Thesis: 'In_formal Spaces - Perspectives on Urban Development in Rio de Janeiro'
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Abstract
The purpose of this research is to understand the theoretical discours around rapid urbanization in Brazil, with particular regard for urban poverty. I investigate, what I have called ‘the paradox of urbanization’; the outcome of a process in which the qualitative impulses - improvements of urbanization, such as public infrastructure and facilities - are planned and implemented in central neighborhoods, while the quantitative rate of urbanization - the strongest growth of the city in terms of residents - takes place in the peripheries of the city. The paradox of urbanization is that qualitative urbanization does not follow the logic of quantitative urbanization.
In Rio de Janeiro the paradox of urbanization has resulted in a divided city, in which rich and poor neighborhoods are separated and exist as closed and partially autonomous communities. The prosperous central neighborhoods were facilitated with parks, pavements, and public buildings, while the peripheries were developed with private means: residents paved their own sidewalks, and companies provided collective buildings and facilities. Architectural artefacts in the poor peripheral neighborhoods were designed following significantly lower standards than in the prosperous neighborhoods. This culture relativist approach is what Ananya Roy called ‘the aesthetization of poverty’.
The modernist dichotomies in Rio de Janeiro - such as slum/formal neighborhood, hills/flat lands, and asphalt/dirt roads - were pushed to extremes when the city experienced its largest growth rates in the mid-20th Century. The priviliged central districts urbanized with public means, while the poor urban neighborhoods developed without planning on the edges of the city, and did not benifit from increasing prosperity of the city. Today, in the hyper-modernized city, these extremes still exist, but they are concealed in an ambiguous domain of private and public spaces; the role of the governement in the peripheral neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro is limited, and the public voids that have emerged in the peripheries are filled in by private parties; today’s spaces that are perceived as public spaces in Rio de Janeiro’s peripheries are shopping malls.
In response to the work of Ananya Roy, I propose a role for architects and planners that I shall indicate as ‘the aesthetization of urbanity’. I propose that architects and planners should create spaces for public functions, in which the architectural qualitity transcends the interest of a particular local community, and adopt the common norms of society as a standard for their representation. The aesthetization of urbanity is a response to community based, self-help projects: using similar architectural means in the peripheral zones as one would use in the centre, to give the peripheries a qualitative impulse beyond local interests, and make the peripheries an integral and established part of the city. The qualitative improvements in the peripheries should be of substantial architectural quality as a representation of state interest in the poor peripheries, should be in the interest of society as a whole and not only a local community, and should create opportunities for residents in the peripheries of the city through public means.
Scholars that have been of influence for me in this thesis include Ananya Roy, Nezar AlSayyad, Amartya Sen, Karl Popper, and Michel Foucault. The historical and site-specific knowledge derives from field-research and mapping, as well as publications by James Holston, Teresa Meade, Janice Perlman, Daniela Fabricius, Edisio Fernandes, Licia Valladares, Alfred Agache, Constantinos Doxiadis, John Turner, among others, and institutional reports and municipal resources.
