Where do the city, architecture, autonomy, and education meet?

Since the 2013 protests, there has been a clear resurgence of the concept of the public sphere in Brazil, particularly in metropolises like São Paulo. Within a context of speculation and a commodified city—where both spaces and public services are driven by capital accumulation, and where public authority operates merely as power rather than in the public interest—a growing movement to reclaim urban spaces by previously marginalized actors has emerged.

These legitimate movements reclaim often abandoned or “empty” spaces, repurposing and activating them to give these assets a social function. In addition to enriching these spaces and turning them into practiced places (CERTEAU, 2007), these insurgent actions foster a different kind of relationship: one that is not based on ownership, commercialization, individualization, and exclusion, but rather on solidarity, care, and a sense of belonging to the community created there. Yet historically, these social organizations have also been criminalized or stigmatized by mainstream media and society at large.

We must urgently open our eyes and arms: to listen to what is emerging, recognize the value driving these desires, welcome these expressions, and protect these sociocultural territories where new ways of living and relating are being reinvented. Demarcating public, common land is essential: it is everyone's right and duty to preserve and care for it, ensuring it is not depleted, exploited, or commodified. How can we preserve and protect these contested community territories? What would it look like to use architecture as a tool to decentralize power and fight for the right to the city through community initiatives? The current management model for cities, public spaces, and facilities does not allow for shared governance with the population. What, then, would it mean to envision an architectural and urban planning practice that fosters autonomy?

Since the 1980s in Latin America, through Uruguayan housing cooperatives and technical assistance to social movements on the outskirts of São Paulo, various alternatives based on critical, collective, and innovative spatial practices have been developed and prototyped, pointing toward experiences of democracy in action and processes of social emancipation. Furthermore, for years, various peripheral and minority [1] movements have been emerging, fighting for their right to exist, amplifying their voices, and occupying new spaces in the city. These efforts activate learning territories: insurgencies, spaces of (r)existence, autonomy, solidarity, and community, characterized by care and mutual support among diverse groups—including cultural movements reclaiming ancestry, permaculture and food sovereignty, struggles for housing and land, LGBTQ+ groups, women, immigrants, Indigenous peoples, Black populations, unhoused people, substance users, mental health advocates, and children and adolescents. What do we need to map these geographies of affect, expand dialogue among historically oppressed social groups, and build a struggle for human rights through a broad agenda?

The variety of social infrastructure alternatives created autonomously and by communities highlights the need for architects to engage directly with the territory to strengthen social transformation. Through their respective practices, Instituto A Cidade Precisa de Você and Escola Sem Muros have investigated ways to design new strategies for city-making alongside local communities, rooted in their territories from the bottom up—using decentralized public policies for direct participation and more horizontal, collaborative, and situated modes of production. To achieve alternative practices, a different learning process is essential—one that moves beyond the isolated pedagogical approaches confined within university walls and disconnected from social reality.

Where do city, architecture, autonomy, and education meet? How can we recognize and value common spaces and the learning experiences that take place within them? What histories do community spaces carry? How can we decolonize the imagination and cultivate autonomous learning territories? How do we build curricula grounded in real-world practice? What tools are used to produce knowledge from experience? What assemblages are necessary to build and protect autonomous territories? How do we co-create and co-manage the city?

The seminar “Architecture for Autonomy: Activating Learning Territories,” taking place in São Paulo from March 29 to 31, 2019, aims to create a space for dialogue and collective knowledge production. It will demonstrate alternative ways of practicing that put the profession's social function into action, addressing contemporary territorial disputes and the activation of networks of exchange and affect. In the face of a crisis, the event seeks to investigate accessible architecture and libertarian modes of production based on collective construction, free labor, and the building site as a school.

This event aims to bring the practice and teaching of architecture and urbanism—currently highly restricted to academia—to the forefront, emphasizing the fundamental relationship between theory and practice, and strengthening reflection-in-action initiatives outside university walls. The goal is to connect existing initiatives that share this critical view, enabling the exchange of experiences and fostering new practices that may emerge from these encounters. To this end, the traditional academic seminar model is challenged in favor of a series of hands-on activities, thematic panel discussions, and self-managed spaces from which collective intelligence can emerge.

The seminar is a joint initiative of Instituto A Cidade Precisa de Você and the Escola Sem Muros program. Held in partnership with several technical assistance offices, educators, collectives, movements, and community spaces from São Paulo and across Brazil, the seminar is supported by CAU/SP through Collaboration Agreement No. 020/2018, established with the Council via Public Call for Proposals No. 001/2018.

Following the event, a publication will be produced documenting practical experiences that are developing autonomous architecture and helping to activate and strengthen learning territories, building a shared narrative of *bem viver* (good living) in cities as a Latin American utopia.

Notes
1. Minorities not in terms of quantity, but in relation to the representation of these identity groups within established and institutionalized power.