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Ecological Urbanism in Latin America
Harvard Graduate School of Design and GG, 2019.
Co-edited by Mohsen Mostafavi, Gareth Doherty, Marina Correia, Ana Maria Duran and Luis Valenzuela.
Exhibition at Museu da Casa Brasileira, São Paulo 2020
Introduction
by Marina Correia
Originally published in Portuguese and Spanish
Translated by the author
The socio-spatial development of Latin America today appears as a project of reconciliation.
An exuberant modernism paired with a deficient modernization characterize the legacy of an explosive process of industrialization.[i]Projective urban practices are faced with the task of working simultaneously towards the past and the future, as the integration of new technologies and innovation in urban practices in Latin America are profoundly affected by the need to democratize the provision of basic infrastructures.
Ecological Urbanism is an initiative started at Harvard Graduate School of Design based on the premise that design may provide a synthetic key to connect ecology and urbanism, as an imaginative and practical method to address climate change and sustainability in the urban environment. Ecology is understood as an ethico-political project, encompassing the environment, its social relations and human subjectivity.[ii] The multiplicity of voices and modes of practice gathered here originate from a series of conversations on Ecological Urbanism which took place following the launch of the Spanish and Portuguese editions of the book in 2014. Given the geographic amplitude of Latin America and its cultural heterogeneity, these case studies and reflections are shown as representatives of local discourses and practices, not as their synthesis.
The challenge to simultaneously reconcile a deficient modernization and develop new strategies towards a more equitable and sustainable environment is discussed in the chapters Antecipar and Curar,[iii] understood both as foreseeing and healing. Their content pivots around the concepts of inequality and visibility. With relation to inequality, we have discussed an awareness gap, the need to generate mechanisms to denounce the scale of socio-spatial segregation and the potential to address these issues by first making them apparent. Measuring inequality, mapping invisible physical, political, social and educational divisions is a fundamental step to be taken not only as a planning tool, but also to promote awareness and educate segments of society that are not engaging with transforming this scenario. In many countries of Latin America, the economic elite is closely tied to transnational capital and does not coincide with the cultural elite. This fragmentation delays mobilization and decreases our resources for activism, as the most critical segments of our societies don't often interact with its higher forces of economic development. Ecological Urbanism in Latin America suggests that the urban and the political be discussed as one single project, by approximating the spheres of governance and urban design.
“It’s less about directly a kind of urbanism and more about leadership, political leadership. This is what we have to talk about. How do you participate when you don’t have education about the environment, when you don’t have access to work or to a way of making a life? It is important that institutions begin to work to measure inequality. This is really important and necessary.” [iv]
- Anita Berrizbeitia
The works presented in the chapters Colaborar and Mobilizar address most centrally the concepts of borders and mobility. These themes are addressed in their concrete, physical dimension, but also as processes that are tied to the notion of social transformation, freedom and the resources to grow, move and interact with citizenship. In these sections, we included practices that have been able to bridge communication gaps and stitch sectors of society, which are physically or politically disengaged. Mobility and the territorial integration of the city from its peripheries is discussed in the texts by Diane Davis, Erminia Maricato and Nelson Brissac. In São Paulo in 2014, a large section of our discussion focused on the borders of the city, the peripheral distribution of poverty, spatial segregation and accessibility.[v]
“The edges of the city are an undetermined space. An area that articulates the city and the rural, the built and nature, the used and the discarded. The periphery seems distant, but it’s the means, the in-between. To be inside, among things. It’s the interstice, the terrain vague, yet densely occupied.” [vi] -Nelson Brissac
The collaborative responses to these challenges reveal methodologies of work which can be instrumental in contexts of social and physical vulnerability. They often emerge “from the ground” and don’t rely on government initiatives to promote new forms of interaction between individual and collective resources. This inability to count on political structures and the instability it brings appear now in the horizon of many regions of the world, which were in the past more politically stable or less susceptible to social and environmental pressures. In the context of this shift, Latin American practices may contribute with models of collaboration that are capable of activating socio-spatial transformations to mediate inequality, working from the grounds of society into its infrastructures of governance. The section Incluir highlights this dynamics. We included practices originated from a diverse spectrum of collaborative structures, ranging from self-organized, non-governmental groups to government policies and articulations by private institutions. The fluid dynamics of these models also reveal an imperative of processes and change over the apprehension of static, permanent realities.
In the chapter Sentir we present contemporary discourses that challenge the placement of design and “the social” at opposite ends of the spectrum of our disciplines. They operate towards the development of new cultural imaginaries, formulating visions of life in the city as a project of critique and poetic investigation of identities and cultures. Contemporary avant-garde practices in Latin America address “the city” in both physical and cultural dimensions, moving across the disciplinary boundaries of architecture, visual arts, politics and literature. The contribution of Angelo Bucci (SPBR), Arquitetos Associados, Barclay and Crousse, Carla Juaçaba and Solano Benitez, among others, reveal a balancing act among soft and hard realities, a juggling between the imaginary, technology and economy, as a Latin American virtue, central and explicit in these contemporary practices. The writing of Giannina Braschi is a moment of sensorial inflection, an encounter intended to highlight the fictional dimension of urban practices. The works of Carlos Cruz-Diez, Nuno Ramos, Roberta Carvalho and Tomas Saraceno, among others, appear as manifestos, revealing nuances of cultural imaginaries by proposing new frictions between the ethic and the aesthetic forces shaping our urban environment.
“Sí, es cierto. Las preguntas no cambian la verdad. Pero le dan movimiento.”[vii]
- Giannina Braschi
[i] Nestor Garcia Canclini. Hybrid Cultures, P42.
[ii] Mohsen Mostafavi, Why Ecological Urbanism, Why Now. Felix Guattari’s concept of “ecosophy” is developed in the form of three ecological registers: environment, social relations and human subjectivity.
[iii] The original verb in Ecological Urbanism is Curate, which we opted to translate as Curar, signifying also “to heal”.
[iv] “Devemos discutir menos um tipo de urbanismo, propriamente dito, e mais a liderança, liderança política. É sobre isso que temos de falar. Como você participa se você não tem educação sobre meio ambiente, se você não tem acesso ao trabalho ou uma forma de ganhar a vida? É importante que instituições comecem a trabalhar para medir as desigualdades. Isso é realmente importante e necessário.” Symposium in Cambridge 2017.
[v] See “As Bordas da Cidade”, a publication by the SDMU of SP formulated after this panel.
[vi] Text by Nelson Brissac:
[vii] " You're right. Questions don't change the truth. But they give it movement."