Monuments of Everyday Life – Interplays of City, Infrastructure and Architecture in São Paulo

authored by

Sarah Theresa Hartmann

supervised by

Jörg Schröder

Abstract

In 2014 the United Nations reported about 28 megacities worldwide, home to 453 million people. Accordingly, the capability and influence of urbanism as a profession on these areas of urban concentration is highly relevant. The development of new perspectives for existing complexities and questions of the urban realm is needed worldwide. However, especially in Brazil, being one of the most populated while young countries, the process and especially the spatial effects of urbanization need to be studied in depth. São Paulo, among the top ten of megacities, is currently inhabited by 21.000.000 people, even if its built up tissue is not older than 100 years. Due to its enormous and racy expansion, the city is conceived as a hasty palimpsest, where generations built in extreme pace over what existed. But especially the implementation of infrastructure left durable traces and played a crucial role in the urban development. Used as an instrument to control and to order the urban expansion, the massive spatial structures entailed, besides their function as traffic infrastructures, also severe fragmentations and social inequality, which essentially shape the city until today.
Against this background, the research identified concrete places in the expanded centre of the megacity that cross and connect the fields of architecture, infrastructure and city, which are usually regarded separately. Four urban spaces, characterized by an extraordinary sense of collectivity and publicness, have been selected as case studies: the Vão do MASP, the Centro Cultural São Paulo, the Box Club and the Minhocão. Their specific spatial settings in different levels of scale can be conceived as al- ternative patterns to instability, commercialization, sanitation and homogenization of urban spaces. Asking for their importance as reference points of collective life and as spatial representatives of collective values, the research formulates the hypothesis if the term Monument—conceived as the materialization of shared social and cultural values—can be reinterpreted, in order to describe and revalue these interplays. Also because the term monument, once considered as an architectural virtue and important component of the city seems to be, due to various reasons, neglected, latest since mo- dernity within the production of city. Therefore, the aim of the research is to systematically develop a methodology that on one hand zooms into the spatial settings of the selected interplays in order to gain a deeper understanding for their set ups, characteristics and the contexts they are embedded. On the other hand, it zooms out, to create a wider frame that conceptualizes the single findings and roots them into superordinate theories.

Organisation(s)

Territorial Design and Urban Planning

Type

Doctoral thesis

No. of pages

346

Publication date

2018

Publication status

Published

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Architecture

Research Area (based on ÖFOS 2012)

Urban design

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG 11 - Sustainable Cities and Communities