Edge City
Edge City by Justin McGuick
Edge City published by Strelka in 2012 is a short summary of an architectural road trip by Justin McGuick through São Paulo which makes a survey of older and newer developments, of the states attempts at building for the influx of new citizens to it’s indifference. The Mutirado housing programmes, the Zezinho Magahlhaes by Artigas and Da Rocha, the Vila Maria Zelia, Alphville, the Favelas themselves. What is the relationship of the Periphery to the center?
And the periphery? In the case of São Paulo the word periphery is almost a misnomer, as there is more periphery than anything else. There are no clear boundaries or perimeters. The periphery is a condition — it is the condition in which the majority of paulistanos live.
Everywhere the formal and informal city is hard to disentangle. The informal city has swamped the formal, grown around and into it. The Favela itself is an in between state.
On his extended trip to Brazil in 1982, Félix Guattari described them as “urban systems that are not cities and rural systems that are not rural”.
McGuick sees that the favelas must be incorporated into the city properly, that infrastructure must be added and real urban citizenship given over to the favelas. But the opportunity of urban renewal that has come with the 2014 World Cup looks likely pan out badly.This book for it’s length could only be a kind of sketch and entry into the megacities of the present so I’m looking forward to McGuick’s future book about activist architecture in South America.
Highlights
There are an estimated 40,000 abandoned buildings in São Paulo, and yet 2 million people live in favelas in the periphery.
And the periphery? In the case of São Paulo the word periphery is almost a misnomer, as there is more periphery than anything else. There are no clear boundaries or perimeters. The periphery is a condition — it is the condition in which the majority of paulistanos live.
What is interesting about it is that within a few hundred metres you have three utterly different approaches to the housing problem: the favela, the mutirão and social housing blocks. You would expect the social housing to be the best of these options, but that is far from obvious from where we are standing.
Pulling into the complex of Zezinho Magalhães, its vast scale is not obvious at first, but there are three sectors and a total of 72 housing blocks. And that’s only half of what was planned. Commissioned by the military dictatorship in 1967, it was originally designed to cover 130 hectares and house 50,000 people. Zezinho was to be an exemplar of how to provide social housing on a mass scale.
These were not governmental efforts but private undertakings by industrialists looking to house their factory workers. By all accounts, Vila Maria Zélia was one of the most idealistic — a model village where no expense was spared.
On his extended trip to Brazil in 1982, Félix Guattari described them as “urban systems that are not cities and rural systems that are not rural”. The favelas themselves are a relatively new phenomenon.
As Mariana Fix and Pedro Arantes describe it, the favela “was a clandestine model, with the state’s consent; a form of solving the housing problem at low cost, without urban and civil rights”.
The problem is not just that they are poor but that they are literally excluded, which is a more radical barrier than poverty. And that exclusion is spatial, not enforced with walls and fences as in the case of Alphaville, but through a lack of infrastructure. Basic city services — it might be public transport or running water, sewerage or electricity — stop at the borders of favelas. In more senses than one, they are off the grid. Cariocas label this dichotomy the morro (the hill) and the asfalto (the asphalt).
The Rio-based architect Jorge Mario Jauregui describes the relationship of the favela to the city in a way that suggests that Brazil is still subject to the social logic of the fazendas. In the coffee estates, the slaves were housed in senzalas, the slave quarters, which were of course separated from the main house. The favelas, according to Jauregui, are the senzalas of the modern city.
Notes
I first published the notes on this book in 2012. The book itself are notes of a road trip and though they are in some ways outdated, I don’t know how much they match the current situation there, they do describe vividly the type of condition of the city and the favela. Whereas in the developing world the Favelas grow around and between the official city it is often unseen and only when vertical slums like Ponte City, The Tower of David and Kowloon Walled City materialise which are more obvious then they are noticed internationally. Favelas are all versions of the bottom-up urbanism the no-man land that’s allowed to exist at once an embarrassment and also necessity of social division made by divisive fast growing and dissolving economies.