urban design

Rapid urbanization throughout São Paulo’s greater metropolitan region has created conditions in which the established, rigid systems of mobility are no longer effective. Since the 1930s, government investment has focused on the growth of extensive automobile infrastructure, a trend that has diminished investment in alternative modes of mass transit and resulted in the current issues of congestion and infrastructure limitations. This condition is a key component of the larger, asymmetrical urbanization process, in which population density in parts of the central region of the city has diminished, while the occupation of peripheral areas, especially in the sprawling gated communities and favelas (slums), has exploded. As a consequence, the majority of people within São Paulo face both social and territorial immobility. Innovative new modes and pathways of transport are needed to make São Paulo an accessible and inclusive city for all of its inhabitants.

Urban Parangolé is based on the central belief that mobility liberates the form of the built city, making it productive, healthy, and vibrant. Urban Parangolé seeks to foster interaction between formal and informal mobility systems, creating flexible spaces where they can influence and negotiate each other’s presence. In essence, Urban Parangolé seeks to redefine how city-dwellers move and how their city moves with them.

This new definition liberates the ground plane, opening it up to a new spectrum of programs and typologies accessible for popular modification and self-determination. Through mobile digital infrastructure, inhabitants customize new territorial reference points, which change the perceived scale of the city and allow all classes of citizens to move between multi-purpose hubs of varying sizes. Physical interventions and zoning policies foster spontaneous, informal gatherings that revive street life and encourage productive activities.

Responding to tensions between micro needs and macro infrastructure, Urban Parangolé proposes multi-scalar mobility prototypes, forming an alternative vision for the city, one where movement is an activity of both utility and pleasure. 

São Paulo will be forced to address the rampantly growing city that has been remodeled by infrastructural plans. The modern way of thinking in São Paulo is connected to the idea of systematic thinking and architectural urbanism, strongly tied to social-political arguments. The CEU will be used as a late case study of city architecture as strategic implants in a metropolitan network.

The complexes combine several programs such as a school, daycare, a library, TV and study room, theater, sport, and leisure areas. CEUs o er exclusive activities not found in other schools or sports centers in the outlying areas. They operate as centers of personal networks gravitating around each unit, and they give the communities a metropolitan dimension.(1)

CEU were precisely implanted into an existing urban fabric characterized by illegibility and exclusion, depicting a reality of social inequality in the peripheral areas of São Paulo. These interventions aimed at re-organizing a fragmented territory by encouraging human contact, providing it with the necessary tools. The “architecture of the program” – of the equipment – becomes the architecture of the place. “The place was then set as C-E-U 2 [Centros de Estruturação Urbana] Centers of Urban Structuring” (2), defining the CEU as structuring poles of the neighborhood and the periphery, establishing a metropolitan network.

When put into new geographic circumstances, and re-framed in new realities, each new surrounding is re-discovered by the gaze of its citizens, making it a reference point in the urban-scape, recognized as the meeting point inside a neighborhood unit. 

The result of research field work in 2008-09 in São Paulo as a counterpoint to modern controlled design, we will investigate on the micro-scale, how people are ‘riding’ these infrastructures, redefining their role by identifying potential and articulating present references for built spaces of coexistence, therefore questioning the modern project.

Micro-planning situates the action of the micro-scale regarding its social practices and collective appropriations, calling a ention to the importance of ‘bo om up’ initiatives in the configuration of the urban landscape.

It reveals fields of action, tools, and handling concepts that indicate ways to operate on a local scale and tactics to improve the quality of everyday life. It points to the enormous potential of these projects to describe the local scale and its urban tactics as another way to think about the city.

“But is there such a thing as a truly public space today? These fragile, isolated acts engage the notion of responsibility: if there is a hole in the sidewalk, why does a city employee fill it in, and not you and me?”(1)

The strategy concentrates on the re-articulation, the re-programming, and re-codifying of present references. It points to the potential of projects to articulate and cross reference, making use of what has already been produced, what’s already there, suitable for us in search of the ‘real city’.

As strategic micro-intervention networks, these case studies demonstrate social networks of metropolitan scale - circuits of resistance to the generic city that provide the city with micro- environments. They identify micro-architectures that can superimpose functional ones, providing them with complexities capable of inducing quality urban spaces. 

URBAN MOBILITY

(INFRA)CULTURAL DESIGN

MICROPLANNING

HORIZONTAL - VERTICAL GRID

REPURPOSING INFRASTRUCTURE

STREET RENAISSANCE

In the late 19th century, citizens of Manha an demanded be er living conditions as an alternative to the existing shanty towns. The chosen grid created building typologies, volumes, and open spaces, which, over the last century, generated the conditions for high density and the urban culture that define New York’s authenticity.

In 1865, the Council of Hygiene and Public Health of the Citizen’s Association of New York reported on the sanitary conditions of the city, highlighting the need to prioritize health. The grid has been a radical response to the bad sanitary conditions, an ambitious plan that aimed at becoming a model for other American cities.(1)

The production of the urban space in Manha an is a synthesis of the horizontal grid (1811’s Commissioners Plan) and the vertical component. New York’s 1916 Zoning plan defined the base frame for the building typologies developed in coming years - it regulated height and setback and designated land uses.(2)

The Seagram Building (1957, Mies van der Rohe / Phillip Johnson) is a reference for the typology of the skyscraper with a plaza, a natural outcome of applying the 1916 zoning plan; this kind of materializations lead to the revision from 1961, based on the successful ‘private plaza’ strategy.

Continuous verticalization has lead to a space of high population density. The creation of the Central Park has provided a recreational free space from which to contemplate the over-dense urbanscape. This breach in the urban structure highlights, by contrast, the city’s density and the grid, defining New York’s unique urban culture. 

In the early 20th-century steam railroads emerged in places that were not connected by waterways, and the new trains soon reached the North-Eastern port cities in the USA; they became a tool of rivalry among cities like New York City, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston. New York with its New York Central Railroad proved its superiority, ensuring the city’s continued dominance over the international trade from within the United States.

However, in the 1950s and 60s, trucking became a more financially viable way of transporting goods, and New York began to de-industrialize as jobs went to other parts of the region or country.

In the mid-1980s, a group of property owners with land under the line lobbied for the demolition of the entire New York Central Railroad structure.

However, residents in the area prevented this from happening by challenging the demolition threats in court. In the 1990s, as the line lay unused and in disrepair – although the riveted steel elevated structure was still strong – it became known for the tough, drought-tolerant wild grasses, shrubs, and rugged trees that grew on top of the structure.

In 1999, a group of community members formed a non-profit organization, called Friends of the High Line, and began applying for permits to redevelop the structure into a park. They also convinced the government to fund the project with backing from private investors.

The example of the High Line project illustrates how some of the infrastructures that have lost its functionality are being transformed into linear infrastructures of public spaces and leisure facilities. The High Line today is a 1.6 km long, elevated linear park, redesigned and planted as an aerial greenway. The High Line shows that, even if big-picture planning is still important, such specific small-scale interventions can produce a high impact on the larger scale and influence urban processes. 

The reclamation of the streetscape in a public campaign from 2005 shows the power of grassroots movements in demanding articulation between bo om-up and top-down initiatives. Given the Manha an grid, it points out the street as the place to perform urban retrofi ing, therefore creating spaces to shelter a collective life.

Jane Jacob’s 1960s observations in the streets of New York remain an essential reference of criticism to the modern planning principles while looking at life in the streets asking ordinary questions of urban living.(1) They draw a ention to the city as a laboratory, from which to learn and in which to act.

The Manha an grid and system of spaces a ached to it has been the testing ground for new initiatives that intend to make use of already-built structures, by performing minor changes on it and therefore provoking e ective changes. The PPS(2) campaign radically raised the profile of transportation and public space issues and generated demand to bring in a new progressive administration to DOT (NY Department of Transportation). Based on that, in the last five years, the City Transportation Department has aligned its transport policy with the need of improvement of the streetscape.(3)

Gehl Architects have been commissioned by DOT to develop a project. The aim has been to use the opportunity of transit design to rethink the streetscape with a budget already existing for the maintenance of the street grid. It represents a strategy to change a space previously used by cars only into a pedestrian-friendly boulevard. This transformation has brought extremely rapid results based on simple and creative temporary operations.(4) 

Stichworte: Reclamation of the street space, Life and Death in Great American Cities

(J.Jacobs, 1960er), Pedestrian City, Department of Transportations New Plan