On December 15, we celebrate "Architect's Day." While this date is an opportunity for celebrations and tributes to the profession, it also serves as an occasion to reflect on what the practice of architecture and urbanism in Brazil is—and what it could be. At this time of year, it is also common to take stock of the past and look toward the future. Therefore, let us take this opportunity to reflect on our professional practice and our role as architects, asking: "Where were you in December 2017, and what were you doing then?"
The question might not make much sense right now, but believe me, it is crucial to the reflection we are proposing. The reason for raising this question by going back two years is Maya [1]. At the time, Maya worked as a waitress near where she lived in Campos Elíseos (a central neighborhood in São Paulo) and her commute took less than 20 minutes on foot. She was formally employed and earned the minimum wage. More than half of her income (around 70%) went toward rent for a two-room unit in an occupied building on Rio Branco Avenue.
In December 2017, Maya had at least one reason to celebrate: she had just received news that the eviction order for the home where she had lived for six years had been suspended by the courts. To celebrate, she took a small Christmas tree out of its box and placed it right in the middle of the four-seat round table in her apartment's main room. Like her, another 200 families lived in housing on the same block in Campos Elíseos, designated as a Special Social Interest Zone (ZEIS). The end of the threat of eviction, even if temporary, brought some peace and tranquility to those hundreds of people.
Under São Paulo’s Master Plan (PD) [2], a ZEIS is an area designated for the development of low-income housing units (in the case of vacant land) or the maintenance and improvement of working-class territories in the city, whether they are favelas, irregular subdivisions, or tenement housing (cortiços) and occupations in central areas, such as the ZEIS where Maya lived. The ZEIS where her home was located covers a total of nine blocks, three of which (together home to about 400 families) are being directly affected by government actions.
On Block 36 (on Rio Branco Ave.), the State Government has proposed building a hospital through a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) at the expense of evicting residents and demolishing all properties on the block. Meanwhile, on the other two blocks (37 and 38, in Largo Coração de Jesus), the Municipal Government, in partnership with the State, is planning housing construction also through a Housing PPP—a model championed by some administrations for supposedly accelerating the execution process.
Campos Elíseos Contested
At first glance, building a facility like a public hospital and developing housing units in such a central area of the Capital does not seem to be (or should not be) a problem. However, the process through which these proposals were drafted and implemented was entirely non-transparent and top-down, violating rights and ignoring the social and physical reality of that territory. This model of intervention—which removes, displaces, demolishes, and only then begins to build—is a mistake and a major contradiction in itself, especially considering the Housing PPP, which still threatens hundreds of people on Blocks 37 and 38.
Take the neighboring block (Block 50) as an example, where the partnership evicted families and demolished buildings to build new housing (in front of Júlio Prestes Square) without designating a single unit for the displaced families from there or the surrounding area. The new units planned under the PPP do not serve the lowest-income and most vulnerable population, who should be the priority of any public policy, nor do they accommodate the people who already live in the region and have been affected by the displacements of recent years. Instead of building housing for those who need it most, it removes those who already live in the center and leaves the displaced families without support or guarantees of housing assistance, further increasing the demand for housing: it is a policy of inverted logic.
This entire process began in 2017, in violation of the Master Plan law itself, by failing to follow the legal rites and procedures defined for a ZEIS. Beyond being a tool designed to protect areas where low-income populations live, each ZEIS must also have a participatory Management Council (CG), composed equally of members of civil society and the government to jointly define guidelines and actions for a given territory. The establishment of the CGs for that ZEIS only occurred after intense pressure from organized civil society in the streets and in the courts, and after several arbitrary evictions and demolitions had already taken place. To make matters worse, the city government decided to split and create two different CGs: one for Block 36, where the new hospital would be, and another for Blocks 37 and 38, where new housing is planned. This hindered local political coordination and mobilization, while excluding the other blocks of the ZEIS from any participatory oversight body.
Two years later, Block 36 is completely demolished and its 200 families have been evicted. Many remain without permanent housing. Of those who managed to receive the R$150,000 Housing Credit [3] (the only assistance actually offered), some had to move to other cities, such as the Baixada Santista region or the municipality of Urânia—about 600 km (370 miles) from central São Paulo—without any social support to help them find and enroll their children in schools in their new cities, for example.
Since then, the City has carried out other actions that, disastrously, wall up properties where people live and work, ignoring the fact that there are still people inside, under the pretext that regional inspectors need to close establishments operating without a license. This arbitrary and violent municipal intervention in the area is nothing new. The narrative that security forces are acting to combat organized crime is used to justify such actions, but the practical result has been the violation of the rights of the people living in the area, widely known as Cracolândia. Furthermore, these initiatives compound the abusive actions of public security forces, which routinely ignore the rights of the local population by conducting humiliating searches in public spaces and disrupting the daily lives of local students and residents with military-style operations involving, at the very least, gunfire and tear gas.
Yet the problems are not limited to a lack of participation, transparency, and arbitrary evictions that ignore legal frameworks and rights. The official intervention proposal also ignores the local reality of those ZEIS-designated blocks in all their social complexity, ethnic diversity, daily dynamism, and morphological richness. The Campos Elíseos neighborhood is not just any place abandoned to its fate, as the stigmas of "Cracolândia" or the "decayed downtown" would suggest. It is a central area of the city with its own problems, challenges, and, above all, its own potential.
There are families paying rent (for houses, rooms, or even beds), families occupying vacant properties, people living alone, people experiencing homelessness, and/or people struggling with substance abuse. There are Romani groups who, despite being nomadic, have been coming and going to São Paulo for 18 years, always choosing the same boarding house on Helvétia Street. Commerce and services, ignored by the official project, help bring life to the neighborhood streets while employing local labor.
Morphologically, these 19th-century blocks feature row houses, typically aligned with the street, where courtyards, thresholds, terraces, backyards, and lightwells provide ventilation and light, while also serving as spaces for sociability. These areas host shared laundries, meeting spots, gardens, or simply a bench to sit and chat.
This entire socio-spatial dynamic, along with the diversity of family arrangements and spatial forms, is threatened with erasure. One could say that an exclusionary, gentrifying project is underway, expressing the financial logic of urban production through new frontiers of real estate capital expansion where there is high potential for surplus gains—and that the public administration, either complicit or captured, collaborates with this process, most actively in this central region. It could even be argued that the State has always played a major role in reproducing urban inequalities and that an initiative that displaces people and violates rights is not necessarily new or exclusive to this part of downtown. While all of this is true, it is not enough. We must recognize this "sanitizing" urban project and look not only at the territory but also at those who are impacted by it.
The government's proposal to build a hospital and housing developments imposes not only new uses on the territory but also a different urban design, a different dynamic, and, above all, assumes a different demographic profile. The vast majority of the people living there are non-white, have low incomes, work in the surrounding area, and structurally depend on the income opportunities and public services in that region, such as health clinics and schools. It is because of this close relationship with the area, as well as the lack of public policies tailored to the economic reality of these families, that many spend a large portion of their income on rent.
We can say that these people are bodies on the margins, *deviant bodies*: those who disrupt the hegemonic logics that historically regulate and shape the imaginary of the city and the citizen. In last month's article here on ArchDaily, we explored how the territory of Western cities is not neutral, as it is based on the idealization (and universalization) of a single subject: a white, athletic man, of whom the 'Modulor' [4] is one of the main expressions. It is for this man, elevated to the status of a universal subject, that we organize the design of our cities—how our sidewalks, corridors, houses, furniture, windows, and guardrail heights should be, and so on.
This man is at the center of everything.
Consequently, everything that does not correspond to or represent him is out of place, pushed to the margins [5]: it is objectified, reduced to otherness, and ultimately stripped of humanity (Kilomba, 2019; Hooks, 2019). Those on the "outside"—the deviant bodies—have their daily activities disrupted because of their social markers. That is, because of who they are (their gender, race, sexuality, financial status, etc.), they navigate spaces (geographical and/or symbolic) where their bodies challenge pre-established norms, risking rejection and, not infrequently, social elimination (Berth, 2019). This can take the form of the literal termination of life, as in the raid that killed nine young people in the Paraisópolis favela (SP), the police shooting of eight-year-old &Areal;gatha Félix in the back, the military operation that targeted a family on their way to a baby shower with 80 gunshots in Rio, or the fatal lynching of Dandara dos Santos in Fortaleza. Alternatively, it can manifest as physical-spatial elimination, which does not kill directly but creates daily constraints, inflicts routine violence, and ultimately expels those bodies from territories where their presence is no longer tolerated by the normative system. These are faces of the same project to eliminate deviant bodies. The difference—besides, of course, the absolute radicality of taking a life—is the tool used to inflict this violence. While the termination of life is based on extermination through gunshots, punches, and kicks, physical-spatial elimination is practiced through daily violations and realized in projects, urban interventions, and public programs that invert the priorities of state action and weaponize knowledge from fields like architecture and urbanism.
Architecture and Urbanism for Whom?
The case of Block 36 is exemplary for advancing this reflection. Who were these 200 families? Where did they go? What conditions did the government impose on their departure? What was offered in return? Were these compensations sufficient? Did they cover all the families? Who was left out, and why? Why was the social housing built nearby not allocated to the displaced families? Why not use other vacant lots in the area for this purpose? All of these fundamental questions for a democratic city did not receive the same attention as the news of a new hospital being built in central São Paulo.
The lack of collective outrage over violations of the right to the city and the deaf ear that society at large has turned to the cries of the displaced population reveal and reinforce a harsh reality: there is a body at the center of everything that everyone hears, everyone sees. Conversely, there are bodies on the margins that are invisible, that do not matter, and that can be eliminated; they can have their homes invaded or bricked up, their belongings thrown onto the street or into a dumpster, and their homes and histories erased from the neighborhood where they built their lives with their families.
But after all, what do architecture and urbanism have to do with the process that, over the past two years, has impacted Maya and neighboring families in Campos Elíseos? How can—and how should—our professional practice respond to the authoritarian, top-down, violative, and violent processes that characterize the production and transformation of urban spaces?
We could say that architecture and urbanism play a significant role in these urban projects, as they are not designed and developed without professionals like us. We could also point out that architects are involved in every stage and sector of processes like the one in Campos Elíseos, from public administration in policy planning to service providers in construction execution. Indeed, it is crucial to recognize that we play a major role in reproducing unequal cities and designing exclusionary projects through our technical work, whether in developing urban planning tools that reinforce patterns of socio-spatial segregation or in the architectural design of buildings.
Zoning itself, one of the most traditional tools of master-planning urbanism, acts as a mechanism that reinforces socio-spatial segregation. The designation of land into exclusively residential zones, for example, with distinct use and occupation parameters that are inaccessible to the vast majority of the population, has consolidated and maintained a segregated city. In this model, a specific area—typically the one with the highest public investment and the largest, best-located lots—is reserved for the wealthy, white ruling class (Rolnik, 1997; Villaça, 1998; Silva, 2014). No planning parameter, whether an index or a specific zone's density coefficient, can be justified solely by technical numbers without being rooted, first and foremost, in a political vision of the city.
Architectural design, in turn, operates at a different scale but contributes to replicating a slave-holding ideology in residential complexes by defining "service" and "social" entrances. These are deeply intertwined with a choreography that separates central bodies from deviant bodies, reinterpreting the colonialist apartheid of the plantation master's house and the slave quarters (casa grande e senzala) (Kilomba, 2019).
This analysis also applies when we design urban intervention projects, such as the Housing PPP, that are disconnected from the actual demands and complexities of the territories they aim to transform. Concretely and/or symbolically, our professional practice strongly reflects the values of our society, such as when technical work operates under anti-democratic, colonialist logics that differentiate territories and legitimize the separation of bodies in cities. Often, this practice serves as an ideological tool that obscures public perception of the ongoing segregation project.
However, this exercise is not meant to reduce our professional practice to what we least admire about it. The goal of this reflection is to examine our actions in order to expand our professional horizons, without losing faith in our ability and desire to play a role in real transformation within society and our cities.
While it is true that design (regardless of its scale within the city) reproduces the aspects and values of an unequal, segregated society that restricts deviant bodies, it is also true that the field of architecture and urbanism must adopt a critical stance on the role of design, understanding that it also possesses the power to transform this society. This is about what architecture and urbanism can be when aimed at critical thinking and designing more just, welcoming, and democratic cities. It is also about a broader view of what design is (and therefore what our profession is), which requires understanding that our work is not solely technical; our work is political.
Cases like the evictions and violations in the Campos Elíseos ZEIS, resulting from an urban project, are not isolated examples. Over the last two decades alone, there have been countless records of arbitrary actions and forced evictions in Brazil driven by major spatial intervention projects. These include Vila Autódromo, affected by the construction of Rio de Janeiro's Olympic Center (and before that, the 2007 Pan American Games venues); the case of workers and blacksmiths who have lived for decades on Ladeira da Conceição in Salvador and are being evicted; the removal of working-class areas along the Belém waterfront for the Estrada Nova project; or Vila Itororó, cleared to make way for a new cultural center in São Paulo. This is not to mention many other interventions that, even when they do not displace residents, usurp valuable urban areas—such as public or common spaces—in the name of privatizing and exclusionary projects, like Cais Estelita in Recife, or the proposal to transform Largo do Arouche (in central São Paulo) into a French-style boulevard, erasing the LGBT memory and history of that area.
But every action triggers a reaction. And it is precisely from these various cases of violations and top-down projects that inspiring experiences emerge, forcing us to think about our role—whether reactive or proactive—in engaging with daily struggles for rights. The experience of Campos Elíseos detailed here also offers many lessons and opportunities to reflect on our professional and political practices.
Toward Another Way of Practicing Architecture and Urbanism
It is true that there is an alignment between our professional field and processes that reinforce pre-defined roles, restrict free movement through the city, and generate vulnerabilities that deny the right to the city to most of the population. However, it is also true that various groups and initiatives have sought to challenge the field of architecture and urbanism, championing their practices as tools to build counter-narratives and to develop and highlight alternatives that legitimize and defend the right to the city. This is the case for technical assistance groups, NGOs, collectives, student-run design offices (escritórios-modelo), academic labs, and many other actors collaborating in transformative actions on the ground. It was within this context and spirit that the Open Forum Mundaréu da Luz was born.
In May 2017, when the municipal administration demolished buildings with people still inside—in what would become one of the most disastrous actions concerning urban policy, social assistance, and mental health in the region—a series of collectives, institutions, and associations from diverse fields came together to oppose the city government's actions, which were packaged under the slogan "the end of Cracolândia." More than just reacting, this new front organized to propose a different way of designing and thinking about the city, free of evictions and rights violations.
Mundaréu da Luz [6] coordinates art groups and harm reduction organizations, while also bringing together residents and local business owners. The front also includes institutions and collectives linked to architecture and urbanism.
Throughout more than two years of coordination, many lessons and challenges shaped the collective construction of the Forum and defined the limits of our actions on the ground. It was primarily these difficulties that now point the way forward and offer tools to think about the city—and consequently architecture and urbanism—on concrete terms set by local reality. This is an experiment, a not-always-successful attempt to decolonize the process, form, and content (Santos, 2013) of city-making.
Engaging with the Territory
How does one approach a complex territory filled with such diverse political actors, lacking any established social cohesion like a Neighborhood Association or a District Committee? Our first task was to get close gradually: visiting the neighborhood, having coffee at the corner bar, and committing to careful, sensitive listening to understand the complexity of the territory and its political subjects. Through this, we were able to identify intervention perimeters and strategic actors to engage and mobilize. This is where our focus on public space interventions originated.
We chose one of the neighborhood's most prominent corners, where people from the fluxo (the open-air crack market) as well as business owners and residents of local houses, boarding homes, and apartments all circulated. There, we held drawing workshops and activities that invited and prompted passersby to reflect on their neighborhood, describe their experiences, and, above all, share their desires for the place they live. From that point on, we were able to connect more deeply with people and expand the network of actors for local mobilization. We discovered that while there were no major leaders unifying the entire population of the territory, there were indeed localized leaders organizing occupations and boarding houses, recognized and legitimized by some residents and merchants. Most of these leaders are Black women born in the central region who have long histories of fighting for housing. They were essential to our understanding of local dynamics, helping us learn about different ways of living and organize town-hall-style meetings with growing resident participation.
Both these leaders and the meetings themselves pointed us toward new languages, new tools for dialogue, and the establishment of mutual trust. Although this participation gained momentum for a time, the eviction of families from Block 36 caused a major breakdown of trust in the plan's capacity to actually change reality, making it very difficult to continue the participatory process.
The Challenges of Language
“It seems to me that there is nothing more urgent than for us to start creating a new language. A vocabulary in which we can all find ourselves in the human condition” (Kilomba, 2019)
Language is perhaps one of the central challenges of our profession. Today, our vocabulary and forms of expression are anchored in a specific type of knowledge and discipline. Rather than communicating, this jargon serves to demarcate boundaries and reaffirm a position of dominance held by those with specialized knowledge over others. Instead of building bridges, language has been a major barrier, hindering mediation between the field of architecture and urbanism and the other subjects who, for one reason or another, must interact with our practice. Traditional urban planning jargon like "identifying actors" (as if they did not already exist) and "diagnosis" (as if there were a disease to be cured) are just a few examples of how our language positions us as the sole possessors of knowledge—at the center, speaking with authority and power. It is contradictory when discourses opposing sanitizing public policies rely on a technical language so inaccessible and top-down that it becomes, in itself, sanitizing and co-opting.
Even reading a territory through maps is an exercise that presupposes a certain mastery of cartographic language and some spatial awareness. Although these are indispensable tools for plans like those Mundaréu da Luz aimed to build collectively, it is essential to rethink the aesthetics and usage of these and other materials. No matter how natural their use may be in technical environments to support readings and proposals, the application of certain tools—of which maps are a prime example—must be carefully planned so that they do not have the opposite effect, alienating instead of informing and mobilizing.
We must create a space and a language guided by different premises—ones that bring us closer, enabling dialogue and exchange without co-optation or capture. A language that recognizes everyone as subjects, that is, "those who have the right to define their own realities, establish their own identities, and name their histories" (Hooks, 1989 as cited in Kilomba, 2019). A language that presupposes listening. Because "listening is, in this sense, the act of authorization toward the speaker. One can (only) speak when their voice is heard. In this dialectic, those who are heard are also those who 'belong.' And those who are not heard become those who 'do not belong'" (Kilomba, 2019).
Mapping Desires, Revealing Conflicts
Identifying the experiences and desires of those who live in and are affected daily by that area was an ongoing effort throughout the process. During collective meetings, we also realized that residents had many questions about what was actually happening on the ground, what the government was planning for the area, whether there were alternatives, and, above all, the timeline for the evictions and how to prevent or end the daily violence by the police and the GCM (Metropolitan Civil Guard).
Many of the residents' questions were ours as well, and we had no answers to offer. Together, we built alternatives, designed possibilities, and coordinated tools. It was out of these conflicts that the proposal for the "Rights Desk" (Balcão de Direitos) recently emerged. This is an ongoing, free service provided by the Brazilian Bar Association (OAB), which is also part of Mundaréu, to organize complaints and offer legal guidance not only to residents of the neighborhood but to the entire city.
Defining the Proposals
Since the purpose of this coalition was not just to react to the violations observed in the region, but also to propose alternative urban and social transformations that would not exclude the local population, Mundaréu sought to construct a different narrative for the future through the plan. Drawing from mappings done during street actions, collective meetings, field surveys, and other tools, we collectively organized the popular plan Campos Elíseos Vivo.
The plan sought to address the demands gathered from residents and business owners, organizing them into various proposals addressing urban planning issues—such as housing and public space—as well as employment, income generation, professional training, and, one of the most sensitive points of the process, psychosocial care and harm reduction. Despite the community-led nature of the collective planning process within the Mundaréu Forum, its guidelines were backed by metrics, budgets, and even preliminary designs, given the leverage that a more technically grounded proposal can provide when contesting narratives against official government plans.
In short, we drew on the strengths identified on the ground (spaces of sociability, usage dynamics, socio-spatial complexity, surrounding vacant properties), the desires expressed by political subjects (workshops, community gardens, collective housing, shared spaces), and programmatic gaps (retail space, social leasing, and therapeutic housing proposals) to formulate a set of guidelines and designs anchored in real opportunities for transformation, driven by the active participation and leadership of those who actually live in the region.
At the core of the proposal is the "key-to-key" concept: no one can be displaced without first having another unit (temporary or permanent) built for them, at a price and size compatible with each family's needs (including people struggling with substance abuse, hence the therapeutic housing), within a one-kilometer radius of the three blocks. Our survey proved that it is possible to build housing in the central region without displacing people or demolishing buildings, as the Housing PPP has been doing in Campos Elíseos: the inventory of vacant land revealed space for more than 2,000 new housing units, combined with mixed-use ground floors to ensure the viability of daily life support activities and programs.
Despite proving the urbanistic and economic viability of the proposal, showing available budget sources, and pointing out the savings from reduced land acquisition costs, Campos Elíseos Vivo still remains in the realm of ideals and struggle. We are absolutely certain that another reality is possible and viable! But what is stopping it from happening?
Engagement with Public Authorities
Dialogue with public authorities also permeated the entire process of drafting the plan, whether to halt evictions, denounce and demand an end to daily violence by the GCM and military police, or to plant the seeds for municipal or state adoption of the project and engagement with local actors. In this regard, one of our key strategies was to join the ZEIS Management Councils covering those blocks. It was in these spaces that the government was forced to open up to some dialogue with local political subjects, fostering a minimum of transparency and listening, and expanding and improving assistance for the impacted families.
However, the Councils were not enough to engage the municipal and state administrations. It was also necessary to turn to the Public Prosecutor's Office and the São Paulo State Public Defender's Office to take legal action. Through a public hearing convened by the Public Prosecutor's Office alongside the Municipal Housing Secretariat (SEHAB), we secured a public commitment to expand housing assistance options, including larger home acquisition subsidies for very low-income families, social leasing, and promises of housing for families from the three blocks within the housing PPP.
Constant changes in the leadership and staff at SEHAB have made relations with the government even more complex. Since 2017, three different secretaries have led the department, alongside systematic turnover in the secretariat's technical staff. With each change, the Mundaréu Forum seeks to reintroduce the proposal, secure the baseline agreements made with the previous team, and push forward to consolidate the new demands outlined in the community-led plan with public officials.
Reflections and Challenges
The assessment of these past two years of coalition-building is filled with both progress and setbacks. The clearing of Block 36, for example, not only erased an entire city block in the city center without any guarantee that all families would receive adequate assistance, but also triggered a breakdown of trust, followed by a loss of local organization among residents.
On the other hand, the formation of the Management Councils, the expansion of assistance formats (social leasing and subsidies), the strengthening of recognized local leaders (now also active in other central areas), and the inclusion of residents previously ignored by the City's housing registry represent small victories that, along with recent awards, deserve to be celebrated.
Still, there is a long road ahead—whether to secure support for those who have not yet received it, guarantee the "key-to-key" transition for those not yet displaced, effectively expand housing programs and funding lines, or strengthen our relationship with local political subjects, who are the true protagonists of this historic process of resistance.
This joint process of building an alternative urban project also leaves us with other reflections, especially regarding our role as architects. Our main challenge goes beyond understanding and organizing local demands, even if this basic task (it must be said) is persistently neglected in our profession. The process of engagement and participation cannot be understood as an optional phase, but as a prerequisite for collective—and democratic—construction in any action aimed at discussing, transforming, and redefining urban spaces.
Understanding that technical design is not dissociated from political practice is the first step in reflecting on our work. The architectural line, so celebrated as an almost divine force in design, is not neutral; it can carry a desire for social transformation or reinforce oppressive systems. Recognizing the limits of our practice means strengthening its potential, including the constant and necessary exercise of dialogue and exchange with other forms of knowledge—not just those shaped by other academic disciplines. It was with this goal that we launched a network of Popular Plans through a national seminar that culminated in a digital publication.
The challenges go further. We were taught to think of the city based on universal subjects like the Modulor. We must admit that this is who we see and envision when we think of urban models. Even when we discuss the social role of the architect and urban planner, this discussion is rarely racialized; that is, we continue with the logic that the Modulor is the universal subject. We struggle to understand that class also informs race and gender (Davis, 2016). In this sense, it is essential to expand our horizons, racialize the discussion, understand our place in the debate, and use our tools to make those who refuse to "listen" "hear." After all, "when there is an asymmetry of groups in power, there are also asymmetries in the access groups have to resources necessary to implement their own voices" (Collins, 2000 as cited in Kilomba, 2019).
For deviant bodies have always been shouting, organizing, moving, and constantly reinventing a different model of the city—whether by promoting occupations of vacant properties, like the 9 de Julho occupation (central São Paulo); creating spaces of Black resistance (aquilombamentos) like Aparelha Luzia (in Campos Elíseos); using and reclaiming public spaces where the LGBTQIA+ population is free to be and express themselves, such as Largo do Arouche; or shaping cultural movements that occupy, contemplate, and challenge street use, like rap, samba, and funk. Yet the hegemonic system does not want to hear them. It wants to silence them—through criminalization, evictions, and extermination.
We must ensure that our tools in architecture and urbanism strengthen these movements, foster plurality and democracy, and promote the formation of subjects rather than operating in favor of the apparatuses of capture (Deleuze, 1980) that homogenize, flatten, simplify, and erase our diversity.
The protagonists for reinventing the meaning of architecture and urbanism are already organized. Now, it is up to us to decide which side of history we will be on.
Notes
1. Maya is a pseudonym used to protect the real identity of one of the residents of Campos Elíseos.
2. Municipal Law 16.050/2014.
3. Housing credit vouchers (Letters of Credit) are financing of up to R$150,000 offered by the CDHU (State Housing and Urban Development Company) to families from Block 36 with incomes of 1 to 10 minimum wages, who do not own property, have a registered tax ID (CPF) with the Federal Revenue, and have not been assisted by any other housing program.
4. The Modulor was conceived by Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier in 1943 as a universally applicable regulating scale of human measurements. Its metrics govern the dimensioning of all artifacts of modern architecture.
5. Grada Kilomba (2019), drawing on bell hooks (1990), defines the margin as a site of both repression and resistance. According to her, the oppressive system itself shapes the conditions for resistance.
6. The Open Forum Mundaréu da Luz is composed of: Ação da Cidadania, Centro de Convivência É de Lei, Centro Gaspar Garcia de Direitos Humanos, Companhia de Teatro Mungunzá, Companhia de Teatro Pessoal do Faroeste, A Craco Resiste, São Paulo Public Defender's Office (specialized units: Promotion and Defense of Women's Rights - Nudem, Housing and Urbanism - Nehaburb, Citizenship and Human Rights - NECDH, Rights of the Elderly and People with Disabilities - Nediped), FLM – Frente de Luta por Moradia, Frente Estadual de Luta Antimanicomial (Feasp-SP), Goma Oficina, IAB-SP – Institute of Architects of Brazil/São Paulo, INNPD – Black Initiative for a New Drug Policy, Instituto Pólis, LabCidade – Public Space and Right to the City Laboratory/FAUUSP, LabJUTA – Territorial Justice Laboratory/UFABC, LEVV – Violence and Social Vulnerability Studies Laboratory/Mackenzie, residents and merchants from blocks 36, 37, and 38 of the Campos Elíseos neighborhood, Mosaico – Student-Run Design Office of the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism/Mackenzie, Movimento Integra, Eviction Observatory (Observatório de Remoções), A Próxima Companhia de Teatro, REPEP – Rede Paulista de Educação Patrimonial, Sã Consciência, and UMM – União dos Movimentos de Moradia.
Felipe Moreira
Architect and urban planner. Researcher at the Polis Institute. ZEIS Counselor for Block 36 in Campos Elíseos (São Paulo/SP).
Vitor Nisida
Architect and urban planner. Researcher at the Polis Institute. ZEIS Counselor for Blocks 37 and 38 in Campos Elíseos (São Paulo/SP).
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This article was written by Felipe Moreira e Vitor Nisida. The translation is powered by AI.
