Edge city: Driving the periphery of São Paulo.
4/5
()
About this ebook
Justin McGuirk
Justin McGuirk is a writer and curator, and has worked as the Guardian's design columnist and the editor of Icon magazine. He is also the director of Strelka Press and the design consultant to Domus, and his writing has appeared in the Observer, the Times, Disegno, Art Review, Cond� Nast Traveller, Form, the Architects Journal, Architecture d'Aujourd'hui. In 2012 he was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture for an exhibition he curated with Urban Think Tank.
Read more from Justin Mc Guirk
Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRadical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to Edge city
Related ebooks
The Lure of the City: From Slums to Suburbs Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHoles In The Whole: Introduction to the Urban Revolutions Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Across the plaza. The public voids of the post-soviet city Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAestheticizing Public Space: Street Visual Politics in East Asian Cities Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTowards the City of Thresholds Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEvil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Filming the City: Urban Documents, Design Practices & Social Criticism through the Lens Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsClean Living Under Difficult Circumstances: Finding a Home in the Ruins of Modernism Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Building Globalization: Transnational Architecture Production in Urban China Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value - New Edition Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe World in a Selfie: An Inquiry into the Tourist Age Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAll Over the Map: Writing on Buildings and Cities Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra-Thin: Architecture and Capitalism in the 21st Century Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsVanguardia: Socially engaged art and theory Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNine Lives A Journey through Life Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCultural Quarters: Principles and Practice Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTuff City: Urban Change and Contested Space in Central Naples Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCommon spaces of urban emancipation Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCommon Ground in a Liquid City: Essays in Defense of an Urban Future Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Switzerland: Deep Urbanism for an Age of Disruption Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGeographies of Digital Exclusion: Data and Inequality Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsExtrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Vanishing Streets: Journeys in London Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCurating (Post-)Socialist Environments Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAmerican Architecture and Urbanism Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Commonist Horizon: Futures Beyond Capitalist Urbanization Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTerritory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Economy of Affordances Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDesigning Disorder: Experiments and Disruptions in the City Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
Architecture For You
The New Bohemians Handbook: Come Home to Good Vibes Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Get Your House Right: Architectural Elements to Use & Avoid Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cozy Minimalist Home: More Style, Less Stuff Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Little Book of Living Small Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5How to Fix Absolutely Anything: A Homeowner's Guide Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Architecture 101: From Frank Gehry to Ziggurats, an Essential Guide to Building Styles and Materials Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Build Shipping Container Homes With Plans Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Become An Exceptional Designer: Effective Colour Selection For You And Your Client Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Flatland Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Feng Shui Modern Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Martha Stewart's Organizing: The Manual for Bringing Order to Your Life, Home & Routines Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Making Midcentury Modern Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Home Sweet Maison: The French Art of Making a Home Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Nesting Place: It Doesn't Have to Be Perfect to Be Beautiful Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Solar Power Demystified: The Beginners Guide To Solar Power, Energy Independence And Lower Bills Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5House Beautiful: Colors for Your Home: The Ultimate Guide to Choosing Paint Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLive Beautiful Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Welcome Home: A Cozy Minimalist Guide to Decorating and Hosting All Year Round Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDown to Earth: Laid-back Interiors for Modern Living Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Shinto the Kami Way Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Decorate: 1,000 Professional Design Ideas for Every Room in Your Home Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Year-Round Solar Greenhouse: How to Design and Build a Net-Zero Energy Greenhouse Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Frommer's Athens and the Greek Islands Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDisney's Land: Walt Disney and the Invention of the Amusement Park That Changed the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Architecture and How to Sketch it - Illustrated by Sketches of Typical Examples Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5
Reviews for Edge city
1 rating0 reviews
Book preview
Edge city - Justin McGuirk
Photography by Thelma Vilas Boas
Municipal housing on the outskirts of São Paulo
São Paulo, the largest city in South America, is an arsenal of statistics for the shock-and-awe urbanist. You might read that São Paulo is a megacity of 19 million people, and that it has grown 8,000 per cent since 1900. Does that help us understand the city? Does it reveal some essential characteristic? In a limited sense, yes, but it also reinforces what we already know. Speed has always been this city’s raison d’être. In Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote of his time there in 1935: The town is developing so fast that it is impossible to obtain a map of it.
In the middle of the 20th century, when the city was the engine of the Brazilian Miracle
, a popular slogan proclaimed São Paulo must not stop
— it was the unstoppable city
.
Today, despite the staggering statistics, São Paulo is slowing down. The population is not growing anywhere near as fast as it used to, but all of that growth is happening in one zone: the periphery. São Paulo’s sprawling fringes reveal a city that is still very much in the making, still somehow raw. It is a place where the sacrifices that people make for access to the city are written into the landscape, into the fabric of their homes. Cities that grow this fast grow in an unconsolidated way, and so while the periphery is full of pathos it is also full of potential.
This is the record of a drive around the periphery of São Paulo. In London Orbital, Iain Sinclair spent months walking the M25, the city’s ring road, in an attempt to understand and embrace the sprawl. I have no such inclinations, and not just because the distances involved are even more perverse. São Paulo is not a city for walking, it’s a city of cars — six million of them. In that spirit, this is emphatically a drive, and as such it is an unapologetically blurred snapshot of a city taken from a moving vehicle, with occasional stops here and there to stretch our legs. But while I doff my cap to Sinclair, in one respect he had it easier: São Paulo has no M25. There are plans for a ring road, the Rodoanel Mario Covas, a 170km-long four-lane motorway. Indeed, one section of it opened in 2002, but the project stalled. Instead we’ll be patching together our own orbital, a spaghetti of roads named Ayrton Senna and Presidente Dutra, Nordestino and Imigrantes — some of these names contain clues as to how this city grew so corpulent.
Our route will take us anti-clockwise around the city, which offers the irresistible conceit that this is a journey backwards in time. In telling the story of social and informal housing in São Paulo, we will start with the conditions that face its most recent arrivals, and work back through other forms of housing that previous decades have offered. As we work backwards through those iterations, a fairly clear picture will emerge of the different strategies the government has taken to house São Paulo’s ever-growing population — and I include favelas in that strategy
. Our trajectory will