The Informal City in the 21st Century

On 7 April 2010, the Dutch Minister of Transport, Public Works and Water Management Camiel Eurlings, will open the exhibition A Cidade Informal do Séc. XXI in Paraisópolis, in São Paulo, Brazil. It is in here in Paraisópolis, with its 77.000 inhabitants one of the biggest favelas in the city, where over the past two years joint teams of the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) and São Paulo’s Municipal Housing Secretariat (SEHAB) have developed projects aimed at integrating this poor area into the surrounding urban tapestry. These projects will be implemented by the city over the coming year. The exhibition is a collaborative project of IABR and SEHAB, with the ETH in Zurich and São Paulo’s Museu da Casa Brasileira (MCB). It will run from 7 April until 12 May in the MCB while the different projects will also be exhibited at their original locations and in public spaces in São Paulo. The heart of the exhibition at the MCB is formed by Squat, part of Open City: Designing Coexistence, the main exhibition of the recent 4th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) in Rotterdam. The exhibition is complemented by other projects developed by SEHAB that were aimed at bridging the urban divide in the ongoing effort to promote a better and more sustainable future for the city. A Cidade Informal do Séc. XXI, The Informal City in the 21st Century, is an interactive show curated by the Brazilian architect Marisa Barda in which projects produced by both Brazilian and foreign architects are shown by focusing on four themes that best represent the problems of the favelas: Connections, Transitions, Fruition and Transformations. The idea of bringing together projects that (re)design the informal city follows naturally from the projects presented at the Squat exhibition at the 4th IABR, Open City: Designing Coexistence in Rotterdam. Squat, designed by IABR’s sub-curators Rainer Hehl and Jörg Stollmann, focused on projects for Paraisópolis which were developed by six design offices: Urban Think Tank (Venezuela), Elemental (Chile), Christian Kerez(Switzerland), Ciro Pirondi, Marcos Boldarini, and MMBB (Brazil). Other elements of A Cidade Informal do Séc. XXI include the work of students from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University coordinated by Christian Werthman (this project focused on another favela, Cantinho do Ceu, and was presented at the 4th IABR exhibition Parallel Cases//IABR@RDM); the work of students from Columbia University, NY, coordinated by Urban Think Tank (Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner) broaching various aspects of the informal areas in the city of São Paulo; and several projects by students from the Escola da Cidade in São Paulo. A small projection room will be showing videos from UrbanInform.net, the documentary/internet project launched at the 4th IABR. There will also be debates on the current state of the informal city and on its future, with a.o. the Italian urbanist Bernardo Secchi, and the architect Sergio Magalhães, the creator of the Favela-Bairro Project in Rio de Janeiro . www.mcb.org.br