Articles

The approval of the controversial draft legislation dubbed the “Lei do Puxadinho” in mid-2020, which relaxed zoning parameters in the city of Rio de Janeiro, sparked widespread debate across various sectors of society—particularly among architects and urban planners, many of whom have strongly criticized the proposal. The debate, however, intensified even further when, under the auspices of this law, a surprise amendment was published in the Official Gazette. This amendment temporarily lifted several restrictions on the Buraco do Lume site, which is adjacent to the square officially named Praça Mário Lago—an important venue for political demonstrations in the city, landmarked by the municipality in 1989 and by the state government in 2019.

The relationship between the market and the state has traditionally been understood as a three-tiered framework. The state guarantees property rights and other preconditions for markets. Markets operate within this structure and deliver efficient outcomes. The state corrects market failures through complementary institutions, such as, in some cases, social welfare policies. Managing cities is no different, and issues such as economic development, accessibility to goods and services, mobility, sustainability, freedom, and well-being depend on the relationship between markets and the state.

Who could have predicted 2020? Even at the beginning of the year, when the existence of a new coronavirus was already known, it was hard to imagine that the world would undergo so many changes. The impacts were not limited to health; they spread to behavior, the economy, and many other aspects of life on the planet, including the environment.

At this point, it is impossible to predict how vaccines against the virus might change humanity's destiny over the coming year, or what Brazil's trajectory will be in recovering from the crisis caused by Covid-19. The year 2021 begins with this mix of uncertainty and expectation—and a strong sense of urgency. January also marks the start of a new decade fraught with major challenges such as the climate emergency, the need to transition to cleaner economies, the imperative to transform our relationship with forests and land use, reimagining urban spaces, and the struggle to reduce inequality and systemic racism, among many others.

Skylines are icons that intrigue people through their urban complexity, shaping character and defining a sense of place. As Kevin Lynch noted in his classic “The Image of the City,” the visual landscape of a city can be treated as an object of varied, unpredictable meanings. While we can envision a clear image when building a city, its true definitions emerge indirectly over the course of its development. In other words, as cities evolve, their skylines evolve alongside them in unpredictable ways.

+ 6

Videos

In 2017, Escola da Cidade—through its Seminar on Culture and Contemporary Reality course, then coordinated by Professor José Guilherme Pereira—welcomed anthropologist and PhD in Social Sciences Manuela Carneiro da Cunha to discuss the history, spatialization, and daily life of Indigenous peoples in Brazil, highlighting issues from not only a cultural standpoint, but also a legal and environmental one.

Just as urban infrastructure can be defined as the network of structures and services required for cities to function efficiently, green infrastructure can also be understood as an interconnected network of areas and elements that preserve the value and function of natural ecosystems. One of the many definitions of green infrastructure posits that this constituent network enhances water and air quality, in addition to providing a range of benefits for both people and wildlife.

+ 1

+ 2

By no means does this text intend to refute or disparage the recently published article The Life and Death of Tiny Houses, but rather to offer the reader alternative perspectives and an expansion on the theme—one of the core principles of architectural criticism. To this end, the text is structured around two axes that analyze several points raised by the original author.

Bicycle infrastructure has grown rapidly in Latin American cities over the last decade. Cities like Bogotá and Santiago have more than doubled the extent of their bike networks. This is promising news, as studies show that cities prioritizing safe infrastructure record significant reductions in cyclist deaths and injuries and gain considerable economic benefits from reduced traffic congestion and fewer sick leave requests.

Nevertheless, much of the existing bicycle infrastructure in Latin American cities was built on local and secondary roads. While implementation may be easier on less busy streets, this approach also reduces the efficiency and overall impact of cycling, in addition to creating safety issues. Cyclists tend to seek shortcuts and the most direct routes, potentially leading to dangerous interactions with cars when they enter arterial roads not designed for non-motorized transport.

Self-described as a movement united around the idea that the physical environment can directly impact the creation of more prosperous and happier lives for its inhabitants, New Urbanism emerged as a concept in the United States in the 1990s and became consolidated through the Congresses for the New Urbanism (CNU), held annually since 1993.

In 1996, three years after the First Congress for the New Urbanism, the Charter of the New Urbanism was launched with the goal of establishing the guiding ideals and principles of the movement and, in doing so, exploring the possibilities for the development of American cities.

+ 1

Architecture carries a strong archetype, one in which its purpose seems larger than the discipline itself. Embellished by a poetic image, its practitioners embody the symbol of great inventors who conceive space and establish new ways of living in society. It is undoubtedly an alluring trade, and one that certainly shapes the daily life of any culture. Yet it is increasingly marked by illusion and disappointment in a market that seems to gradually distance itself from theory and close itself off in niches of its own creation. Under ever-growing competition that fails to yield a significant improvement in the quality of what is produced, working in architecture gradually translates into frustration and insecurity.

+ 19

The orthogonal grid is the manifestation of a principle of order, a condition reinforced by the repetition of elements that express the structural rationality embedded in an aesthetic system. There is also a sense of freedom celebrated by decoupling structure from walls which, combined with pragmatic efficiency, keeps structural grids a constant presence in buildings of various scales both in Brazil and around the world.

In technical terms, structural grids are composed of linear elements—specifically beams—situated on a single plane to form a mesh capable of resisting structural loads. Typically, they feature regular spacing crossing at right angles, with dimensions that vary depending on the material used.

The year 2020 brought with it a whirlwind of challenges, calling many aspects of daily life into question. Marked by the pandemic, we all had to reinvent ourselves in some way to weather this unprecedented moment. It was no different for the city. COVID-19, like other infectious diseases (the Black Death, the Spanish flu, etc.), laid bare the relationship between its spread and urbanization. This is an easy analysis to make when data shows that the spread of the virus has been far greater in large urban centers.

In this regard, the health crisis has sparked discussions about the urbanization model to which our cities are subjected—a model of dispersed sprawl that prioritizes automobile mobility. Wilson Ribeiro dos Santos, a professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at PUC-Campinas, in an article co-authored with Sidney Piocchi Bernardini and Gabriela Celani, states that this urbanization model—where commerce and services are concentrated in the city center, while strictly residential areas and gated communities are located on the periphery—ended up accelerating the spread of the virus. This is because people from all parts of the city must travel daily to the same central area to work, study, visit the doctor, shop, and so on.

Promoting homeownership as an investment strategy is a risky proposition. No financial advisor would recommend taking on debt to put such a large portion of your savings into a single financial asset, whatever it may be, as it represents a major concentration of risk.

Worse still, this risk is not random: it falls most heavily on low-income buyers, who receive worse financing terms and whose neighborhoods are systematically more likely to have lower or even declining home values, leading to devastating consequences for the racial wealth gap.

Cities are changing in many ways—some, fortunately, for the better. More Brazilians have come to see the bicycle as the best choice for urban mobility, and 67% of people would swap their cars or motorcycles for cleaner transit alternatives. While public perception of air quality is discouraging, awareness of climate change has grown, and 92% of people want electric buses in their cities.

TEIA re(p)resents the city of São Paulo through a comic book narrative. The characters were developed as protagonists based on an empirical selection of twelve neighborhoods key to the city's history, whose residents served as the foundation for the character archetypes in the script. The graphic novel format provided the ideal medium to develop a language that allows for spatial thinking about the urban context and the observation of human relationships within this created and illustrated universe, highlighting its role as a communicative medium. Beyond experiencing and understanding the neighborhoods, the project aimed to explore the notion of belonging. The in situ experience in the neighborhoods and spontaneous conversations with residents—who served as references for the protagonists—allowed the narrative to reflect on the difference between being (of a place) and existing (in a place) in Brazil's most populous and diverse metropolis.

Shortly before taking office in January 2020, Mayor Claudia López committed to redesigning a major arterial road in Bogotá, aiming to transform it into a green corridor for active and sustainable mobility. To do so, the mayor also pledged to promote a planning process with broad public participation—a rather daunting task in a city of nine million people.

Known since the 16th century as Calle Real, Avenida Séptima is widely considered Bogotá's most important thoroughfare, stretching 23 kilometers and traversing the city's eastern zone. It is perhaps the only road that runs through every income bracket in the municipality, from the poorest to the very wealthy. It is also the most hotly debated space in the Colombian capital.

In a past life, I completed a master's degree in semiotics, where I learned to pay attention to the words we choose. For example, open any book on Brazilian architecture and you will find subtitles that help organize our built environment chronologically: Indigenous Architecture, Colonial Brazilian Architecture, Imperial Brazilian Architecture, Brazilian Modern Architecture, Contemporary Architecture in Brazil. Notice the subtle difference: the word *Brazil*, which names this land, appears in every post-colonial period, but is absent from the one representing the original way of building in this place. 

+ 12

+ 7

In recent years, public agencies, architects, and urban planners worldwide have increasingly debated the future of cities, reflecting on the directions contemporary urban planning must take to address a complex web of urban and social challenges. However, one question continues to dominate professional discourse: how can we create spaces capable of improving quality of life and health in the public realm without relying on large-scale infrastructure projects?

In response, several movements have emerged, attempting to implement simple actions that foster the development of “new” public spaces to meet the immediate demand for high-quality urban environments. These initiatives suggest that future cities will become increasingly inviting, championing a closer relationship between pedestrians and the street. Examples of these interventions include the implementation of parklets; the temporary closure of avenues to vehicular traffic, opening them to pedestrians and turning them into open areas like temporary urban parks; the installation and expansion of bike lanes; urban vertical gardens; and pocket parks.