Architectural Design V-IX: Central Park Brasilândia (H.Klumpner)

Abstract

How can the de-industrialization of the neighborhood, Brasilândia, provide an opportunity to design a new centrality?How can we transform an abandoned mine into a central park?How can this prototype be evaluated and upscaled into a city-scale green system?

Objective

Students are introduced to tools and immersed in our Chair’s “method-design” to develop their prototypical design projects by: 1) Base-Line: Designing across a continuum of architectural, urban, and planning scales to collaboratively develop a basis for how the city is now. 2) Mapping: Identifying existing and future challenges and opportunities, taking on the stakeholder role, and visualizing demands and resources into three different scenarios. 3) Concept Design: Developing an urbanistic synthesis and translating concepts into an evidence-based prototypical architectural project - intervention. 4) Prototype Design: Presenting the synthesis of the process in time and space on different scales, framed as a narrative, consequentially developed and communicated in analog and digital graphic representations. 5) Upscaling: Testing project concepts and upscaling prototypes through design-policy recommendations to facilitate transferability in São Paulo and other cities. The Design Studio’s thesis revolves around imagining São Paulo as a city committed to Socio-Environmental Justice, local and municipal urban ecosystem adaptation, and promoting a healthy environment and well-being. In the context of climate change, widespread inequalities, and new urban transformation projects, it will be vital to co-design a human-nature-oriented city that invests in the urban regenerative processes, promotes biodiversity and circularity within resource constraints, and balances private and public interest. Undergoing transformation, São Paulo has a range of urban and environmental tools, including the 2014 Master Plan, recognized by UN-Habitat as one of the best practices related to the UN's New Urban Agenda*. Additionally, the city has adopted a Climate Action Plan 2020-2050 outlining objectives for decarbonizing and mitigating inequalities. Despite these initiatives, São Paulo faces the ongoing challenge of translating guidelines into tangible urban and environmental prototypical transformations, particularly at the local scale, involving democratic management mechanisms. Architecture and Urban Design are at the forefront of making transformations visible in preparation for promoting social and environmental justice. The next generation of designers provides places of coexistence, biodiversity, and quality of life, which are essential for human and non-human beings. This way opportunities, traditional and contemporary knowledge, and technologies are translated into new spatialities. Changing the landscape and regenerating open and democratic neighborhoods full of architectural and nature-based opportunities. The Studio will engage with a team of experts and policymakers from the city, members of the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo (FAU-USP), and advocates for urban and environmental causes. *UN-Habitat Brazil, 2016

Content

São Paulo, the second-largest city in the Western Hemisphere, is known for its diverse social, environmental, governmental, and architectonic inequalities. Its urban landscape is in the contrasts, encompassing diverse elements: forests, waterfalls, rural areas, indigenous villages, financial centers with corporate towers, and iconic buildings designed by architects like Lina Bo Bardi, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Oscar Niemeyer, and Villanova Artigas. Also, it features historic buildings from the colonial, modern, and industrial periods alongside informal settlements, often situated in landslide-prone regions and near flood-prone river zones. Socially, Brasilândia is a low-income neighborhood challenged by growing favelas, ongoing infrastructure projects, post-industrial abandoned factories, and minimal green spaces, resulting in the city’s lowest life expectancy rates for its citizens. Environmentally, this neighborhood is at risk of landslides and flooding, limiting access to public spaces and basic services. Regarding justice, the São Paulo Government is committed to the Climate Action Plan 2020-2050, aiming to reduce greenhouse gases, achieve net-zero emissions, and promote resilience in the most vulnerable areas, attempting to develop innovative and sustainable urban prototypes. The learning goal of Central Park Brasilândia is to design a public park addressing three adjacent areas: a zone of favelas along a river, new transport infrastructure, including a metro and highway, and a network of cultural and social facilities. The design studio focuses on the transformative regeneration of the city on three scales: A) City Scale: 1:150.000 / São Paulo as a whole: Mobility network, zoning, water systems, informal settlements, urban and rural zones, environmentally protected areas. B) Regional Scale: 1:20.000 / North Zone: New orange subway line, Special Zones of Social Interest, Serra da Cantareira, High Voltage Power Grid, Informal settlements, Ring Road (Rodoanel), Tietê River and its tributaries. C) Local Scale: 1:2.000 / Project site: Morro Grande Planned Park (abandoned mine) and the former industrial and cultural facilities associated with it, the future Brasilândia metro station, informal settlements, rivers, and green areas, a network of social facilities. Socio-Environmental Justice forms the basis for sustainable development models, like the emerging Central Park in Brasilândia. This is the Design Studio’s foundation for imagining new urban and ecological systems that enhance biodiversity, circularities, agroecology, food production, green jobs, and facilitate diverse community and cultural events. Designing a green and civic metropolitan center in the periphery of São Paulo could become a prototype and a city-scale reference, addressing the climate emergency locally and extending its impact beyond São Paulo and Brazil. In the frame of co-creating new systems of repair, care, resourceful use of, and innovation, São Paulo can re-imagine and re-build its new urban central park as sociocultural and agroecological centrality. This reimagination involves creating innovative spaces for sustainable living for humans and non-humans, fostering participative learning, facilitating knowledge transfer, and contributing to economic development. The aim is to promote social and ecological cohesion and inclusion.

Resources