure to
serve the population. In addition to land intended for
public places and institutional uses, lots should also
be required for private use, which may be resold on the
market or incorporated into housing policy.
In the areas that require redevelopment, concessions
can be made to private companies, enabling them to
expropriate the real estate necessary to carry out the
urban plan, as well as offering the affected owners the
option to exchange them for new units yet to be built, or
for a share in the capital of the development. The private 396
company would carry out the works without public
resources and would be paid by the sale of the units built.9 9. Ibid., O reparcelamento do
An important element that induces this type of solo: um modelo consorciado
de renovação urbana. Brasília:
development is public investment in public transport,
Senado Federal, 2017.
such as metro stations, trams or bus lanes, which demand
higher urban densities in order to be financially viable
and add value to nearby properties. In these cases, it is
possible to establish an economic-financial equation
that incorporates tariffs and real estate revenues, giving
the company responsible for the public works the urban
concession of the surrounding land.

THE CHALLENGE OF CONSERVATION:

PRIVATELY OWNED PUBLIC SPACES

Another dimension that demands paradigmatic change is

the ownership model of common spaces. In the traditional
system, they belong to the municipality and are conserved
with budgetary resources, except for the sidewalks, whose
conservation is attributed to the owner of the lot. Whether
due to the scarcity of public resources or the lack of
standardization and supervision of sidewalks, the result
has been neglect and deterioration.
It is possible to conceive, however, an alternative model
in which residents collectively own public spaces and are
responsible for their conservation, but cannot restrict
free access and usufruct by the general population. The
sidewalks and squares would belong to a condominium
composed of all owners of plots in the block, but would be
subject to terms of use instituted by the Local Authority
by which any person, resident or not of the condominium,
would be allowed to circulate through these spaces and
make use of the existing amenities.10 10. Ibid., Condomínio de lotes: um
Similar urban techniques have already been widely used modelo alternativo de organização
do espaço urbano. Brasília:
in Brazil. On a small scale, we have the example of the
Senado Federal, 2017.
commercial galleries of the center of São Paulo and the
pilotis required in the superblocks of Brasilia.
On a larger scale, but with access restrictions, we find
shopping malls, horizontal condominiums and closed
subdivisions. Although the closure of these ventures is
to be condemned, it must be acknowledged that they are
able to offer and maintain open spaces of excellent quality
and without burdening the public budget. The changes
promoted in the Federal Urban Land Subdivision Law
in 2017 allow this bonus to be used, but require the local
authorities to make an incisive effort to curb the closure
of subdivisions and to establish terms of use on land
condominiums for the benefit of the general population
and the urban landscape.
Victor Carvalho Pinto (São Paulo-SP, 1966) is a
jurist specialized in infrastructure and urban
development. A PhD in economic and financial law
from the Universidade de São Paulo (USP), he is a
legislative advisor to the Federal Senate in the area
of urban development, and author of the book Direito
urbanístico: plano diretor e direito de propriedade
and articles in specialized magazines and websites.
A lawyer with experience in the modelling of
infrastructure and urban development projects, he
followed a career as a specialist in public policy and
government management in the Federal Government,
having served the Presidency of the Republic and the
Ministries of Planning and Justice.
Installation
outside the
Brazilian
Pavilion
NSDC 400
Atelier Marko
Brajovic

São Paulo suffers from a pathological urban

segregation that manifests itself through
extensive walls and fences, emphasizing the
already critical distinction between public
and private areas in the city. Paradoxically,
we found cases in which fences divide
public space from public space.
Such segregation elements are spread
all over the city of São Paulo, on different
scales and in diverse locations, separating
our parks, squares, monuments and finally
the pubic space from their citizens.
The project called NSDC (an acronym
alluding to Lina Bo Bardi’s stage setting
design for the play Na selva da cidade [In the
Jungle of the City]) proposes a re-design of
the city fences, converting them into public
furniture by considering the design process
as a tool for transformation, used to shape
the urban landscape and its uses.
The design concept by Atelier Marko
Brajovic is based on the continuous
process of folding— Deleuze’s fold—,
where a single element is folded onto itself
to form a new shape. The Atelier was in
charge of all process development and
technological solutions, while each product
was developed through a community
action. The citizens themselves are the
ones who best know their needs in specific
areas and the project responded to those
local demands.
Politically, when we fold fences, we
redefine their use; from a segregating and
separational urban element into a place
of meeting and aggregation. More than a
form, the project presents itself as a tool for
urban civic transformation.
The NSDC project was commissioned to
Atelier Marko Brajovic by São Paulo City
Hall and Museu da Cidade in 2015, and it
was installed in several sites of the city.
The edges
of objects
Selected projects
from the open call
406 Pedro Varella, Gru.a Arquitetos
Installation “From where you
don’t see when you are” over
Niemeyer’s MAC
408 Sem Muros Arquitetura Integrada
School Without Walls
410 Studio MK27
Children’s Square
412 Bernardes Arquitetura
The Brincante Institute
414 Brasil Arquitetura
Terreiro Òsùmàrè
416 H+F Arquitetos
Unifesp Student Housing
418 Rosenbaum + Aleph Zero
Children’s Village
420 Triptyque Architecture
Amata Wooden Building
422 SIAA + HASAA
Sesc Ribeirão Preto
403
424 Pedro Évora
Maré Observatory
426 SP Urbanismo
São Paulo Open Downtown
428 Una Arquitetos, LUME da FAUUSP,
Una Arquitetos, H+F Arquitetos
e Metrópole Arquitetos
From Planning to Design / 
Sesc Parque Dom Pedro II
430 Corsi Hirano + Candi Hirano
Arquitetos
Liberdade Boulevard
432 sauermartins +
Metropolitano Arquitetos
Santa Efigênia Crossing
434 Vigliecca & Associados
Parque Novo Santo Amaro
Housing Complex
436 Boldarini Arquitetos Associados
Ilha Comprida Waterfront
438 Libeskindllovet Arquitetos,
Jansana, de la Villa,
de Paauw, arquitectes
Urban Plan for Pirajussara
The Edges of Objects approaches the
theme Walls of Air from the scale of the
architectural and urban interventions. This
chapter attempts to measure the ability of
Brazil’s recent architectural production in
mediating conflicting relationships between
public and private domains.
As opposed to the cartographic
approach, which maps the multiple types of
barriers that build the Brazilian territory, this
section presents architectural objects that
encourage the transposition of walls present
in our cities. The selected proposals share
the drive to investigate new ways of dealing
with the limits, divisions and ruptures within
urban fabrics. At the same time, they raise to
surface the pressing need to use design as a
way to transform conditions of exclusion into
possibilities of bringing people together.
The projects were selected through
an open public call—an unprecedented
initiative for a Brazilian pavilion in the
Venice Biennale—with the clear goal of
widening and democratizing the dialogue
about contemporary Brazilian architecture.
Widely publicized throughout Brazil, the
call invited architects to submit projects
through the website www.murosdear.org.br,
which hosted a series of sections for public
participation in the Walls of Air research.
The open call considered any project
within the Brazilian territory eligible for
submission, regardless of the nationality
of the architect. Either built or unbuilt,
projects were accepted for selection as
long as they were grounded in reality,
meaning it had to have a real client or be
part of a competition—academic projects
or ideas proposals were not accepted. The
submission period opened on December
19th, 2017, and closed on January 19th, 2018,
with 289 proposals received from more than
60 cities in the country.
The submitted projects confirmed the
high concentration of architectural firms
in the southeast region of the country, the
rare presence of foreign firms building in
Brazil (especially if compared to regions
like North America, Asia or Europe) and,
lastly, the hardship of turning proposals
into real buildings, demonstrated by
the high number of unbuilt projects.
Nevertheless, they also represent the high
quality of the contemporary architectural
scene in this country.
Seventeen projects were chosen for their
inspiring and tangible ideas, sharing the
clear desire to transform their environment
into one that is more fluid and inclusive.
These projects, displayed in the first room
of the Brazilian Pavilion at the Giardini in
Venice, aims to show a plurality of solutions
that engage—through different lenses—with
the concept of Walls of Air.
The projects address issues such as:
how to bring people together to fight
for a common cause against forces of
pure financial land speculation; how to
rethink our technological limitations;
how a community can learn by building
collectively; how to merge industrialized
construction processes with vernacular
techniques; how to disrupt legal
frameworks through the proposition of
innovative architectural and urban forms;
how to make use of punctual strategies
to generate a network for fostering urban
renewal; how to use the void as a way to
stitch two sides of an informal community;
how to bridge large infrastructure corridors;
how to densify uses as a means of bringing
a community together; and how to rethink
preserved areas as carefully calibrated
public spaces, among other strategies.
Finally, the presentation of the 17 projects
was developed in a collaboration between
the curatorial team with each architecture
firm. The choice of a graphic representation
with few but impactful line drawings, each
specifically crafted to establish a dialogue
with all other projects, aims at highlighting
not only the nuances of design with its
variations in scale, but also to focus on the
actions that connect them with the broader
exhibition theme. The actions of fostering,
seeding, revealing, interpreting, stitching,
repurposing, framing, interconnecting,
articulating, comprehending, bridging,
densifying, converting, and learning,
ultimately reveal each projects’ ability
to break down walls and build a more
generous and collectively Freespace.
Installation
“From where
you don’t
see when
you are” over
Niemeyer’s
Museum of
Contemporary
Art
Repurposing an omitted
modern roof as a
contemporary public space
Architects
Pedro Varella +
Gru.a Arquitetos
LocaTIOn
Niterói – RJ
Niterói Contemporary Art
Museum (MAC) was designed
in 1991 by Oscar Niemeyer and
represents one of the most famous
icons of Brazilian architecture.
The boundaries between the
building and the Guanabara Bay
landscape are clearly defined by
the sharp edges of its reinforced
concrete structure. The visitors’
movement within the space are
controlled: the access from the
dry plaza, the sinuous ramp, and
finally the landscape, framed by
the edges of the structure. It was
designed to be seen only by those
who finish this sequence thought
by its architect. Although original
design conditions are difficult
to ignore, they are precisely a
starting point to formulate an
instigating challenge: how can
we free ourselves from MAC’s
prominent image? How can we
challenge the limits imposed by
the greater Brazilian master’s
design, offering new experiences
to people?
407
The project offers visitors the
opportunity to be on this iconic
building, although, at the same
time, they also lose sight of the its
outlines. To make this possible,
a tubular structured ladder was
installed, providing a continuity
to the ascending movement of
the ramp, leading people to the
museum’s roof slab. On the roof
slab’s perimeter, a tubular handrail
system was attached to the
existing structure by a tensioned
cable system, allowing the handrail
to stand still without any interfere
in the slab surface.
From the rooftop, the
distinction between figure
and background is lost and an
unexplored field of reflections
and sensations opens up. The
architecture, which usually
is recognized by its visual
appearance or its iconic status and
predetermined views, is subverted
as a support to imagination,
revealing formerly hidden
interpretive layers.
School
Without
Walls
Learning by building
collectively
Architects
Sem Muros Arquitetura
Integrada
Location
São Paulo – SP
The project School Without Walls
in Jardim Damasceno Cultural
Center aims to potentialize the
local movement of resistance in
the periphery in northern São
Paulo, Brazil. Through recognizing
the context and integrating
elements, from the macro to the
micro scale, the architectural
project reflects the space between
building and inhabiting. A choice
of where, what, how and why
to build: to use architecture’s
aesthetics to value and amplify
a local community’s fight to its
right to (other) city, as a political
force which legitimates a territory
together with its inhabitants.
The Jardim Damasceno
Cultural Centre wooden shed
has existed for 25 years next to
a stream. It is occupied by local
inhabitants, who maintain an
open and free space inside the
dense neighborhood, providing
social assistance, political
articulation and conditions to
the integral development of the
community. Even when the space
suffers continuous expropriation
attempts, it houses a daily diverse
use: activities for approximate
60 local children and cultural
manifestations for youngsters
409
and adults. The space though
has difficulty in maintaining its
precarious infrastructure.
While designing, it was
important to connect different
knowledges and integrate popular
participation; while building, it
was important to make a physical
construction as a mean for a
social one. The result was a
bamboo meta-structure (produced
inside the metropolitan region
of São Paulo) to be built during a
pedagogical immersion program,
involving a multidisciplinary
group from inside and out the
community. The construction is to
be made from local materials, to
allow the people to appropriate the
new space, to develop a sense of
belonging, to give it meaning.
After the building is concluded,
the aim is to define together the
next steps: how to sustain and give
permanence to what was built?
How the constructed space can
still foster an area to potentialize
the community towards building a
learning territory? To find answers,
it is necessary to recognize the
importance of a politics of care
to sustain the project’s effects
and impact on the life of the
ones involved.
Children’s
Square
Articulating a void into a
whimsical arena
Architects
Marcio Kogan
+ studio mk27
Location
São Paulo – SP
A public square conceived as a
playful place to children’s free
exploration—that was the idea
behind Children’s Square’s
design, soon to be built in a 900m2
urban site in the middle of a
residential neighborhood.
A circular and visually
permeable wooden wall, with a
23m diameter and a height of 2.5m,
defines the square’s organization.
All paths converge into a center,
creating an image similar to a
primitive distribution of meeting
places: a storytelling circle around
a bonfire or indigenous houses
around a large central open space.
Leading to the outside, the
wood wall has some portals
which allow children to search for
new worlds. These passageways
also embrace some wild flowers
gardens and water fountains.
Some children may play hide-and-
seek and suddenly invade a small
secret maze. When the amusement
411
turns into a game of tag, they once
again return to the square’s center,
running and jumping on the open,
free, and uncovered grass lawn.
In between the walls, inside
the empty space, other openings,
portals offer even more activities.
Children’s creativity is catalyzed
by this recreational environment,
which doesn’t impose any specific
use, but encourages exploration.
On one side, set into the wooden
concave gable, is a small puppet
theater; in front of it, another niche
with slides and swing sets.
The Children’s Square is not
a boring place for children to just
waste their time. Instead, it is a
living garden filled with open-air
discoveries, which offer children
unforgettable experiences. Their
imagination leads into spaces,
each with different possibilities,
where children get wet, slide,
scream, climb, and explore this
place of little joy.
The Brincante
Institute
Seeding local resistance
Architects
Bernardes Arquitetura
Location
São Paulo – SP
The Brincante Institute, created in
1992 by artists Antonio Nóbrega
and Rosane Almeida from a
homonymous spectacle they
staged, is dedicated to Brazilian
culture experiences in its most
diverse modalities. Like the regional
meaning of the term “brincante”—a
type of popular multi-artist of the
Brazilian Northeast who sings,
dances, and plays instruments—the
Institute proposes an expansion
to traditional Brazilian artistic
practice. Thus, it offers courses
about popular art, which aim to
upskill performers and educators
- capable of thinking about
contemporary society in a new way.
The owner of the old warehouse
where the Institute used to
operate for over a decade in Vila
Madalena (a neighborhood in
São Paulo) sold the place to a
construction company in 2014
without consulting Nóbrega and
Almeida. Strongly attached to
its neighborhood, the Brincante
Institute saw its legacy threatened
with the possibility of an eviction.
After a very hard legal process,
the institute failed to reverse the
owner’s decision, this became an
opportunity to reaffirm its local
role—to resist.
A few years earlier, Nóbrega
and Almeida had bought two small
413
houses just next to the warehouse,
hoping to expand Brincante. In a
cynical move, the same builder who
bought the warehouse also made
offers to acquire the small houses.
It was the last straw. Strengthening
its commitment to Vila Madalena,
Brincante decided to stay.They
launched a fundraising campaign—
#FicaBrincante (#BrincanteStays)—
focused in raising funds for the
Institute, to be built on these
two sites.
The new Brincante building
has expanded its participation
in the urban life of Vila
Madalena by binding it spatially,
programmatically, and definitively to
public life through meeting spaces
and its theater-school, which now
also accommodates shows to
the public, as well as rehearsals
and courses. Attached to a small
square and an open mezzanine that
connects the street to its interior,
the theater-school makes Brincante
a milestone for resistance in the
midst of an environment of real
estate speculation. In the words of
Nóbrega himself: “We will continue
seeding Brazil, after all, it is from
this place [pointing to the street]
that we see and experience the
world, despite the damn real estate
speculators who think they own
it all!”
Terreiro
Òsùmàrè
Interpreting history through
the layering of walls
Architects
Brasil Arquitetura
Location
Salvador – BA
Throughout human history,
walls have been indicating
divisions between properties and
territories—barriers for protection
and defense. Nevertheless,
there are also walls that, in
separating, connect. These walls
frame the landscape, validate
passageways, regule contact,
define neighborhoods and ensure
crossings. These walls are also
connections, adding and unifying
common interests; physical and
symbolic landmarks of human
accomplishments, full of social
impacts; recording the historical
and technological events. These
walls structure aqueducts,
retaining walls, and bridges. Even
those created to protect, such as
the one surrounding the boroughs,
acquired some new meanings.
These walls became a living
statement of man’s existence,
focused on building a more
comfortable life.
Walls arise from one of the
most archaic actions of humanity,
associating human work with the
stones of nature.
Occupying one of the city’s
hillsides, the green area of the
Òsùmàrè Terreiro* (one of the
oldest in the city) represents
what has been, for centuries,
the rationale for occupying the
rugged territory of Salvador:
small constructions on the
ridges of the hills next to access
roads, lined by lush vegetation
sloping down to the bottom of
river valleys and streams. This
intelligent model of occupation,
adapted to the topography and
geographical situation, and
combining construction with
415
preservation of nature, has been
disappearing in the last decades,
destroyed by unrestrained and
massive urbanization. In the urban
area of Salvador, it has been
preserved thanks to the traditions
of the Candomblé rituals—and
the Òsùmàrè Terreiro is one of
the last remnants of this type
of occupation.
The intervention aims at the
physical and symbolic preservation
of the site (listed as heritage by
the Institute of National Artistic
and Historic Heritage - IPHAN) and
its expansion, seeking comfort,
forcefulness, and delicacy at the
same time: the levels and retaining
walls will mark the future life
of the terreiro, making it more
comfortable, accessible, and
dignified in its facilities. The new
complex can be divided into three
large blocks, which correspond to
the three topographical levels: the
Upper Part, the Central Historical
Part, and the Lower Part.
The “Dark Forest” (Mata
Escura), as it was known until the
beginning of the twentieth century,
will be recovered and densified,
receiving paths on gentle ramps for
walks and contemplation of nature
and the sacred. Leading downhill
or uphill through the Dark Woods,
the long staircase will represent the
snake / a path to cross the sacred
lands of Ilê Òsùmàrè.**
* Terreiro—a place for Candomblé
rituals, dedicated to a particular
orixá (or saint).
** Òsùmàrè—an orixá that
symbolizes the infinite and is
represented by the snake and
the rainbow.
Unifesp
Student
Housing
Framing space for enabling
a collective student life
Architects
H+F Arquitetos
Location
Osasco – SP
Located on the edge of a new
campus of the Federal University
of São Paulo (unifesp) in Osasco—
part of the São Paulo metropolitan
region—the Student Housing
Project offers the opportunity to
facilitate, through its architecture,
a set of interactions between
the university’s self-referencing
culture, usually marked by
isolation, and the daily life of the
neighborhood where it is located.
The building was organized
in tiers conforming to the slope
of the plot, and configures two
spaces with markedly distinct
characteristics: the courtyard
and the square. While the former
is dedicated exclusively to
students, the square opens to the
neighborhood and offers a direct
route for those who come from the
metropolitan train station, making
it one of the main access “doors”
to the campus.
In addition to its public use
facilities, the square offers
common activities for residents
of both the campus and the
neighborhood. Thus, the student
417
housing’s collective spaces,
including community library,
cinema/theater, event hall, and
art studio, potentially serve as
resources for the sociability of
students and the surrounding
community. Accompanying the
gradient of the street, these
programs unfold in successive
levels, each linked to a specific
space of the square.
By extending the public sphere
into the boundaries of the campus,
the square acts as a vestibule, a
space of unforeseen interactions.
Together, the square and building
form a habitable wall, a border
that is both resistant and porous,*
capable of offering the city an
interactive and lively interface with
the university environment.
*Sennet, Richard. Boundaries
and Borders. In: Burdett, Ricky
e SUDJIC, Deyan (Ed.) Living in
the endless city : the Urban Age
project by the London school of
economics and Deutsche Bank’s
Alfred Herrhausen society. New
York: Phaidon Press Limited, 2011.
Children’s
Village
Fostering togetherness by
merging technological and
vernacular processes
Architects
Rosenbaum + Aleph Zero
Location
Formoso do Araguaia – to
The continuum, the vast, and
a thin imaginary line in the
background embraces the journey
and the practical know-how
and techniques of Brazilians
living in the central region of
the country. In a place not only
marked by rural and indigenous
memories, techniques, aesthetics,
and rhythms, but also where
rich cultures fade in the face
of a blind desire to modernize,
architecture has to confront
the existing contradictions
and create alternatives to the
current ordinary solutions. With
these concerns, the project to
house 540 children who study
at Canuanã boarding school
aims a cultural dialogue, which
encourages local construction
techniques, indigenous beauty
and traditions, as well as creates
a sense of belonging, essential for
the students’ development.
To better understand the
inherent complexity of the place,
the “A gente transforma” [We
transform] methodology embraced
stages of research, immersion,
and open collaboration with the
locals - community, teachers,
and students. The process
also included workshops and
419
open presentations seeking a
common facing up the project’s
specificities, which resulted
from the dialogue between
contemporary techniques and
a rich vernacular knowledge of
the place.
The continuous exchanges
led to a solution: the first step
in a broader organization for its
territory. The two required villages
were set closer to the school farm’s
boundaries, leaving a central axis
to be filled solely with educational
programs. Each village has forty-
five units, arranged around three
large courtyards where local
flora provides a fresher air. The
housing units, for six students
each, were built in soil-cement
bricks, made from the site’s soil.
These bricks improve thermal
performance and avoid a complex
and expensive logistics process.
On the second floor, different areas
for interaction, such as TV rooms,
playing and reading spaces were
displaced. Above, a thin, white
metallic roof supported by a glued
laminated wood structure provides
a great shadow which, besides
covering the building, composes a
generous transition between inside
and outside.
Amata
Wooden
Building
Breaking technological
paradigms
Architects
Triptyque Architecture
Location
São Paulo – SP
Amata Wooden Building was
designed through an important
collaborative process between
architects and their clients—
Triptyque Architecture and Amata,
a sustainable forestry company,
which gave its name to the project.
Located in Vila Madalena, a
neighborhood in São Paulo, Amata
was conceived in an unusual and
irregular site, which morphology
enables a diverse connection
between city, citizens, low and
high topographies. The 4,700
sq meter mixed-use building is
organized into 13 floors, embracing
a shared program—co-working and
co‑living—besides restaurants.
Differently from the usual, Amata
is a vertical building conceived
to be built on wood. It became a
choice, once wood brings new
421
possibilities to a sustainable and
urban architecture, as an alternative
to “decarbonize” the construction
in Brazil (wood’s productive cycle
already begins adding an enormous
carbon credit to atmosphere,
since 1sq meter soaks up 1 tonne of
carbon dioxide during its growth).
In addition, the technology applied
for CLT and Glulam manufacturing,
allows a very efficient structure,
even for a high building.
As other materials developed
between 19th and 20th centuries,
this project reinforces the use of
wood as an innovation to the 21st
century, so that Amata Building
may be just the seed for a new
experience on architecture—which
overlaps building techniques,
urban laws and emotional-
physical-empirical benefits.
Sesc
Ribeirão
Preto
Densifying uses as a
means of strengthening
the community
Architects
SIAA + HASAA
Location
Ribeirão Preto – SP
Diversity marks the experience
of strolling around Sesc Ribeirão
Preto, a cultural and sports center
located in the northwest of the
state of São Paulo. The building
offers a range of paths and routes,
multiple forms and spaces, and
a variety of provocative openings
and enclosures. There is no typical
floor plan, nor replication of stairs
or corridors. There is, however, the
ever-present intention to create
internal terraces connecting spaces
and providing open environments
with unique vantage points .
Yet, more than anything, the
Sesc Riberão Preto is a project
within a project. This is the seminal
issue guiding the architects’
intervention for adaptive reuse of
a pavilion designed by architect
Oswaldo Corrêa Gonçalves in
1966. Selected through a public
competition in 2013, the new
proposal aims to reorganize,
update, and expand Sesc’s existing
activities. The project turns
the linear two-story modernist
building into a primary transition
point between Sesc and the city.
The new activities are
concentrated in the new vertical
building: a volume constituted
by the stacking of spaces for
multiple functions. Each of these
activities generates a unique
423
geometry, ideal for its function.
The result is a complex cross
section that intersperses closed
spaces with voids, openings, and
paths that connect public and
administrative programs.
The ground floor is organized
around a series of interconnected
swimming pools, where new
internal pools follow the existing
outdoor pool. The rooftop of the
original pavilion allows the creation
of a public plaza that connects the
building’s various programs: an
act of suspending and dispersing
activities, typical of a foyer.
The scenic box theater is
located in the core of the tower,
and the upper floors accommodate
a multi-use dark room and a sports
court at the top. New exterior
fenestration is modulated by a
3×3 m structural grid, alternating
louvers, perforated or opaque
red and black panels, blunt
concrete areas, and the literal
transparency of glass.
By juxtaposing new and
existing elements—horizontal and
linear, vertical and compact—the
building’s strategy allows them to
interact and reinforce one another.
As a result, the building creates
a new interface between users,
the Sesc program, and the city
around them.
Maré
Observatory
Comprehending the
totality of the territory
through a vertical
displacement of the body
Architects
Pedro Évora
Location
Rio de Janeiro – RJ
Like the towers of an ancient city
or palm trees taller than a forest,
observatory structures emerge
between houses and abandoned
industrial sheds. Where the
neighborhoods are opaque
within the dense and labyrinthine
periphery, vertical elements signal
new horizons and guide other
possibilities of navigation. This
image, projected as a tale, belongs
to the reality of the Complexo da
Maré [Maré Complex], a set of
favelas in the city of Rio de Janeiro,
where the Maré Observatory
project takes place.
The Maré Complex is a set of
sixteen communities that house
about 130,000 people in an average
of three-story constructions, in an
area equivalent to Copacabana.
Established from the north shore
of the Guanabara Bay, near the
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro,
also known as Fundão University
(because it is located on Fundão
Island), its boundaries are defined
by Avenida Brasil, Linha Vermelha,
and Linha Amarela, the main
access roads to the city. Seen from
the highways, it appears as a thick
territory whose real dimensions
425
are impossible to measure.
Internally, it is characterized by
the juxtaposition of different
constructions and circulation
paths, which unite and distinguish
its spaces, communities, and
armed commands. From any given
point, it is impossible to perceive
its wholeness. The Favela da Maré
is commonly known for its opacity
and violence.
The Maré Observatory project
creates other viewpoints for the
region with the installation of
observatories attached to public
facilities, creating a network of
vertical visual references for
the sixteen communities that
make up the Maré Complex.
The project emerged from the
demand to expand the Bela Maré
Contemporary Art Center, an
industrial warehouse converted
into a cultural center in the Nova
Holanda community in 2012. It
proposes to build a thirty-meter
high metallic tower that will
house a public belvedere and
institutional activities, in addition
to establishing itself as a new
element for residents and for the
Maré landscape.
São Paulo
Open Downtown
Converting residual
spaces into pockets for
social interaction
Architects
SP Urbanismo
Location
São Paulo – SP
The city offers its residents
many opportunities—for housing
and work, access to leisure and
culture, shopping and services,
meeting spaces, and training and
education. These opportunities
result in the residents’ need not
only to move around the urban
territory but also to remain in its
many spaces.
The Open Downtown Program
implements a set of uses and
activities for underutilized spaces,
replacing existing fences and
obstructions with open areas for
intense activity in a continuous
invitation for permanence. Thus,
it intends to emphasize the
importance of these places for
the fruition of the city, as well as to
reinforce its public character.
This program was implemented
through a participatory process,
developed through dialogue
between the various agents
involved in the production and use
of space. In the Open Dialogue
workshops and seminars, actions
were defined in three directions:
prioritize and protect non-
motorized means of locomotion
(pedestrians and cyclists); create
conditions for the permanence of
people in the public space; and
promote new uses and activities
for these spaces. An effective and
427
strategic issue helped define a
first attempt at applying these
actions. The São Francisco and
São Bento plazas, where the
program was implemented,
together with the former
Largo do Carmo (near today’s
Cathedral Plaza) constitute the
historical triangle where São
Paulo’s development began. The
city’s downtown area presents
the largest offer of commerce,
services, transportation, historical
and cultural heritage.
The program proposes the use
of fixed and movable furniture:
wooden decks, benches, ping
pong tables, information center,
tables and chairs, beach chairs,
patio umbrellas, chess set, and
equipment to support cultural
events. In addition, the project
promotes greater pedestrian
safety through new horizontal
signage, bollards, and expanded
crossing lanes.
These elements help create
environments with new functions,
intensify public use, and
encourage spaces for meeting
and leisure, providing users with
different experiences: shaded
areas, artistic presentations, film
sessions, open classes, yoga
classes, games, food, and energy
and internet access.
From Planning to
Design / Sesc Pq. Dom
Pedro II
Managing multiple scales to generate
urban value
Architects
Una Arquitetos (urban project by
Laboratório de Urbanismo da Metrópole /
LUME FAUUSP, Una Arquitetos, H+F
Arquitetos and Metrópole Arquitetos)
Location
São Paulo – SP
The old floodplain area of
Tamanduateí River was the fluvial
port of São Paulo Village. At the
beginning of the XX century, the
region was transformed into
a large public park of French
inspiration, becoming a transition
between the historical center and
the former industrial zone of the
city. In the late 1960s, the park
was totally transformed by violent
urban infrastructure interventions,
which turned it into a fragmented
and fragile region. Thus, the
Urban Plan presented several
coordinated interventions, as the
expressways demotion; viaducts
demolitions; new streets and
bridges, an intermodal terminal
along the existing subway station,
a retention lagoon and two priority
development sectors, the northern
and western arcs.
The northern sector of the plan,
headed by Una Architects, includes
the proposal of a new unit of Sesc
(Social Service of Commerce) as an
anchor of the urban requalification
proposed for the area. The
surroundings of the park have an
immense potential for housing
densification, especially for the
low-income households, with areas
reserved by law for this use.
The project under development
for this new Sesc unit seeks to
maximize the qualities inherent
to the public program, which
characterizes the institution.
The Sesc units are large
multifunctional buildings, where
cultural, sports and leisure
activities coexists, always
associated with an educational
purpose. The visitation in some
Sesc units reaches five thousand
people per day.
Occupying an entire triangular
shaped block, Sesc D. Pedro II
is circumscribed by three roads.
With accesses to each of them,
the ground floor results in a partly
sheltered square, animated by the
flows converging to its interior.
In order to house the sectors
with free access to the public and
to maximize the offered activities,
a two-layered horizontal volume
spreads out over the block. The
workshops, cafe and the foyer
of the experimental theatre are
located on the ground floor. These
uses are located around an open,
tree lined patio, which allows a
relation of visual contact among
activities in distinct floors.
Escalators connect the street
level to the large terrace on the
second floor. The walk through
the terrace, around the treetops,
reveals views above this city
stretch, including great historical
429
buildings, such as the “Palácio
das Indústrias” and the “Mercado
Municipal”. Located between
the ground floor and the terrace,
the first floor accommodates
the restaurant, library and
administrative areas.
The proposed theatre has
a flexible setting, with several
possibilities of staging scenes and
public assembly, also allowing
connections among the outdoor
areas. The gymnasium, in addition to
the sports court, has areas reserved
for multiple sports activities and
a large gym. The rooftop of the
building is occupied by the aquatic
complex, which includes an indoor
pool and two outdoor leisure
pools. The level of this floor allows
surprising city views.
Within its compact
emplacement, the Sesc building
dialogues and values its
surroundings, densely occupied
with retail and services, offering
visitors the enjoyment of new
views towards an important
set of landmarks, especially
to the historic hill, São Paulo’s
Downtown. Its volumetry
graduates its heights in relation
to the immediate environment,
offering a delicate insertion as
shape, and transforming the
urban quality of this part of city.
430 The relationship between the lack
of use, of activity, and the sense
Liberdade of freedom and expectation is
fundamental to understand all

Boulevard the evocative power that empty

Stitching urban fabrics
by disrupting the current
legal framework
terrains have in the way the city is
perceived in recent years. Empty,
however, as absence, but also as
promise, as an encounter, as space
of the possible, as expectation.
— Ignasi de Solà-Morales

Architects Solid walls built on the landscape

Corsi Hirano + Candi Hirano or invisible walls excavated in the
urban geography are both walls
Arquitetos
that a large-scale metropolis
Location such as São Paulo is capable of
São Paulo – SP
erecting: abyssal borders in its
time and space. The proposal
for Liberdade Boulevard results
from the disappearance of public
spaces and the quality of the urban
landscape in our cities.
A public initiative after the
creation of a specific law allowing
the occupation of existing voids,
the project proposes an important
reconstitution of the urban fabric.
It is guided by the recognition of
walls and fractures in the city—in
this case a negative space. An
empty wall in critical condition is
recognized as a potential stage
to challenge its infrastructure,
and as an opportunity to
create meeting points. Even
from existing barriers, cities
can construct new unifying
elements able to generate social
encounters, facilitated by public
space and its expansion.
Approaching a recurring
condition in the city, we propose
the appropriation of airspace
over the freeway that connects
the city from East to West. The
creation of urban squares that
welcome urban diversity is
complemented with elements
–programmed or not—defined by
the multiplicity of activities that
are supported by both local and
metropolitan scales.
It is necessary to clarify that
the dilution of the existing social,
political, and economic urban walls
must also be based on physical
strategies that generate situations
and places where full conviviality is
possible in the reality built around
us. Here, architecture constitutes
Freespace in its essence:
democratic space. Requested by
neighborhood associations and
organizations engaged in uniting
public and private initiatives,
the project continues to to
embrace both.
432 Considering the rupture of the
urban fabric generated by the
Santa Efigênia existing overpass and road
infrastructure, the Travessias

Crossing (Crossings) project is a mechanism

intended to attenuate the urban
landscape by offering paths closer
Bridging heavy to the human scale. It overcomes
physical barriers by introducing a
infrastructural corridors
pedestrian overpass, creating an
urban crossing.
Architects Based on a study of viaducts
Sauermartins + and areas adjacent to the East-
Metropolitano Arquitetos West highway in the city of Belo
Horizonte, the competition held
Location
by the City sought strategies for
Belo Horizonte – MG interventions that activated and
improved public space and the
urban landscape, minimizing the
idleness of these residual areas
and preventing illegal occupation.
The proposal developed for
the Fulgêncio Overpass takes
into consideration the critical
degradation and abandonment
of its surroundings, caused
by the juxtaposition of the
Andradas Avenue, the Arrudas
creek, and the city’s train
tracks. The overpass provides
continuity to the Francisco
Salles Avenue, connecting
two neighborhoods equipped
with important healthcare
facilities and ample public
transportation connections.
As an intervention strategy,
the pedestrian overpass connects
both sides of the avenue,
unifying the urban fabric and
providing accessible routes for
pedestrians and cyclists. It is
located underneath the existing
viaduct, where metal elements
are fixed to the original concrete
structure, thus highlighting the
different uses and allowing for a
simple construction. At its ends,
where the metal structure meets
the street level, the resulting slope
accommodates bleachers that
can be used as a venue for cultural
events. Instead of an urban void,
the area underneath the viaduct
becomes inviting and encourages
a new type of urban life. To activate
it, new programs propose a variety
of uses, including spaces for social
gatherings, shopping, and leisure.
The project considers
architecture as an instrument
capable of fostering the
discussion of existing urban flows
in Brazilian cities, and aims to
present opportunities for urban
regeneration through multi-
purpose spaces that minimize
physical and social barriers.
434 Parque Novo Santo Amaro
Housing Complex project not
Parque Novo Santo Amaro only provides dwelling for those
families who used to live in a

Housing Complex precarious and risk situation

or in an incessant worry of
flooding-collapsing possibilities.
Separating as a means of qualifying the It also improved the community’s
urbanity—especially considering
moments of exchange
its particular location, within an
environmental protected area.
Architects By valuing the site’s existing
Vigliecca & Associados resources, the project fits to the
Location urban landscape without ignoring
São Paulo – Sp
its previous reality. Originally,
this area used to be a green area,
which, due to irregular occupation,
was extinct. Considering this
past, the project recovers the
site’s landscape through a linear
park, which also establishes an
infrastructural central axis to the
Complex. The park’s program—
playgrounds, skate lanes, soccer
field, club and school—stimulates
dwellers in using the space and
introduces them a new sense
of belonging.
Before the projects
implantation, in order to go to
school, children used to have
two options: pass through a
polluted stream or taking a long
time to walk around the block.
Considering this context, the
project created a new circulation
flow through new connecting
bridges. The five and seven
floor buildings that hold 200
habitational units are divided
into many typologies, such as:
two-floor apartments with two
or three bedrooms and units
adapted disabled people’s use.
Surrounding these buildings, the
semi-public paths stimulate a
pedestrian flow.
Now, in addition, a new street
covers the existing polluted
stream. In order to preserve
the neighborhood identity and
to improve their water supply,
some artificial water ponds
permeate the site and the many
existing natural water springs
were restored.
436
Ilha Comprida Waterfront
Revealing a preserved seafront as an
accessible public space
Architects
Boldarini Arquitetos Associados
Location
Ilha Comprida – SP
Ilha Comprida occupies a narrow
stretch of sand approximately
72 kilometers long and 3
kilometers wide and is unique
for having one hundred percent
of its territory inside an area of
environmental protection (APA).
The requalification project of
its shoreline seeks to organize
and promote seaside activities,
with objectives that go beyond
this maritime front and summer
tourism. Since the island plays
an important environmental role
as a breakwater, protecting the
mainland from the wind and seas,
it is fundamental to preserve its
dunes that face the winds and
protect the area behind it from the
effects of these coastal agents.
The requalification project for
Ilha Comprida shoreline is thus
conceived as a pilot project to
transform this ocean frontage.
It employs strategies that
contemplate the natural conditions
as well as the needs of residents
and visitors, providing structures
that positively intervene in the
natural flows while simultaneously
guiding use and visitation of this
public space par excellence.
Land parceling in the city’s
downtown area is characterized by
an orthogonal grid with 50 meter
wide blocks, configuring a number
of streets perpendicular to the
beach that lead a large number of
users to Beira-Mar Avenue, where
services for mostly summer tourists
are located in a disorganized
way, creating a number of
conflicts between pedestrians,
vehicles, cyclists, sellers, kiosks,
and temporary structures, in
addition to the already mentioned
environmental problems.
The project begins with
the ordering of these seaside
usages. The bus stops for public
transportation are taken as a
mediating element between the
beach (the natural environment)
and the urban occupation (the
built environment). It intends to
carry out an urban transformation
based on the public issue of mass
transportation, which will allow for
a truly democratic approach to the
designed space.
438 Informal urbanization is the
dominant development mode
Urban Plan for Pirajussara in the world’s fastest growing
cities. As architects and urban
planners, we are concerned
Interconnecting fragments along the river to about how to improve life in
free space in a dense informal settlement informal neighborhoods through
the landscape, since having an
open space is a rare and precious
Architects
resource in these areas.
LLA Arquitetos + JDVDP Arquitetos The Pirajussara 5 project
Location considers the Diniz River as a
São Paulo – SP structural axis of the proposal,
through the connection of public
spaces, existing dwellings, and
new resettlement housing. As
the river is partially hidden by the
existing houses, the goal is to
rediscover it and bring it closer
to the people, requalifying its’
banks with the implementation of
a linear park. Thus, in the resulting
space are funded civic axes of
social relations, coexistence and
cultural exchange, benefiting
the neighborhood with a close
public space, as the intervention
creates a new facade to the
river, considered as background
these days.
Through these axes, the
design concept establishes
“emptiness” as a priority for
areas that lack open spaces.
Therefore, new public areas
are created in order to
stimulate centrality poles,
which reinforce the identity of
each neighborhood.
Meticulous urban
procedures, such as eliminating
physical barriers, landscaping,
and implementing public
services including sewage and
water systems, play an essential
role in achieving environmental
quality and connecting the urban
fabric. Additionally, the design
applies the concept of “greenway”
or “promenade”, redefining
the sections of the streets and
implementing traffic-calming
strategies so that the public
space, until now dominated by
the perspective of the car, can
be revitalized. Thus, the slum
can reestablish a dialogue with
its surroundings and become
part of  the formal city, where
it belongs.
installation “from where
you don’t see when you are”
over niemeyer’s museum of
contemporary art
–– project: Pedro Varella
–– development: GRU.A
(grupo de arquitetos)
–– collaboration: Caio Calafate,
André Cavendish, Julia Carreiro
–– evaluation board for the
reynaldo roels jr award: Lisette
Lagnado, Pablo Leon de La
Barra, Michelle Sommer
–– consultants: Rodrigo Affonso
(structural engineering); Bruno
Contarini (structural consultant);
Jirau (equipment and structures);
New Alfa (structure assembly)
–– original project: Oscar Niemeyer
–– location: Museu de Arte
Contemporânea de Niterói
(MAC), Niterói–RJ, Brazil.
–– area: 1,885m² (rooftop slab)
–– year: 2017
–– status: built
school without walls
–– ESM Program plan and
management: Andressa
Capriglione, Marcella Arruda,
Ranyely Araújo
–– architectural project: Tomaz
Lotufo, Cassio Abuno
–– consultants: Ana Beatriz Giovani,
Flavia Burcatovsky, Victor
Presser (Project registration
and communication material);
Marjory Mafra, Nádia Recioli
(permasampa support);
Payacán Artes em Bambú, Jair
Vieira, Pedro Burgos (design
consultancy and construction
of bamboo structure); Noêmia
Mendonça, Nivalda Aragues, Ana
Sueli, Fernando Ferreira (ECJD
community organization); Pepe
Guimarães (photos and movies)
–– location: Brasilândia,
São Paulo–SP, Brazil
–– area: 160m²
–– year: 2017 (ongoing)
–– status: unbuilt
children’s square
–– architecture: Studio MK27
–– architect: Marcio Kogan,
Eduardo Gurian, Marcio Tanaka
–– design team: Carlos Costa,
Laura Guedes, Mariana Simas
–– studio team: Beatriz Meyer,
Carolina Castroviejo, Diana
Radomysler, Eduardo Chalabi,
Eduardo Glycerio, Elisa Friedmann,
Gabriel Kogan, Lair Reis, Luciana
Antunes, Marcio Tanaka, Maria
Cristina Motta, Mariana Ruzante,
Mariana Simas, Oswaldo Pessano,
Renata Furlanetto, Samanta
Cafardo, Suzana Glogowski
–– Location: São Paulo–SP, Brazil
–– area: 900m²
–– year: 2012 (ongoing)
–– status: unbuilt
brincante institute
–– authors: Bernardes Arquitetura
–– design team: Thiago Bernardes,
Dante Furlan, Rafael Oliveira,
Maria Vittoria Oliveira, Marcelo
Dondo, Ana Paula Endo, Mary
Helle Moda, Flavio Faggion
–– exhibition illustrations: Gabriel
Duarte, Vitor Cunha, Gabriel
Gomes, Juliana Biancardine,
André Vuaden
–– institutional support:
Instituto Alana
–– consultants: Alfama Construtora
(general contractor); LHG
Engenharia (structural design);
Appogeo (foundations); Smart
Service (electric and hydraulic);
Tottal Tecnologia Térmica
(mechanical); Acústica e Sônica
(acoustics); AtendTudo (stage
design); Cenário Paisagismo
(landscape architecture); Foco
Iluminação (lighting design);
Tecnosystem / Jansen and SC
Esquadrias (window systems);
Hormann (special acoustic
doors); Isofibras (acoustic panels)
–– location: São Paulo–SP, Brazil
–– area: 342m²
–– year: 2015-2016
–– status: built
terreiro òsùmàrè
–– authors: Francisco Fanucci,
Marcelo Ferraz
–– co-author: Roberto Brotero
–– design team: Anne Dieterich,
Cícero Ferraz Cruz, Gabriel
Mendonça, Julio Tarragó, Laura
Ferraz, Luciana Dornellas, Pedro
Renault, William Campos,
Guega Rocha, Heloisa Oliveira,
Juliana Ricci
–– physical model: Antonia Romer
–– location: Salvador–BA, Brazil
–– land area: 3,935m²
–– building area: 3,883m²
–– year: 2017 (ongoing)
–– status: unbuilt
unifesp student housing
–– H+F arquitetos: Eduardo
Ferroni, Pablo Hereñu; Camila
Reis, Camila Paim, Amanda
Rodrigues, Levy de Lima Vitorino,
Bianca Fontana, Nathália Grippa,
Leonardo Navarro, Lucas Cunha
–– consultants: Steng Pro (structural
design); Fit engenheiros
(building services); Feuertec (fire
protection); K2 (Sustainability
Consultant); Exato engenharia
(quantity surveying); Ricardo
Viana (landscape); Proassp
(waterproofing)
–– location: Osasco–São Paulo,
Brazil
–– area: 10,155.33m²
–– year: 2014 (ongoing)
–– status: unbuilt
children’s village
–– Fundação Bradesco / Canuanã
students’ homes
–– authors: Rosenbaum +
Aleph Zero
–– consultants: Ita Construtora
(design, manufacture and
construction of wooden
structures); Raul Pereira
Associated Architects
(landscaping); Lux Lighting
Projects (lighting design);
Meirelles Carvalho (foundations
project); Ambiental Consultoria
(Environmental); Lutie (MEP);
Trima (concrete slabs); Inova
TS (general contractor);
Rosenbaum and Fetiche
(FF&E); Fabiana Zanin (project
registration and communication
material); Leonardo Finotti,
Diego Cagnato, Gallery
Experience (photos and movies)
–– location: Formoso do Araguaia–
TO, Brazil
–– area: 23,344.17m²
–– year: 2014-2016
–– status: built
amata wooden building
–– authors: Carolina Bueno, Sávio
Jobim, João Vieira Costa, Victor
Hertel, Alice Sallustro
–– consultants: Equilibrium/
Carpinteria (design,
manufacture and construction
of wooden structure,
 engineering); PS2 Projetos
e Consultoria / Amata
(project registration and
communication material)
–– location: São Paulo–SP, Brazil
–– area: 4,700m²
–– year: 2017 (ongoing)
–– status: unbuilt
sesc ribeirão preto
–– authors: César Shundi Iwamizu,
Eduardo Pereira Gurian, Helena
Aparecida Ayoub Silva
–– competition team: Helena Ayoub
Silva & Arquitetos Associados
(Alexandre Gaiser Fernandes,
André Desani Ariza, Elisa Haddad,
Gustavo Madalosso Kerr, Kim de
Paula, Luisa Amoroso Guardado,
Thomas de Almeida Ho); Siaa
Arquitetos Associados (Alexandre
Gervásio, Andrei Barbosa da Silva,
Bruno Valdetaro Salvador, Daniel
Constante, Rafael Carvalho)
–– project coordination: Cecília
Prudencio Torrez, César Shundi
Iwamizu, Eduardo Pereira Gurian,
Helena Aparecida Ayoub Silva
–– design team: Helena Ayoub Silva
& Arquitetos Associados (Gustavo
Madalosso Kerr, Thomas de
Almeida Ho, André Desani Ariza,
Fernanda Bianchi Neves Taques
Bittencourt, Flávia Falcetta); Siaa
Arquitetos Associados (Andrei
Barbosa da Silva, Bruno Valdetaro
Salvador, Fernanda Britto,
Leonardo Nakaoka Nakandakari,
Luca Caiaffa, Rafael Carvalho,
Maria Fernanda Xavier)
–– consultants: Addor (masonry);
Ambiental (thermal comfort);
CAP - Consultoria Ambiental
e Paisagística (landscaping
architecture); Crysalis (audio,
video and multimedia); CTE (LEED
and PROCEL consulting); Empro
(vertical transport); Fernando
Machado (technical design of
kitchens); Franco Associados
(lighting); Jugend (electronic
security system, fire detection
and alarm, building management);
Mag Projesolos (concrete floor);
MBM Engenharia (hydraulic,
electrical, climate control and
fire fighting installations); MK
Engenharia (consulting in
vehicles flow); Pedro Martins
Engenharia (consulting in
framing); Polis Engenharia (logic,
telephony and stabilized energy);
Proassp (waterproofing);
Siaa Arquitetos Associados
(framing); Simone Carvalho
(consulting in odontology); Solé
e Associados (acoustic confort
and scenographic technology);
Statura Engenharia (concrete
and metallic structure); ZF&
Engenheiros Associados
(foundations and earthmoving)
–– Sesc coordination: Amilcar
João Gay Filho (engineering and
infrastructure manager); Grisiele
Cezarete; Rita Palavani; Giorgio
D´Onofrio; Sergio José Battistelli,
Vicente Paulo Aráujo Girodo
(technical and planning advisory
–– text: Francesco Perrotta-Bosch
–– location: Ribeirão Preto–SP, Brazil
–– area: 15,000m²
–– year: 2013 (ongoing)
–– status: unbuilt
maré observatory
–– author: Pedro Évora
–– client: Observatório de Favelas
–– producer: Luiza Melo
(Automática)
–– collaborators: Rua Arquitetos
(Pedro Rivera, Fabiano Pires,
Olivia Vigneron)
–– consultants: Samuel Betts
(lighting project); Geraldo
Filizola (structural engineering)
–– location: Nova Holanda, Maré,
Rio de Janeiro–RJ, Brazil
–– area: 1,050m²
–– year: 2012-2017
–– status: unbuilt
são paulo open downtown
–– SP Urbanismo
–– president: José Armênio de
Brito Cruz
–– development: Fernando Mello
Franco, Gustavo Partezani
Rodrigues, Luis Eduardo Surian
Brettas, Eduardo Pompeo
Martins, Jihana Yussif Abou
Nassif, Patricia Lutz Vidigal,
Cristiana Gonçalves Pereira
Rodrigues, André de Paula
Andreis, Luana Moreira Pereira,
André Gonçalves dos Ramos,
João Porfírio da Silva
–– development support: Patricia
Saran, Thomas Len Yuba, José
Eduardo de Sousa Costa,
Cristina Tokie Sanomie Laiza,
Potiguara Mendes Ponciano
–– administrative, financial
and legal support: Fabio
Nascimento, Valdemir Lodron,
Ricardo Simonetti, Adriana
Ferreira dos Santos, Ricardo
Grecco Teixeira, Nivaldete
Sanches C de Jesus, Maria de
Fátima Claro Cabral, Tercio
Ruiz Ruggeri, Isabel Cristina de
Souza, Rita Alves de Lima
–– interns: Bibiana Araujo Tini,
Douglas Vieira Farias, Hannah
Brito Montenegro Campos,
Horrana Porfírio Soares, Juliana
Souza Matayoshi, Natalie Henia
Lagnado, Paula de Arruda
Castro Giavarotto, Pedro Cezar
de Andrade Cipis, Ana Paula
Siqueira, André Moreno Bonassa,
Davi Hastenreiter Sampaio, Diego
Fontgalland Dias, Flávio Johnsen
Barossi, Gabriela Mem Barbosa,
Giulia Lorenzi, Heloísa de Souza
Oliveira, Jéssica Schroeder
Selingardi, Júlia Kaffka, Juliana
Custodio Miranda, Mariana
Wandarti Clemente, Nicolas
Costa Panseri, Pamela Lopes da
Silva, Paola Trombetti Ornaghi,
Rodolpho Rodrigues Baptista do
Prado, Rodrigo Marinoni Mandelli,
Suzi Meire Correa, Vitória Raíza
Marques Novo
–– collaboration: PR-SE - Prefeitura
Regional da Sé; SMT / CET -
Companhia de Engenharia de
Tráfego; SMADS – Secretaria de
Assistência e Desenvolvimento
Social; SMDHC – Secretaria de
Direitos Humanos e Cidadania;
SMSO / AMLURB – Autoridade de
Limpeza Urbana; SMSO / ILUME -
Departamento de Iluminação
Pública; SSU / GCM – Guarda
Civil Metropolitana; Polícia
Militar do Estado de São
Paulo; Gehl Architects (active
engagement consulting)
–– implantation: SP Urbanismo
–– operation and research:
LR Eventos
–– location: Largo São Francisco/
Largo São Bento, São Paulo–SP,
Brazil
–– year: Largo São Francisco –
2014/Largo São Bento - 2016
–– area: Largo São Francisco
(2,705m²)/Largo São Bento
(3,900m²)
–– year: 2018 (ongoing)
–– status: built
from planning to design /  Contenções (foundations
sesc pq. dom pedro ii
urban plan:
–– Secretaria Municipal de
Desenvolvimento Urbano:
Miguel Luiz Bucalem –
secretário
–– Laboratório de Urbanismo da
Metrópole - LUME da FAUUSP:
Regina Meyer, Marta Grostein
–– administrative coordination
(fupam): José Borelli
–– Una arquitetos: Cristiane Muniz,
Fábio Valentim, Fernanda
Barbara, Fernando Viégas /
collaborators: Ana Paula de
Castro, Carolina Klocker,
Eduardo Martorelli, Fabiana W.
Cyon, Filipe dos Santos Barrocas,
Igor Cortinove, Miguel Muralha,
Roberto Galvão Júnior / interns:
Bruno Gondo, Henrique te
Winkel, Luccas Matos Ramos
–– H+F arquitetos + Metrópole
arquitetos Anna Helena Villela,
Eduardo Ferroni, Pablo Hereñu /
collaborators: Bruno Nicoliello,
Cecília Torres, Liz Arakaki, Renan
Kadomoto, Thiago Moretti,
Tammy Almeida / interns:
Carolina Yamate, Carolina
Domshcke, Felipe Chodin,
Karina Kohutek, Luisa Fecchio,
Natália Tanaka, Nike Grote
Sesc Pq. Dom Pedro II:
–– design architects: Cristiane
Muniz, Fábio Valentim, Fernanda
Barbara, Fernando Viégas
–– design team: Barbara Francelin,
Camila Martins, Clóvis Cunha,
Joaquin Gak, Julia Jabur, Julia
Moreira, Manuela Raiteli, Marie
Lartigue, Pedro Ribeiro, Rodrigo
Carvalho, Sarah Nunes
–– consultants: SOMA arquitetos /
UNA ARQUITETOS (landscape
design); Passeri Arquitetos
Associados (acoustic consultant);
Addor&Associados (masonry);
Acústica e Sônica (acoustic
confort and scenographic
technology); MK Engenharia
(vehicles flow consultant); Pedro
Martins Engenharia (consulting in
framing); Estúdio Carlos Fontes -
Luz + Design (lighting); Machado
de Campos (technical design of
kitchens); Júlio Kassoy e Mário
Franco (concrete and metallic
structure); ZF & Engenheiros
Associados Fundações e
and earthmoving); Proiso
(waterproofing); ETP Climatização
(mechanical); Crysalis / aVM
(audio, video and multimedia);
Jugend (electronic security
system, fire detection and alarm,
building management); PHE
(hydraulic, electrical consultant);
EACE (vertical transport); CTE
(LEED consultant); ASA Estúdio
(PROCEL consultant)
–– location: São Paulo–SP, Brazil
–– area: 24,000m²
–– year: 2018 (ongoing)
–– status: unbuilt
liberdade boulevard
–– authors: Daniel Corsi,
Dani Hirano, Candi Hirano
–– collaborators: Marina Nunes,
Elis Cristina Morales, Caroline
Jun, Nathália Melo, Jessyca Lin,
Marina Martorelli
–– location: São Paulo–SP, Brazil
–– intervention area: 17,406m²
–– construction area: 38,580m²
–– year: 2011-2013
–– status: unbuilt
santa efigênia crossing
–– architecture: sauermartins +
Metropolitano Arquitetos
–– design team: Cássio Sauer,
Elisa T. Martins (sauermartins)
+ Camila da Rocha Thiesen
(Metropolitano Arquitetos) –
collaborator: Ignacio de la Veja
–– designers: Bárbara
Remussi, Luísa Pasqualotto,
Augusto Pereira
–– development: Prefeitura de
Belo Horizonte; PUC-Minas,
NGO Arquitetos sem Fronteiras,
Flávio Agostini (M3 Arquitetura),
Carlos Teixeira (Vazio/SA)
–– location: Belo Horizonte–MG,
Brazil
–– area: 6,500m².
–– year: 2014
–– status: unbuilt
parque novo santo amaro
housing complex
–– project: Vigliecca & Associados
–– authors: Héctor Vigliecca,
Luciene Quel, Neli Shimizu,
Ronald Fiedler
–– design team: Thaísa Folgosi
Fróes, Caroline Bertoldi, Kelly
Bozzato, Aline Ollertz Silva,
Pedro Ichimaru Bedendo,
Mayara Rocha Christ
–– administration: Paulo
Eduardo de Arruda Serra,
Luci Tomoko Maie
–– client: Prefeitura do Município
de São Paulo – Secretaria
de Habitação
–– superintendency:
Elisabete França
–– management: Consórcio
JNS Hagaplan
–– consultants: Procion Engenharia
(MEP engineering); Berfac
(foundations and earthmoving);
Camilo Engenharia (concrete
structure); Projeto Alpha / 
Flavio D’Alambert, Prometal
(metallic structure); Consórcio
Mananciais – Construbase
Engeform – José Roberto
do Nascimento e Adriano R.
Marques (general contractor)
–– location: São Paulo–SP, Brazil
–– intervention area: 5,4ha
–– number of housing units: 198
–– built area: 18,710m2
–– year: 2009-2012
–– status: built
ilha comprida waterfront
–– authors: Marcos Boldarini,
Lucas Nobre and Larissa Reolon
–– design team: Flavia Cavalcanti,
Juliana Junko, Marta Abril,
Renata Serio and Rodrigo Garcia
–– interns: Patricia Tsunoushi and
Pricila Anderson
–– general contractor: Prefeitura
de Ilha Comprida
–– consultants: CAP – Consultoria
Ambiental Paisagística
(landscaping project); Linear
Engenharia e Tecnologia (storm
drainage); Wagner Garcia
(structures and foundations);
DMA Engenharia (eletrical);
HPROJ Engenharia (hydraulic);
Tecnowatt Iluminação
(lighting); BLK Construção
e Empreendimentos
(constructor); Pezzi
Consultoria, Mariângela
Oliveira de Barros, Pablo Garcia
Carrasco (consultants)
–– location: Ilha Comprida–SP,
Brazil
–– area of intervention: 283,000m²
–– extent of intervention: 3.2km
–– year: 2011-2015
–– status: built
urban plan for pirajussara
–– co-creation: Libeskindllovet
Arquitetos + Jansana de la Villa,
de Paauw Arquitectes
–– authors: Claudio Libeskind,
Sandra Llovet, Robert de Paauw,
Imma Jansana, Conchita de la
Villa, Toni Abelló, Carlota Socias
–– design team: Adriano Soares,
Marina Rosa, Natália Leardini,
Ariane D’Andrea, Vinicius
Libardoni, Bruna Bimeghini,
Luana Pereira, Beatriz Vanzolini
Moretti, Gabriel Faria de
Paula, Guilherme Filocomo,
Márcia Endrighi, Camille
Bianchi, Gabriela Barbosa
Amorim, Francesco Fontana,
Stefano Muzzi
–– consultants: EGI Enginyeria,
Bac Engineering Consultancy
Group, Maccaferri do Brasil,
Consgeo Engenharia
–– location: Campo Limpo,
São Paulo–SP, Brazil
–– area: 176,874m²
–– year: 2012-2018
–– status: unbuilt
Bibliography 444
and image
credits
bibliography
1. Crossbreedings
intro text
––Câmara dos Deputados, 2018.
O fim do programa “Ciência Sem
Fronteiras” e a perspectiva dos
estudantes. [Accessed on: April,
2018]. Available at: http://www2.
camara.leg.br/camaranoticias/
radio/materias/REPORTAGEM-
ESPECIAL/553104-O-FIM-DO-
PROGRAMA-%E2%80%9CCIENCIA-
SEM-FRONTEIRAS%E2%80%9D-E-
A-PERSPECTIVA-DOS-ESTUDANTES-
BLOCO-3.html
––Ciência Sem Fronteiras, 2018.
O que é?. [Accessed on: April,
2018]. Available at: http://www.
cienciasemfronteiras.gov.br/web/
csf/o-programa
––Conselho de Arquitetura e
Urbanismo do Brasil (CAU/
BR), 2012. Dados Gerais CAU/
BR. [Accessed on: April, 2018].
Available at: http://www.caubr.
gov.br/censo/resource/site/pdf/
nacional/Censo-CAU-Brasil.pdf
––Conselho de Arquitetura e
Urbanismo do Brasil (CAU/BR),
2017. Anuário de Arquitetura e
Urbanismo. [Accessed on: April,
2018]. Ano 1, vol. 1. Available at:
http://www.caubr.gov.br/wp-
content/uploads/2017/10/anuario-
final-0301-web150.pdf
––Institute of International
Education, 2015. Top 25 Places of
Origin of International Students.
[Accessed on: April, 2018].
Available at: http://www.iie.org/
opendoors
––LORES, Raul Juste, 2017. São
Paulo nas alturas: a revolução
modernista da arquitetura e do
mercado imobiliário nos anos 1950
e 1960. São Paulo: Três Estrelas.
––SADAIKE, Patrícia, 2004. 1964:
os impactos do golpe militar na
carreira acadêmica e artística
do arquiteto Vilanova Artigas.
Projeto História. Tomo 1, pp.257-
266. [Accessed on: April, 2018].
Available at: https://revistas.
pucsp.br/index.php/revph/article/
viewFile/9957/7396
exhibition map
––Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento
de Pessoal de Nível Superior
(CAPES), 2016. Graduation
students abroad. [Shared:
December, 2017]
––Conselho de Arquitetura e
Urbanismo do Brasil (CAU/BR),
2017. Working architects in Brazil.
[Shared: January, 2018]
––SEDAC/CIESIN, 2015. Gridded
World Population. [Accessed on:
January, 2018]. Available at: http://
sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/
collection/gpw-v4
––Openflight Database, 2017.
Flight Routes. [Accessed on:
January, 2018]. Available at:
https://openflights.org/data.
html  Conselho de Arquitetura e
Urbanismo do Brasil (CAU/BR),
2017. Arquitetos ativos no Brasil.
[Shared: January, 2018]
––SEDAC/CIESIN, 2015. Gridded
World Population. [Accessed on:
January, 2018]. Available at: http://
sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/
collection/gpw-v4
––Openflight Database, 2017. Flight
Routes. [Accessed on: January,
2018]. Available at: https://
openflights.org/data.html    Administrative boundaries.
intro map
––Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento
de Pessoal de Nível Superior
(GEOCAPES) 1998-2016. Statistics
data [Accessed on: February,
2018]. Available at: https://
geocapes.capes.gov.br/geocapes/
––Global Administrative Areas
(GADM), 2015. Administrative
areas. [Accessed on: February,
2018]. Available at: http://www.
gadm.org/
2. Human Flows
intro text
––CANABRAVA, Alice, 2007. História
Econômica. São Paulo: Editora
Unesp.
––FAUSTO, Boris, 1999. A Concise
History of Brazil. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
––PÄÄBO, Svante, 2016. Neanderthal
man: in lost search of lost
genomes. New York: Basic Books.
––SANTOS, Sales Augusto
dos Santos; HALLEWELL,
Laurence, 2002. Latin
American Perspectives. Vol.
29, n. 1. Thousand Oaks: Sage
Publications.
exhibition map
––Comitê Nacional para os
Refugiados (CONARE), 2000-
2016. Refuge requests. [Accessed
on: December, 2017]. Available
at: http://dados.mj.gov.br/
dataset/7c589e2f-dfb8-40b3-
bc96-e389155d8c67/resource/
a74a4b65-c38a-4343-9fb5-
e1b4e919dd6d/download/conare.
csv
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE), 2000.
Population Census. [Accessed
on: November, 2017]. Available at:
https://ww2.ibge.gov.br/home/
estatistica/populacao/censo2000/
default.shtm
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE), 2010.
Population Census. [Accessed
on: November, 2017]. Available at:
https://censo2010.ibge.gov.br/
––Polícia Federal, 2000-2016.
National Records for Foreign
Registration (SINCRE). [Shared:
January, 2018]
intro map
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE), 2016.
[Accessed on: February, 2018].
Available at: ftp://geoftp.ibge.
gov.br
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE), 2016. Roads.
[Accessed on: February, 2018].
Available at: ftp://geoftp.ibge.
gov.br
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE), 2016. Ports.
[Accessed on: February, 2018].
Available at: ftp://geoftp.ibge.
gov.br
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e
Estatística (IBGE), 2016. Airports.
[Accessed on: February, 2018].
Available at: ftp://geoftp.ibge.
gov.br
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE), 2012. Census:
2010: Educação e Migração.
[Accessed on: February, 2018].
Available at: https://ww2.ibge.gov.
br/home/estatistica/populacao/
censo2010/educacao_e_
deslocamento/default.shtm
3. Material Flows
intro text
––CASTRO, José Roberto, 2016. As
commodities e seu impacto na
economia do Brasil. [Accessed
on: April, 2018]. Available at:
https://www.nexojornal.com.
 br/explicado/2016/03/31/As-
commodities-e-seu-impacto-na-
economia-do-Brasil
––Confederação Nacional do
Transporte (CNT), 2018. Estudo
revela dificuldades do transporte
de cargas em centros urbanos.
[Accessed on: April, 2018].
Available at: http://www.cnt.org.
br/imprensa/noticia/estudo-cnt-
revela-dificuldades-transporte-
cargas-centros-urbanos
––Metrô, 2012. Gestão Ambiental.
[Accessed on: April, 2018].
Available at: http://www.metro.
sp.gov.br/metro/licenciamento-
ambiental/pdf/linha_18_bronze/
eia/volume-iii/Arquivo-20.pdf.
Acesso em: abril, 2018.
––PRATA, Bruno de Athayde; ARRUDA,
João Bosco Furtado. Avaliação do
transporte de cargas na cidade
de Fortaleza sob o enfoque da
logística urbana: diagnóstico
e proposição de intervenções.
Universidade Federal do Ceará,
2007. Available at: https://www.
researchgate.net/profile/Bruno_
Prata/publication/228583448_
AVALIACAO_DO_TRANSPORTE_
DE_CARGAS_NA_CIDADE_DE_
FORTALEZA_SOB_O_ENFOQUE_DA_
LOGISTICA_URBANA_
DIAGNOSTICO_E_PROPOSICAO_DE/
links/0046353ad9f2a9ec49000
000.pdf
––RIBEIRO, Luiz Cláudio Moisés;
SIQUEIRA, Maria da Pena
Smarzaro, 2012. Portos e cidades:
expansão e modernização dos
portos de Vitória (séc. XX-XXI).
[Accessed on: April, 2018].
Availabe from: http://www.
periodicos.ufes.br/dimensoes/
article/viewFile/4323/3383
––SANTANA, Raimunda Nonata
do Nascimento Santana, 2005.
Cidades Portuárias: notas sobre
os espaços estratégicos da
mundialização e a questão do
desenvolvimento local. [Accessed
on: April, 2018]. Available at: http://
www.joinpp.ufma.br/jornadas/
joinppIII/html/Trabalhos2/
Raimunda_nonata173.pdf
––The Observatory of Economic
Complexity, 2016. Brazil.
[Accessed on: April, 2018].
Available at: https://atlas.media.
mit.edu/pt/profile/country/bra/
exhibition map
––Climate Change Initiative via
Global Forest Watch, 2017. Land
Cover. [Shared: February, 2018]
––(EPL) and (IPEA), 2015.
OD projections for cargo
transportations. [Accessed on:
February, 2018]. Available at:
http://www.epl.gov.br/matrizes-
do-transporte-inter-regional-de-
carga-no-brasil
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE), 2008.
Explanations on Law 7585 from
July 1986 and Petroleum Oil
Distributions. [Accessed on:
February, 2018].
––Departamento Nacional de
Produção Mineral (DNPM), 2015.
Brazilian Mining Processes Areas.
[Accessed on: February, 2018].
Available at: http://www.anm.
gov.br/assuntos/ao-minerador/
sigmine
––SEDAC/CIESIN, 2015. Gridded
World Population. [Accessed on:
January, 2018]. Available at: http://
sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/
collection/gpw-v4
––National Agency of Petroleum,
Natural Gas and Biofuels (ANP),
1997-2017. Petroleum Historical
Series of Exploration Auctions.
[Accessed on: January, 2018].
Available at: http://www.brasil-
rounds.gov.br/portugues/
coordenadas_dos_setores.asp
––Empresa de Pesquisa Energética
(EPE), 2015. Blocks and Fields of
Petroleum Exploration. [Accessed
on: December, 2017]. Available at:
http://www.epe.gov.br/en/areas-
of-expertise/oil-gas-biofuels/oil-
and-natural-gas-exploration-and-
production-(e-p)
––Ministério do Meio Ambiente
(MMA), 2004. Timber Extraction
Focuses and Influence. [Accessed
on: December, 2017]. Available at:
http://mapas.mma.gov.br/i3geo/
datadownload.htm
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE), 2016. Limites
Administrativos: Municípios do
Brasil. [Accessed on: January,
2018]. Available at: ftp://geoftp.
ibge.gov.br
––Secretaria de Comércio Exterior
(SECEX) via DataViva, 2015.
Import/Export Origins in Brazil.
[Accessed on: January, 2018].
Available at: http://www.dataviva.
info
intro map
––Global Administrative Areas
(GADM), 2015. Administrative areas.
[Accessed on: February, 2018].
Available at: http://www.gadm.
org/
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE), 2016.
Administrative boudaries.
[Accessed on: February, 2018].
Available at: ftp://geoftp.ibge.
gov.br
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE), 2016. Ports.
[Accessed on: February, 2018].
Available at: ftp://geoftp.ibge.
gov.br
––Trase, 2017. Brazil soy. [Accessed
on: February, 2018]. Available at:
http://trase.earth
4. Fluid Landscape
intro text
––Confederação Nacional do
Transporte, 2001-2015. Anuário
CNT do Transporte: Evolução da
malha rodoviária Pavimentada
por Região e Unidade da
Federação. [Accessed on:
April, 2018]. Available at: http://
anuariodotransporte.cnt.org.
br/2017/Rodoviario/1-3-1-1-3-/
Malha-rodovi%C3%A1ria-
n%C3%A3o-pavimentada
––Câmara Brasileira da Indústria
da Construção - CBIC, 2000-
2015. Participação (%) no
valor adicionado bruto (a
preços básicos) - segundo as
atividades. [Accessed on: April,
2018]. Available at: http://www.
cbicdados.com.br/media/anexos/
tabela_02.D.13_3.xlsx
––Câmara Brasileira da Indústria
da Construção - CBIC, 2000-2015.
Pessoal ocupado e participação
no total Brasil - segundo grupos
de atividades. [Accessed on:
April, 2018]. Available at: http://
www.cbicdados.com.br/media/
anexos/tabela_02.D.13_3.xlsx
––CORREIA, Roberto Lobato, 1999. O
espaço urbano. São Paulo: Ática.
––COSTA, Karina Machado, 2015. O
estoque de carbono na vegetação
e no solo de fragmentos
florestais em paisagens tropicais.
Masters dissertation, Instituto
de Biociências, Universidade
de São Paulo [Accessed on:
 April, 2018]. Available at: http://
www.teses.usp.br/teses/
disponiveis/41/41134/tde-
14012016-150942/publico/Karine_
Costa_CORRIG.pdf
––ERMINIA, Maricato,
2003. Metrópole, legislação e
desigualdade. [Accessed on: April,
2018]. Available at: http://www.
scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_
arttext&pid=S0103-
40142003000200013&lng=en&n
rm=iso
––FERREIRA, João Sette Whitaker,
2005. A cidade para poucos: breve
história da propriedade urbana no
Brasil. [Accessed on: April, 2018].
Available at: http://www.academia.
edu/download/33263826/
Cidadeparapoucos_Propriedade_
Urbana_Joaosetter.pdf
––Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica
Aplicada (IPEA), 2010.
Sustentabilidade Ambiental no
Brasil: biodiversidade, economia
e bem-estar humano. [Accessed
on: April, 2018]. Available at: http://
www.ipea.gov.br/agencia/images/
stories/PDFs/livros/livros/Livro_
sustentabilidadeambiental
––LONGO, Marcos; KELLER, Michael;
SANTOS, Maiza N. dos; LEITOLD,
Veronika; PINAGÉ, Ekena R.;
BACCINI, Alessandro; SAATCHI,
Sassan; NOGUEIRA, Euler M.;
BATISTELLA, Mateus; MORTON,
Douglas C., 2016. Aboveground
biomass variability across intact
and degraded forests in the
Brazilian Amazon. [Accessed on:
April, 2018]. Available at: https://
agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/
doi/abs/10.1002/2016GB005465
––MARENGO, José A.; NOBRE,
Carlos Afonso; SELUCHI,
Marcelo Enrique; CUARTAS,
Adriana; ALVES, Lincoln Muniz;
MENDIONDO, Eduardo Mario;
OBREGÓN, Guillermo; SAMPAIO,
Gilvan, 2015. A seca e a crise
hídrica de 2014-2015 em São
Paulo. [Accessed on: April,
2018]. Available at: https://www.
journals.usp.br/revusp/article/
download/110101/108684
––Ministério do Meio Ambiente,
2013. Florestas do Brasil em
resumo (2007-2012). [Accessed
on: April, 2018]. Available at:
http://www.florestal.gov.br/snif/
images/Publicacoes/florestas_
do_brasil_em_resumo_2013_
atualizado.pdf
––Ministério do Meio Ambiente,
2018. Cobertura vegetal dos
biomas brasileiros. [Accessed
on: April, 2018]. Available
at: http://www.mma.gov.br/
estruturas/sbf_chm_rbbio/_
arquivos/mapas_cobertura_
vegetal.pdf
––MOURA, Rosa; PÊGO, Bolívar, 2016.
Aglomerações urbanas no Brasil
e na América do Sul: trajetórias
e novas configurações. Rio de
Janeiro: Instituto de Pesquisa
Econômica Aplicada - IPEA.
––ROLNIK, Raquel;  KLINK, Jeroen,
2011. Crescimento econômico e
desenvolvimento urbano: por que
nossas cidades continuam tão
precárias?. [Accessed on: April,
2018]. Available at: http://www.
scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_
arttext&pid=S0101-
33002011000100006&lng=e
`&nrm=iso. ISSN 0101-3300.  pdf
http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0101-
33002011000100006
exhibition map
––NASA Earth Observations, 2018.
Water Vapor. [Accessed on:
February, 2018]. Available at:
https://neo.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/
view.php?datasetId=MYDAL2_M_
SKY_WV
––Jarvis A., H.I. Reuter, A.  Nelson,
E. Guevara via International
Centre for Tropical Agriculture,
2008. Hole-filled  seamless
SRTM Digital elevation data
V4. [Accessed on: December,
2017].  Available at: http://srtm.csi.
cgiar.org.
––International Rivers via Global
Forest Watch, 2014. Major
Dams. [Accessed on: February,
2018]. Available at: http://
data.globalforestwatch.org/
datasets/537361e2df59486e898cd
4e024af57ea_0
––Global Forest Watch Climate,
2000-2016. Carbon Emissions.
[Shared: February, 2018]
––National Centers for
Environmental Information via
Windy, 2018. Wind Direction and
Speed. [Accessed on: February,
2018]. Available at: https://www.
windy.com/?gfs,850h
intro map
––European Space Agency (ESA),
2010. GlobCover land cover map.
[Accessed on: February, 2018].
Available at: http://www.esa.int/
––Global Administrative Areas
(GADM), 2015. Administrative
areas. [Accessed on: February,
2018]. Available at: http://www.
gadm.org/
––Climate GLOBAL FOREST WATCH
WATER (GFW), 2006. Arid regions.
[Accessed on: February, 2018].
Available at: http://water.
globalforestwatch.org/
5. The Map is not the Territory
intro text
––Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica
Aplicada (IPEA), 2017. Fronteiras do
Brasil: uma síntese dos trabalhos
da oficina de Brasília. [Accessed
on: April, 2018]. Available at:
http://www.ipea.gov.br/portal/
images/stories/PDFs/relatorio_
institucional/171019_relatorio_
institucional_fronteiras_do_brasil.
––Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica
Aplicada (IPEA), 2017. Fronteiras
do Brasil: diagnóstico e agenda
de pesquisa para política pública.
[Accessed on: April, 2018].
Available at: http://www.ipea.gov.
br/portal/images/stories/PDFs/
livros/livros/170628_fronteiras_do_
brasil_volume2.pdf
––IPEA DATA, 2017. Banco de Dados.
[Accessed on: April, 2018].
Available at: http://www.ipeadata.
gov.br/Default.aspx
––MEYER, Regina Maria Prosperi,
2006. O urbanismo: entre a
cidade e o território. [Accessed
on: April, 2018]. Available at:
http://cienciaecultura.bvs.
br/scielo.php?script=sci_
arttext&pid=S0009-
67252006000100016&lng=en&nr
m=iso
––Ministério da Integração Nacional,
2005. Proposta de Reestruturação
do Programa de Desenvolvimento
da Faixa de Fronteira. Bases
para uma Política Integrada de
Desenvolvimento Regional para a
Faixa de Fronteira. [Accessed on:
April, 2018].
––Available at: http://www.retis.igeo.
ufrj.br/wp-content/uploads/2005-
livro-PDFF.pdf
––MORAES, Antonio Carlos Robert,
1984. Território. Revista
 Orientação, n. 5. ISSN  2236-2878    exportacao/recinto-alfandegados/
––TORRECILHA, Maria Lucia, 2013.
A gestão compartilhada como
espaço de integração na fronteira
Ponta Porã (Brasil) e Pedro Juan
Caballero (Paraguai). Doctoral
thesis, Faculdade de Filosofia,
Letras e Ciências Humanas,
Universidade de São Paulo.
[Accessed on: April, 2018].
Available at: http://www.teses.
usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8136/
tde-09122013-112517/publico/2013_
MariaLuciaTorrecilha_VCorr.pdf
––TORRECILHA, Maria Lucia, 2015.
Na linha da fronteira. [Accessed
on: April, 2018]. Available at:
http://www.labcom.fau.usp.br/
wp-content/uploads/2015/05/1_
cincci/041.pdf
exhibition map
––The Nature Conservancy, 2003.
Terrestrial Ecoregions. [Accessed
on: December, 2017]. Available
at: http://maps.tnc.org/gis_data.
html#TerrEcos
––World Database on Protected
Areas (WDPA), 2016. Terrestrial
and Marine Protected Areas.
[Accessed on: January, 2018].
Available at: https://www.
protectedplanet.net
––U.S. Geological Survey, Earth
Explorer, 2017. Vegetation
Monitoring by eMODIS NDVI V6.
[Accessed on: February, 2018].
Available at: https://earthexplorer.
usgs.gov/
––Fundação Nacional do Índio
(FUNAI), 2017. Terras indígenas no
Brasil.  [Accessed on: November,
2017]. Available at: http://www.
funai.gov.br/index.php/shape
––Development Back of Latin
America (CAF), 2008. Freshwater
Ecoregions. [Accessed on:
December, 2017]. Available at:
https://www.geosur.info/geosur/
index.php/es/datos-disponibles/
datos
––Global Administrative Areas, 2015.
Administrative Areas. [Accessed
on: December, 2017]. Available at:
http://www.gadm.org/version2
––Receita Federal do Brasil,
Ministério da Economia (RFB),
2005. Customs Controls.
[Accessed on: January, 2018].
Available at: http://idg.receita.
fazenda.gov.br/orientacao/
aduaneira/importacao-e-
area-de-controle-integrado-aci
––Conselho de Arquitetura e
Urbanismo do Brasil (CAU/BR),
2017. Working architects in Brazil.
[Shared: January, 2018]
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e
Estatística (IBGE), 2010. Population
Census. [Accessed on: November,
2017]. Available at: http://web.fflch.
usp.br/centrodametropole/716
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e
Estatística (IBGE), 2016. Rivers and
Water Bodies in Brazil. [Accessed
on: December, 2017]. Available
at: http://www.geoservicos.
ibge.gov.br:80/geoserver/
wms?service=WFS&version=1.0.0&
request=GetFeature&typeName=
CCAR:BCIM_Trecho_Massa_
Dagua_A&outputFormat=SHAPE-
ZIP
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE). Ports.
[Accessed on: November, 2017].
Available at: ftp://geoftp.ibge.
gov.br
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE), 2016.
Administrative Boundaries:
Brazilian Cities. [Accessed on:
November, 2017]. Available at:
ftp://geoftp.ibge.gov.br
––Natural Earth Data. Bathymetry.
[Accessed on: December,
2017]. Available at: http://
www.naturalearthdata.com/
downloads/10m-physical-vectors/
––Natural Earth Data. Airports.
[Accessed on: November,
2017]. Available at: http://
www.naturalearthdata.com/
downloads/10m-cultural-vectors/
airports/
––Google, 2017. South America/
time and routes between cities.
Google Maps [Accessed on:
December,2017]. Available
at: https://www.google.
com/maps/@-13.8326385,-
53.8151095,4.75z
intro map
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE), 2016.
Administrative Boundaries:
Brazilian Cities. [Accessed on:
February, 2018]. Available at: ftp://
geoftp.ibge.gov.br
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE), 2016.
Hydrography. [Accessed on:
February, 2018]. Available at: ftp://
geoftp.ibge.gov.br
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE), 2016. Roads.
[Accessed on: February, 2018].
Available at: ftp://geoftp.ibge.
gov.br
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE), 2016. Ports.
[Accessed on: February, 2018].
Available at: ftp://geoftp.ibge.
gov.br
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística, 2010. Cities
socioeconomic data. [Accessed
on: February, 2018]. Available at:
ftp://geoftp.ibge.gov.br
––GLOBAL FOREST WATCH CLIMATE
(GFW), 2016. Potential carbon
gain. [Accessed on: February,
2018]. Available at: http://climate.
globalforestwatch.org/
––Rede Amazônica de Informação
Socioambiental Georreferenciada
(RAISG), 2016. Natural protected
areas. [Accessed on: February,
2018]. Available at: https://raisg.
socioambiental.org
––RAISG Rede Amazônica de
Informação Socioambiental
Georreferenciada, 2016.
Indigenous territory. [Accessed
on: February, 2018]. Available at:
https://raisg.socioambiental.org
––NASA Socioeconomic Data and
Applications Center (SEDAC), 2015.
Population density. [Accessed
on: February, 2018]. Available at:
http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/
data/collection/grump-v1
6. Succession of Edges
intro text
––Brasil, 1967. Lei complementar
nº1, de 9 de novembro de 1967.
[Accessed on: April, 2018].
Available at: http://www.planalto.
gov.br/ccivil_03/leis/lcp/
lcp01.htm?TSPD_101_R0=19fc9803
311d0dd636565c94b38f1c20b030
000000000000000450d3ebdffff
00000000000000000000000
000005ac7ca40007087cd30
––Brasil, 1988. Constituição da
República Federativa do Brasil de
1988. [Accessed on: April, 2018].
Available at: http://www.planalto.
gov.br/ccivil_03/constituicao/
constituicao.htm
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE), 2007. Brasil:
 500 anos de povoamento / IBGE,
Centro de Documentação e
Disseminação de Informações.
[Accessed on: April, 2018].
Available at: https://biblioteca.
ibge.gov.br/visualizacao/livros/
liv6687.pdf
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE). Arranjos
populacionais e concentrações
urbanas no Brasil. Rio de
Janeiro, 2016. [Accessed
on: April, 2018]. Available at:
https://www.ibge.gov.br/apps/
arranjos_populacionais/2015/pdf/
publicacao.pdf
––TOMIO, Fabricio Ricardo de
Limas, 2002. A criação de
municípios após a Constituição
de 1988. [Accessed on: April,
2018]. Available at: http://www.
scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_
arttext&pid=S0102-
69092002000100006&lng=en&n
rm=iso
––Secretaria Municipal de
Urbanismo e Licenciamento, 2018.
Histórico demográfico de São
Paulo. [Accessed on: April, 2018].
Available at: http://smul.prefeitura.
sp.gov.br/historico_demografico/
––SPOSITO, Eliseu Savério, 2017.
Glossário de geografia humana
e econômica. São Paulo: Editora
Unesp.
exhibition map
––Centro de Estudos da Metrópole
(CEM), 2012. Administrative
boundaries: Brazil Regions
[Accessed on: December, 2017].
Available at: http://web.fflch.usp.
br/centrodametropole/716
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE), 2016.
Administrative boundaries 1892-
1991. [Accessed on: December,
2017]. Available at: ftp://geoftp.
ibge.gov.br/organizacao_do_
territorio/malhas_territoriais/
municipios_1872_1991/
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE), 2010.
Indigenous population in Brazil.
[Accessed on: December, 2017].
Available at: https://indigenas.
ibge.gov.br/downloads.html
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE), 2010. Brazil’s
demographic data since 1500.
[Accessed on: December, 2017].
Available at: https://memoria.ibge.
gov.br/
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE), 2010. City
population since 1872. [Accessed
on: December, 2017]. Available
at: http://www.ipeadata.gov.br/
Default.aspx
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE), 2007. 500
years of settlement. [Accessed
on: December, 2017]. Available at:
https://biblioteca.ibge.gov.br/
visualizacao/livros/liv6687.pdf
intro map
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE), 2016.
Administrative areas. [Accessed
on: February, 2018]. Available at:
ftp://geoftp.ibge.gov.br
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE), 2011. Brazil’s
territory evolution between 1872-
2010. [Accessed on: February,
2018]. Available at: https://ww2.
ibge.gov.br/home/geociencias/
geografia/default_evolucao.shtm
7. Geography of the Real
Estate Market
intro text
––FONSECA, Nuno de Azevedo,
2004. O Processo Capitalista de
Produção da Arquitetura para o
Mercado Imobiliário. [Accessed
on: April, 2018]. Available at: http://
lares.org.br/Anais2004/trabalhos/
B1/Nuno%20de%20Azevedo%20
Fonseca.pdf
––MACIEL, Carlos Alberto, 2013.
Arquitetura, indústria da
construção e mercado imobiliário.
Ou a arte de construir cidades
insustentáveis. [Accessed on:
April, 2018]. Available at: http://
www.vitruvius.com.br/revistas/
read/arquitextos/14.163/4986
––Instituto de Arquitetos do Brasil
(IAB), 2016. Duzentos anos do
ensino de arquitetura no Brasil:
história e reflexões. [Accessed
on: April, 2018]. Available at:
http://www.iab.org.br/noticias/
duzentos-anos-do-ensino-de-
arquitetura-no-brasil-historia-e-
reflexoes
––JLL, 2016. Global Real Estate
Transparency Inde. [Accessed on:
April, 2016]. Available at: http://
www.jll.com/greti/Documents/
GRETI/Global-Real-Estate-
Transparency-Index-2016.pdf
––JLL, 2016. Taking Real Estate
Transparency to the Next Level.
[Accessed on: April, 2018].
Available at: http://www.jll.com/
greti/Documents/GRETI/GLOBAL_
REAL_ESTATE_TRANSPARENCY_
INDEX_2016_CHART_BOOK.pdf
––Ministério da Educação (MEC),
2007. Resolução nº4, de 13 de
julho de 2007. [Accessed on:
April, 2018]. Available at: http://
portal.mec.gov.br/cne/arquivos/
pdf/2007/rces004_07.pdf
––Ministério da Educação (MEC),
2010. Resolução nº2, de 17 de junho
de 2010. [Accessed on: April, 2018].
Available at: http://portal.mec.gov.
br/docman/junho-2010-pdf/5651-
rces002-10
––SPOSITO, Eliseu Savério, 2017.
Glossário de geografia humana
e econômica. São Paulo: Editora
Unesp.
––VARGAS, Heliana Comin, 1997.
O projeto de arquitetura e o
mercado imobiliário: o caso
da cidade de São Paulo.
[Accessed on: April, 2018].
Available at: http://www.
labcom.fau.usp.br/wp-content/
uploads/2015/08/1997-
ARQUITETURA-e-MERCADO-
IMOBILI%C3%81RIO.pdf
exhibition map
––Centro de Estudos da Metrópole
(CEM), 2012. Administrative
boundaries: Brazil States.
[Accessed on: December, 2017].
Available at: http://web.fflch.usp.
br/centrodametropole/716
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE). Roads.
[Accessed on: November, 2017].
Available at: ftp://geoftp.ibge.
gov.br
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE). Railways.
[Accessed on: November, 2017].
Available at: ftp://geoftp.ibge.
gov.br
––Conselho de Arquitetura e
Urbanismo do Brasil (CAU/BR),
2017. Working architects in Brazil.
[Shared: January, 2018]
––Getulio Vargas Doundation
(FGV), 2017. Building Supply
Manufacturers Data. [Shared:
December, 2017]
––UNEP/GRID-Geneva, 2014.
Exposed capital-monetary value
of urban buildings. [Accessed
 on: November, 2017]. Available at:
http://preview.grid.unep.ch/index.
php?preview=data&events=
socec&evcat=2&lang=eng
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE), 2011-2015.
CEMPRE - Companies National
Register Statistics. [Accessed
on: November, 2017]. Available at:
http://preview.grid.unep.ch/index.
php?preview=data&events=socec
&evcat=2&lang=eng
––Associação Brasileira de Shopping
Centers Centers (ABRASCE ), 2017.
Shopping Centers. [Accessed
on: November, 2017]. Available at:
http://preview.grid.unep.ch/index.
php?preview=data&events=soce
c&evcat=2&lang=eng
––Sistema Nacional de Informações
e Indicadores Culturais (SNIIC),
2017. Cultural Venues. [Accessed
on: February, 2018]. Available at:
http://mapas.cultura.gov.br/
intro map
––Centro de Estudos da Metrópole
(CEM), 2010. Census 2010 - IBGE.
[Accessed on: February, 2018].
Available at: http://web.fflch.usp.
br/centrodametropole/
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE), 2016.
Administrative boudaries.
[Accessed on: February, 2018].
Available at:
ftp://geoftp.ibge.gov.br
––Inside Airbnb, 2017. Airbnb listings
for São Paulo. [Accessed on:
February, 2018]. Available at:
http://insideairbnb.com/
––Inside Airbnb, 2015. Airbnb listings
for Rio de Janeiro. [Accessed
on: February, 2018]. Available at:
http://insideairbnb.com/
8. Inhabiting the House or
the City?
intro text
––AMORE, Caio Santo; SHIMBO, Lúcia
Zanin; RUFINO, Maria Beatriz Cruz,
2015. Minha Casa… E a Cidade?
Avaliação do Programa Minha
Casa Minha Vida em seis estados
Brasileiros. Rio de Janeiro: Letra
Capital.
––Câmara Brasileira da Indústria da
Construção (CBIC). Perenidade dos
Programas Habitacionais. PMCMV:
sua importância e impactos de
eventual descontinuidade. Brasília,
2016. [Accessed on: April, 2018].
Available at: https://cbic.org.br/
wp-content/uploads/2017/11/
Perenidade_dos_Programas_
Habitacionais_2016.pdf
––CUNHA, Gabriel Rodrigues, 2014.
O Programa Minha Casa Minha
Vida em São José do Rio Preto/SP:
Estado, Mercado, Planejamento
Urbano e Habitação. Doctoral
thesis, Instituto de Arquitetura e
Urbanismo, Universidade de São
Paulo. [Accessed on: April, 2018].
Available at: http://www.teses.
usp.br/teses/disponiveis/102/
102132/tde-11122014-100257/
publico/TeseGabrielCunhaFinal
Corrigida.pdf
––Caixa Econômica Federal (CEF),
2018. Apresentação. [Accessed
on: April, 2018]. Available at: http://
www.caixa.gov.br/sobre-a-caixa/
apresentacao/Paginas/default.
aspx
––GARBIN, Rafael; SAUGO, Andréia;
FERRARI, Dustin; LOLI, Gisele;
KLEIN, Luciana Cristina; XAVIER,
Monique Danielli, 2016. Avaliação
Pós Ocupação dos primeiros
empreendimento do Programa
Minha Casa Minha Vida, faixa
1 e 2 na cidade de Erechim-RS.
[Accessed on: April, 2018].
Available at: https://periodicos.
uffs.edu.br/index.php/JORNADA/
article/view/3697
––ROLNIK, Raquel, 2015. Guerra dos
lugares: a colonização da terra e
da moradia na era das finanças.
São Paulo; Boitempo.
––SHIMBO, Lúcia Zanin, 2010.
Habitação Social, Habitação de
Mercado: a confluência entre
Estado, empresas construtoras
e capital financeiro. Doctoral
thesis, Escola de Engenharia
São Carlos, Universidade de São
Paulo. [Accessed on: April, 2018].
Available at: file:///C:/Users/
usuario/Downloads/tese_lucia_
shimbo_jun10_final.pdf
––VILLA, Simone Barbosa;
SARAMAGO, Rita de Cássia Pereira;
GARCIA, Lucianne Casasanta, 2016.
Desenvolvimento de metodologia
de avaliação pós-ocupação do
Programa Minha Casa Minha
Vida: Aspectos funcionais,
comportamentais e ambientais.
[Accessed on: April, 2018].
Available at: http://www.ipea.gov.
br/portal/images/stories/PDFs/
TDs/07102016td_2234.pdf
exhibition map
––LEHAB / Departamento de
Arquitetura e Urbanismo (DAU)
/ Universidade Federal do Ceará
(UFC), 2012-2015. Mapping of
Fortaleza’s PMCMV bands 1, 2
and 3 developments [shapefile].
[Shared: February, 2018]
––LABCAM / FAU / Universidade
Federal do Pará (UFPA), 2009-
2012. Mapping of Belém do
Pará’s PMCMV bands 1, 2 and
3 developments [shapefile].
[Shared: February, 2018]
––Núcleo de Pesquisa Habitação
e Cidade do Observatório das
Metrópoles / FAU / IPPUR /
Universidade Federal do Rio
de Janeiro (UFRJ), 2009-2012.
Mapping of Rio de Janeiro’s
PMCMV bands 1, 2 and 3
developments [shapefile].
[Shared: February, 2018]
––LabHabitat / Departamento de
Arquitetura (DARQ) / Universidade
Federal do Rio Grande do Norte
(UFRN), 2009-2012. Mapping of
Natal’s PMCMV bands 1, 2 and
3 developments [shapefile].
[Shared: February, 2018]
––LabCidade / Departamento de
Projeto (AUP) / Universidade
de São Paulo (USP), 2009-2012.
Mapping of São Paulo’s PMCMV
bands 1, 2 and 3 developments
[shapefile]. [Shared: February,
2018]
––LabCidade / Department of
Design (AUP) / University of São
Paulo (USP), 2009-2012. Mapping
of Campinas’ PMCMV bands 1, 2
and 3 developments [shapefile].
[Shared: February, 2018]
––Rede Cidade e Moradia + Cota
760. “MCMV” processed database
[shapefile]. [Shared: February,
2018]
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e
Estatística (IBGE), 2010. Population
Census. [Accessed on: February,
2018]. Available at: ftp://ftp.
ibge.gov.br/Censos/Censo_
Demografico_2010/Resultados_
do_Universo/Agregados_por_
Setores_Censitarios/
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE), 2010. Census
Tract. [Accessed on: February,
2018]. Available at: https://mapas.
ibge.gov.br/bases-e-referenciais/
 bases-cartograficas/malhas-
digitais.html
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e
Estatística (IBGE), 2017. Estimated
Population - Since 1991. [Accessed
on: March, 2018]. Available
at: https://ww2.ibge.gov.br/
home/estatistica/populacao/
estimativa2017/default.shtm
––United Nations Development
Program, Human Development
Report, 2016. Human Development
for Everyone, Briefing note for
countries on the 2016 Human
Development Report - Brazil.
[Accessed on: March, 2018].
Available at: http://hdr.undp.org/
sites/all/themes/hdr_theme/
country-notes/BRA.pdf
––UN-Habitat’s Global Urban
Observatory, 2018. United Nation’s
Millennium Development Goals
Database, Urban Data Indicators
since 1950. [Accessed on:
March, 2018]. Available at: http://
urbandata.unhabitat.org/explore-
data/
––Sistema de Informações Sobre
Orçamento Público Federal (SIGA),
2018. Federal Budget Reports
2006-2015. [Accessed on: March,
2018]. Available at: http://www8d.
senado.gov.br/BOE/BI/logon/start.
do?ivsLogonToken=WWW8D.
senado.gov.br%3A6400%409005
430JoNhmf74Lz75gQp9QSthA
WN9005428JwgFB8tdHWj
qjLpy1skg75z
––World Bank Global Development
Data, 2018. Urban Development,
Social Development, Poverty,
Economy and Growth Indicators
- Brazil. [Accessed on: March,
2018]. Available at: https://data.
worldbank.org/indicator
––Ministério das Cidades, Secretaria
Nacional de Habitação, 2017.
Minha Casa Minha Vida General
Data. [Shared: January, 2018]
intro map
––AMORE, C. S., SHIMBO, L.Z., RU,
M. B. C., 2015. Minha casa… e a
cidade? avaliação do programa
minha casa minha vida em seis
estados brasileiros. Rio de Janeiro:
Letra Capital.
––Caixa Econômica Federal, 2017.
Minha Casa, Minha Vida Program
(MCMV) projects. [Accessed on:
February, 2018]. Available at:
http://www.minhacasaminhavida.
gov.br
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE), 2016.
Administrative boundaries.
[Accessed on: February, 2018].
Available at: ftp://geoftp.ibge.
gov.br
––IBGE Instituto Brasileiro de
Geografia e Estatística, 2010.
Cities socioeconomic data.
[Accessed on: February, 2018].
Available at: ftp://geoftp.ibge.
gov.br
––Fundação Sistema Estadual de
Análise de Dados (SEADE), 2010.
Paulista Social Vulnerability Index
- IPVS. [Accessed on: February,
2018]. Available at: http://www.
seade.gov.br
9. Solid Divisions
intro text
––BIZZIO, Michele R., ZUIN, João
Carlos Soares, 2016. A apropriação
do ideário cidade-jardim nos
condomínios residenciais
fechados brasileiros. [Accessed
on: April, 2018]. Available at: http://
vitruvius.com.br/revistas/read/
arquitextos/17.198/6300
––BRASIL, 2002. Lei nº 10.406, de
10 de janeiro de 2002: Código
Civil. [Accessed on: April, 2018].
Available at: http://www.planalto.
gov.br/ccivil_03/leis/2002/l10406.
htm
––CALDEIRA, Teresa Pires do
Rio, 2000. City of walls: crime,
segregation, and citizenship in São
Paulo. Los Angeles: University of
California Press.
––LEITE, Maria Angela F.P, 2011.
O espaço dividido nas cidades
do século XXI. [Accessed
on: April, 2018]. Available at:
https://periodicos.ufsc.br/
index.php/geosul/article/
viewFile/24659/21839
––SIGNORELLI, Carlos Francisco;
SILVA NETO, Manoel Lemes da,
2012. Por um urbanismo a partir
do outro. [Accessed on: April,
2018]. Available at: http://www.
vitruvius.com.br/revistas/read/
arquitextos/12.140/4199
––TORQUATO, Manuela Lourenço
Pires, 2006. Análise do Direito de
Vizinhança no novo código civil
quanto a muros, paredes e plantas
divisórias. [Accessed on: April,
2018]. Available at: http://egov.
ufsc.br/portal/sites/default/files/
anexos/9198-9197-1-PB.pdf
––VARGAS, Heliana Comin, 2006.
Centros urbanos: por quê
intervir? Palestra apresentada
no Seminário Internacional de
Reabilitação de Edifícios em
áreas centrais. [Accessed on:
April, 2018]. Available at: http://
www.labcom.fau.usp.br/wp-
content/uploads/2015/08/2006-
Interven%C3%A7%C3%A3o-em-
centro-urbanos-imagens.pdf
––WHITAKER, João Sette, 2011.
Perspectivas e desafios para o
jovem arquiteto no Brasil. Qual o
papel da profissão?. [Accessed
on: April, 2018]. Available at:
http://vitruvius.com.br/revistas/
read/arquitextos/12.133/3950
exhibition map
––Brazilian Landscape Research
Lab, FAUUSP (Quapá). Urban Block
Morphology Analysis. [Shared:
February, 2018]
––Open Street Map, 2017. Brazilian
Streets. [Acessed on: February,
2018]. Available at: https://www.
openstreetmap.org/
––Flanders Marine Institute, 2016.
Marine Regions: Economic
Exclusive Zones. [Acessed on:
December, 2017]. Available at:
http://www.marineregions.org/
downloads.php
––Google Earth, 2017. Satellite
Images. [Acessed on: March,
2018]
intro map
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE), 2016.
Administrative boundaries.
[Accessed on: February, 2018].
Available at: ftp://geoftp.ibge.
gov.br
––Atlas de Desenvolvimento
Humano no Brasil, 2014. Human
Development Atlas in the Brazilian
Metropolitan Regions: São
Paulo. [Accessed on: February,
2018]. Available at: http://www.
atlasbrasil.org.br/2013/en/
download/base/
10. The Encryption of Power
intro text
––Pixo [documentary], 2009.
Directed by Roberto T. Oliveira
and João Wainer. São Paulo.
––exhibition map
––Instagram, Inc. API, 2016-2018.
 Data extracted using hashtags
#pixo #pixosp #pixacao #xarpi.
[Accessed on: April, 2018]
––Departamento de Produção e
Análise de Informação (DEINFO)
/ Prefeitura Municipal de São
Paulo (PMSP) via Geosampa,
2018. Buildings in each
neighborhood. [Accessed on:
April, 2018]. Available at: http://
geosampa.prefeitura.sp.gov.br/
––Departamento de Produção e
Análise de Informação (DEINFO)
/ Prefeitura Municipal de São
Paulo (PMSP) via Geosampa,
2018. Building blocks in São
Paulo. [online]. [Accessed on:
April, 2018]. Available at: http://
geosampa.prefeitura.sp.gov.br/
––Prefeitura Municipal de São
Paulo, 2017. Infractions related
to pixo in São Paulo. [Shared:
January, 2018]
––Data Zap, 2018. São Paulo’s
Metropolitan Area real state
database. [Shared: March, 2018]
––Escola da Cidade, 2018. News
about Pixo in São Paulo. [Shared:
April, 2018]
intro map
––Centro de Estudos da Metrópole
(CEM), 2018. Base de Logradouros
RMSP. [Accessed on: February,
2018]. Available at: http://web.
fflch.usp.br/centrodametropole/
––Centro de Estudos da
Metrópole (CEM), 2016. Favelas
e Loteamentos irregulares
no Município de São Paulo.
[Accessed on: February, 2018].
Available at: http://web.fflch.usp.
br/centrodametropole/
––Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística (IBGE), 2016. Limites
Administrativos. [Accessed on:
February, 2018]. Available at: ftp://
geoftp.ibge.gov.br
––Instagram, Inc. API, 2016-2018.
Data extracted using the
hashtag #pixo. [Accessed on:
February, 2018].
image credits
Francis Alÿs (p.14)
The Leak (São Paulo), 1995
Documentation of an action
(São Paulo)
Courtesy: the artist and Galerie
Peter Kilchmann, Zurich
Manoela Medeiros (p.16)
Fronteira [Frontier], 2017
Excavation on wall and coating
Photo: Eduardo Ortega
Courtesy: the artist
Marcius Galan (p.20)
Seção diagonal [Diagonal Section],
2008
Installation view of the exhibition
Do Objeto para o Mundo, Inhotim
Collection at Itaú Cultural,
São Paulo, 2015
Photo: Edouard Fraipont
Courtesy: Instituto Inhotim,
Brumadinho
Lula Buarque de Hollanda (p.22)
Fragment of the installation
O muro [The Wall], 2017
Courtesy: the artist
Cildo Meireles (p.24)
Através [Through], 1983-1989
Installation view at Fondazione
HangarBicocca, 2014
Photo: Agostino Osio
Courtesy: the artist and
Fondazione HangarBicocca, Milan
Nicolás Robbio (p.34)
Plano expandido (Questões ao
traçar uma linha) [Expanded Plane
(Questions when Drawing a Line)],
2016
319 pieces of wire
Photo: Edouard Fraipont
Courtesy: Galeria Vermelho,
São Paulo
Rivane Neuenschwander (p.74)
Mapa-Múndi BR (Postal)
[World‑Map BR (Postal)], 2007
Postcards and wood shelves
Courtesy: the artist, Fortes D’Aloia
& Gabriel, São Paulo, Stephen
Friedman Gallery, London, and
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
Melanie Smith (p.112)
Stills from Fordlândia, 2014
HD 30’
Photo: Julien Devaux
Courtesy: Galerie Peter Kilchmann,
Zurich and Galeria Nara Roesler,
São Paulo
Cássio Vasconcellos (p.114)
CEASA, 2012
Photograph
Courtesy: the artist
Carolina Caycedo (p.132)
A Gente Xingú, A Gente Doce, A
Gente Paraná [The People Xingú,
The People Doce, The People
Paraná], 2016
From the series A Gente Rio –
Be Dammed [The People River–
Be Dammed]
Satellite photographs
Commissioned for the 32nd Bienal
de São Paulo
Courtesy: the artist
Helena Wolfenson (p.136)
Paracatú de Baixo, 2015
Marlon, Bento Rodrigues, 2015
From the series Rastro de lama
[Mud Trail]
Photograph
Courtesy: the artist
Aline Lata (p.140)
Bento Rodrigues, Mariana –
Brasil, 2015
From the series Rastro de lama
[Mud Trail]
Photograph
Courtesy: the artist
Runo Lagomarsino (p.168)
ContraTiempos [Setbacks], 2010
Dia projection loop, 27 original
images in a Kodak carousel slide
projection with timer
Courtesy: the artist and
Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo
Paulo Nazareth (p.172)
Premium Bananas / Mapa Guarani
[Premium Bananas / Guarani Map],
2012
Sewing and mixed media on tissue
Courtesy: Mendes Wood DM,
São Paulo
Jonathas de Andrade (p.204)
1a Corrida de Carroças do
Centro do Recife / O levante
[1st Horse-Drawn Cart Race of
Downtown Recife / The Uprising],
2012
Photographic documentation
and video
Photo: Josivan Rodrigues
and Ricardo Moura
Courtesy: Galeria Vermelho,
São Paulo, and Galleria Continua,
San Gimignano
Renata Lucas (p.230)
aqui havia um projeto de cidade
[here, there was a project for city],
2018
Cortesia da artista e
Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo
Bárbara Wagner and
Benjamin de Burca (p.236)
DESENHO/CANTEIRO
[PLAN/PLAT], 2014
Video collage, HD, color,
sound, 12’12’’
Courtesy: the artists, Fortes
D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo, and
Amparo 60, Recife
Photo: Marina D’Imperio
Mauro Restiffe (p.238)
Itaquerão #2, 2014
Estacionamento Oficina
[Oficina Parking Lot], 2014
São Paulo – Viaduto Antártica, 2014
São Paulo, fora de alcance, a
project commissioned by
Instituto Moreira Salles
Photograph
Courtesy: the artist and Fortes
D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo
Pedro Victor Brandão (p.312)
Untitled #3, 2013
Untitled #12, 2013
Untitled #20, 2013
Untitled #16, 2013
Untitled #24, 2013
Untitled #22, 2013
From the series Mitigação sem
impacto (Convite à pintura)
[Mitigation Without
Impact (Invitation to Painting)]
Inkjet print on cotton paper
Courtesy: Galeria Sé, São Paulo
Ivan Padovani (p.362)
Campo cego [Blind Field], 2014
Digital photograph. Inkjet print on
cotton paper over aluminum plate
and composite of cement and
cellulose
Courtesy: the artist
Pablo López Luz (p.368)
Pixo III, 2015
Photograph
Courtesy: the artist
map credits
Maps 1-10
Walls of Air Cartographies Team:
Gabriel Kozlowski, Laura González
Fierro, Marcelo Maia Rosa, Sol
Camacho, Gabriel Duarte
Bárbara Graeff, Chiara Scotoni,
Haydar Baydoun, Heloisa
Escudeiro, Olivia Serra, Miguel
Darcy, Manoela Pessoa,
Rafael Marengoni.
Map 08
Walls of Air Cartographies Team,
Marc Angélil, Rainer Hehl, Patricia
Lucena Ventura,
Rede Cidade e Moradia, Cota 760
Map 09
Walls of Air Cartographies Team,
Escola da Cidade Team (Pedro
Vada (coordenador), Newton
Massafumi, Pedro M. R. Sales,
Beatriz Dias, Bruna Marchiori,
Giulia Ribeiro, Isabela Moraes,
Karime Zaher, Marilia Serra,
Mateus Loschi, Pedro H Norberto)
Quapa FAUUSP
Map 10
Walls of Air Cartographies Team,
Escola da Cidade Team

Tuca Vieira (p.268)

Marabá, 2013
Marabá, 2013
From the series Viagem ao Brasil
[Voyage to Brazil]
Photograph
Courtesy: the artist

Carol Quintanilha(p.270)
concreto armado
[reinforced concrete], 2014
Photographs
Courtesy: the artist

Antoni Muntadas
in collaboration with
Paula Santoro (p.310)
On Translation: Comemorações
urbanas, 1998-2002
Bronze plaque, postcard,
and website
Courtesy: the artist and
Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo
General credits 454
Fundação bienal de são paulo
team

Chief Executive Officer

Luciana Guimarães

Chief Project Officer Chief Financial and

Dora Silveira Corrêa Administrative Officer
Emilia Ramos

Communication Bienal Archive Legal Counsel

Felipe Taboada · Manager Ana Luiza de Oliveira Mattos · Bruna Andrade · Intern
Adriano Campos Manager
Ana Elisa de Carvalho Price Ana Paula Andrade Marques Finance
Caroline Carrion Fernanda Curi Amarildo Firmino Gomes · Manager
Diana Dobránszky Melânie Vargas de Araujo Fábio Kato
Eduardo Lirani Pedro Ivo Trasferetti von Ah Silvia Andrade Branco
Julia Bolliger Murari
Victor Bergmann Production Planning and Operations
Felipe Isola · Planning and Marcela Amaral · Coordinator
Institutional Relations and Logistics Manager Danilo Alexandre Machado de Souza
Partnerships Joaquim Millan · Artwork Rone Amabile
Flávia Abbud · Manager Production and Exhibition Manager
Eduardo Sena Bianca Volpi Human Resources
Irina Cypel Dorinha Santos Albert Cabral dos Santos · Assistant
Mariana Sesma Felipe Melo Franco
Raquel Silva Gabriela Lopes Materials and Property
Rayssa Foizer Graziela Carbonari Valdomiro Rodrigues da Silva ·
Heloisa Bedicks Manager
General Secretariat Veridiana Simons Angélica de Oliveira Divino
Maria Rita Marinho · Manager Viviane Teixeira Daniel Pereira
Carlos Roberto Rodrigues Rosa Waleria Dias Larissa Di Ciero Ferradas
Josefa Gomes Vinícius Robson da Silva Araújo
Educational Program Wagner Pereira de Andrade
Paula Signorelli · Chief Executive Claudia Vendramini · Manager
Office’s Advisor Laura Barboza Information Technology
Bianca Casemiro Leandro Takegami · Manager
Regiane Ishii

Cristina Fino · Editorial Coordinator

Thiago Gil · Researcher
Exhibition credits
Title
Muros de Ar / Walls of Air
Commissioner
João Carlos de Figueiredo Ferraz
Fundação Bienal de São Paulo
Curators
Gabriel Kozlowski
Laura González Fierro
Marcelo Maia Rosa
Sol Camacho
Curatorial team
Coordinator
Gabriel Duarte
Architects
Bárbara Graeff, Catarina Flaksman,
Chiara Scotoni, Giusepe Filocomo,
Haydar Baydoun, Heloisa
Escudeiro, Olivia Serra, Miguel
Darcy, Manoela Pessoa, Nitzan
Zilberman, Rafael Marengoni,
Leonardo Serrano
Interns
Júlia Figueiredo, Larissa Guimarães,
Luiz Filipe Rampazio
Participants
Open call: Selected projects,
Bernardes Arquitetura, Boldarini
Arquitetos, Brasil Arquitetura, Corsi
Hirano Arquitetos, H+F Arquitetos,
Libeskindllovet Arquitetos, Jansana,
de la Villa, de Paauw, arquitectes,
Pedro Évora, Pedro Varella,
Gru.a Arquitetos, SIAA + HASAA,
Sauermartins + Metropolitano
Arquitetos, Rosenbaum + Aleph
Zero, Sem Muros Arquitetura
Integrada, SP Urbanismo, Studio
MK27, Triptyque Architecture,
Una Arquitetos, Laboratório de
Urbanismo da Metrópole – LUME
da FAUUSP, Metrópole Arquitetos,
Vigliecca & Associados  Quapa), Cota 760 (Luis Guilherme
Outdoor installation
Atelier Marko Brajovic
Artists in the catalogue
Antoni Muntadas, Bárbara Wagner
and Benjamin de Burca, Carolina
Caycedo, Carol Quintanilha, Cássio
Vasconcellos, Cildo Meireles,
Francis Alÿs, Helena Wolfenson e
Aline Lata, Ivan Padovani, Jonathas
de Andrade, Lula Buarque de
Hollanda, Manoela Medeiros,
Marcius Galan, Mauro Restiffe,
Melanie Smith, Nicolás Robbio,
Pablo López Luz, Paulo Nazareth,
Pedro Victor Brandão, Renata
Lucas, Rivane Neuenschwander,
Runo Lagomarsino, Tuca Vieira
Collaborators
Multidisciplinary committee
Ailton Krenak, Antonio Risério,
Antonio Donato Nobre, Carla
Caffé, Claudio Bernardes,
Claudio Haddad, Cripta Djan,
Drauzio Varella, Eliane Caffé,
Gilson Rodrigues, Luiz Felipe de
Alencastro, Sérgio Besserman,
Kenarik Boujikian
Research consultants + Essays
Alvaro Rodrigues dos Santos, Ana
Luiza Nobre, Bruno Santa Ceciíia,
Carlos Eboli, Carol Tonetti, Celma
Chaves Pont Vidal, Danilo Igliori,
Eduardo Aquino, Elisabete França,
Eudoxios Anastassiadis, Gabriel
Duarte, Gru.a + Oco, Iris Kantor, Ligia
Nobre, Marc Angélil, Marcos Rosa,
Paulo Orenstein, Paulo Tavares, Philip
Yang, Rainer Hehl, Raquel Rolnik,
Rodrigo Agostinho, Sergio Castelani,
Victor de Carvalho Pinto
Research groups & institutions
Data Zap, Global Forest Watch,
Mapping Lab, Nexo Jornal, Rede
Cidade e Moradia, VIVA Projects,
MIT – School of Architecture +
Planning (Clarence Yi-Hsien Lee,
Collyn S Chan, Cristina Grace
Clow, Jaehun Woo, Maia Sophie
Woluchem, Marissa Elisabeth
Reilly, Nitzan Zilberman, Robert
Alva Cain, Yeah Nidam), ETH (Marc
Angélil, Patricia Lucena Ventura,
Rainer Hehl), FAU USP (LabCidade,
Alves Rossi, Nicolas Andre
Mesquita, Paula Lemos), Escola da
Cidade (Pedro Vada (coordinator),
Newton Massafumi, Pedro M.
R. Sales, Beatriz Dias, Bruna
Marchiori, Giulia Ribeiro, Isabela
Moraes, Karime Zaher, Marilia
Serra, Mateus Loschi, Pedro H
Norberto), QGIS consultants, Pedro
Camargo, Geology consultants
(Cássio Roberto da Silva – CPRM,
Serviço Geológico do Brasil,
Cristina Boggi da Silva Rafaelli
– Instituto Geológico, Eduardo
Soares de Macedo – Instituto
de Pesquisas Tecnológicas,
Lidia Keiko Tominaga – Instituto
Geológico), Universidade Federal
do Pará (Graciete Guerra da
Costa, Ligia T. Simonian Lopes,
Bernadeth Beltrão Rosas Bentes,
Rodrigo Augusto de Lima
Rodrigues, George Bruno de
Araújo Lima, Rebeca Barbosa
Dias Rodrigues, Luciane Santos
de Oliveira, Stephany Aylla de
Nazaré Carvalho Pereira, Glenda
de Souza Santos, Rebeca Barbosa
Dias Rodrigues, Luciane Santos
de Oliveira, Stephany Aylla de
Nazaré Carvalho Pereira, Glenda
de Souza Santos)
Interviews & workshops:
Coletivo ENTRE (Ana Altberg
(coordinator), Mariana Meneguetti
(coordinator), Joana Martins,
Juliana Biancardine, Manuela
Muller, Michel Zalis, Nathalia
Perico, Stephanie Marques)
Photography & video
Arq.Futuro, Marina D’Imperio,
Murilo Salazar
Immigration workshop
Angela Quinto, Carmen Silva,
Cássia Fellet, Juliana Caffé,
Preta Ferreira, Nathalia Lima,
Thalissa Burgi, Rafael Migliatti,
+ 63 Immigrants
Architects stories
Alexander Pilis, Claudio Acioly,
Flavio Coddou, Mauro Resnitzky,
Oscar Oiwa, Ricardo de Ostos ,
Rodrigo Louro, Taneha Kuzniecow
Bacchin, Zeuler Lima
Exhibit graphic design
Curators
visual identity +
Catalogue graphic design
Celso Longo + Daniel Trench
Website programming
Create – Soluções Online
Production Publication credits acknowledgements
Abilio Guerra, Adélia Duarte,
Local Architect Edited by Adèle Naudé Santos, Ana Miljacki,
Martin Weigert Gabriel Kozlowski Ana Paula de Haro, Anália Maria
Laura González Fierro Marinho de Carvalho Amorim,
Graphic Production Marcelo Maia Rosa Andrade Morettin Arquitetos,
Ligia Pedra Sol Camacho André Correa do Lago, Camilla
Barella, Carlos Viana de Carvalho,
Catalogue Printing Editorial coordination Caroline Passos, Cecilia Tanouri,
Opero Fundação Bienal de São Paulo Team Cinthia Marcelle, Ciro Miguel, Ciro
Pirondi, Claudia Rabelo Lopes
Maps metal work and assembly Assistant editor – Jardim Botânico RJ, Claudio
Euroimmagine S.r.l Rafael Falasco Haddad, Cristina Gebran, Eduardo
Lourenço, Edson Emygdio Pereira
Physical models Design Junior, Elisabete Dos Santos,
Paola Acevedo (coordinator), Celso Longo + Daniel Trench Eugenio Queiroga, Evaldo Lima,
Ada Demetriu, Alba del Barrio, Fábio Tadeu Araújo, Fernando
Alberto Martínez, Carles Truyols, Design development de Mello Franco, Fernando Túlio,
Daniel Escribà, Gerard Graells, Manu Vasconcellos Galeria Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel,
Jean Craiu, Mariona Mayol Battle, Galeria Luisa Strina, Galeria
Simon de Jong Translation Nara Roesler, Galeria Vermelho,
Alexandre Barbosa de Souza, Gilberto Belleza, Giulia Foscari,
Anthony Cleaver, Glenn Global Forest Watch, Guido
Realization Johnston, John Norman, Rodrigo Otero, Guilherme Falcão, Haroldo
Fundação Bienal de São Paulo Maltez‑Novaes, Suzana Vidigal Pinheiro, Hashim Sarkis, Hector
Funarte Zamora, Instituto Bardi/Casa de
Embassy of Brazil in Rome Copyediting and proofreading Vidro, Isabela Billi, João Felipe
Ministry of Culture Anita di Marco, Anthony Doyle, Campos Villar, Joao Queiroz,
Ministry of Foreign Affairs Bruno Tenan, Débora Donadel, Jonathan Franklin, Luciana
Teté Martinho Rubino, Luis Fernando Villaça
Support Meyer – Instituto Cordial, Marcio
Haddad Foundation Graphic production Soares, Marcos Kahtalian – Brain
Tereos Ligia Pedra Bureau Inteligência, Maria Célia
Fonseca, Marisa Moreira Salles,
Partners Image processing and printing Maya Dávalos, Meejin Yoon,
MIT – School of Architecture Opero srl, Verona, Itália Mendes Wood Dmab, Michelle
+ Planning Mendlewicz, Paula Miraglia, Pedro
MIT – MISTI Brazil Font Cavalheiro, Pedro Moreira Salles,
Jonathan Franklin Fakt Philip Oetker, Philippe Petalas,
Pierre Santoul, Rafael Vogt,
Media partnership Paper Rafaella Crepaldi, Regina Parra,
IAB – Instituto de Arquitetos MultiOffset 300 g/m2 (cover) Renato Anelli, Ricardo Heder,
do Brasil MultiOffset 90 g/m2 (inside) Silvio Macedo, Tania Haddad,
ArchDaily Brasil Tomas Alvim, Velia Oynick,
Vladimir Santana
from left to right:

Ailton Krenak
Luiz Felipe de Alencastro
Antonio Donato Nobre
Claudio Haddad
Eliane and Carla Caffé
Sérgio Besserman
Claudio Bernardes
Drauzio Varella
Gilson Rodrigues
Djan Ivson
Kenarik Boujikian
Dados Internacionais de
Catalogação na Publicação (CIP)
(Câmara Brasileira do Livro,
SP, Brasil)

Walls of air : Brazilian Pavilion

2018 / edited by Sol Camacho…
[et al.]. -- 1. ed. -- São Paulo :
Bienal de São Paulo, 2018.

Other editors: Gabriel Kozlowski,

Laura González Fierro, Marcelo
Maia Rosa. Vários autores.

ISBN 978-85-85298-60-9

1. Arquitetos - Brasil 2. Arquitetura

- Brasil 3. Arquitetura - Exposições
- Catálogos 4. Arquitetura
contemporânea 5. Arquitetura -
Projetos 6. Bienal Internacional
de Arquitetura 7. Política urbana
8. Urbanismo I. Fundação Bienal
de São Paulo. II. Camacho, Sol. III.
Kozlowski, Gabriel. IV. González
Fierro, Laura. V. Rosa, Marcelo Maia.

18-15411   CDD-720.981

Índices para
catálogo sistemático:

1. Bienal Internacional de
Arquitetura : Exposições :
Catálogos 720.981

Iolanda Rodrigues Biode -

Bibliotecária - CRB-8/10014