The (In)-Between

Since the introduction of neoliberalism in the 1980s, housing has transformed from a social good to a market commodity, resulting in housing policies’ focus shifting from resilience to efficiency. The shift greatly affected the Global South, where an overwhelming amount of housing was, and still is, required (Syllabus Intro). Several initiatives aimed to counter the issue through approaches solely focused on resilience. These projects were, however, unable to produce the amount of housing needed. Subsequently, several housing experts recently argued that a trade-off between efficiency and resilience is required to challenge this global phenomenon.

The project investigates the balance between resilience and efficiency through a social housing development in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city. Despite São Paulo not being a poor city, it has one of the world’s most inequitable distributions of wealth. One of the main symptoms of this inequality is a lack of sufficient housing. The project is in Grajau, one of the city’s periphery neighbourhoods. Heterogeneous neighbourhoods, called favelas or irregular settlements, populate the district(Marques and Saraiva 2017, 21). Favelas often consist of dwellings that do not meet adequate housing standards according to Brazilian law. Still, these neighbourhoods provide an opportunity for impoverished families to have a house, presenting somewhat of a solution towards the Brazilian housing crisis.

The research concluded that Brazil’s large socio-economic gap and complicated political history are two of the primary catalyst for the country’s significant housing crisis. The Estatuto da Cidade (City Statute), developed after the fall of the dictatorship, acts as a legal framework to manage and improve the urban development of periphery neighbourhoods. The City Statute includes the Zones Especias de Interesse Social’ (ZEIS, Special Zones of Social Interest). ZEIS identifies areas where infrastructure and degraded properties can be improved, allocates space for public amenities and dedicates unused land for Social Interest Housing (HIS) and Low-Income Market Housing (HMP).

The central concern of the project is the lack of urban integration between Social Housing developments and their surrounding heterogeneous neighbourhoods (favelas and irregular settlements). A combination of fieldwork, theoretical research and comparative analysis, discussed throughout the report, was used to identify the problem. The project challenges the urban segregation between favelas and Social Housing through porous thresholds and careful boundaries. The approach is derived mainly from the work of German philosopher Walter Benjamin, Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck and Brazilian architect Hector Viglecca. The design applies porous thresholds and careful boundaries throughout all design scales, continuously considering the project’s socio-economic, managerial, and environmental impact.