 Good afternoon. I'm Mabel Wilson, I'm a professor of architecture here at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation. I'm also the chair of the steering committee for StudioX. And this is the first of a series that we wanted to do to have a conversation with StudioX directors and curators and architects within their respective regions. And so talking about architectural practice and trying to kind of do a comparative conversation around particular topics and issues. And it also is emerging out of both conversations that have happened amongst the various StudioX directors and curators. One of them was housing the majority, which sort of dealt with issues about housing in these particular sites. And so it's a kind of continuation of some of those threads and those themes. And so I just want to make a brief introduction of Impo Mazzipa and Pedro Rivera. We're going to be joined by Marta Moriera of MMBV in Sao Paulo and Heinrich Wolf and Ilza Wolf from Cape Town, South Africa. And so just a little bit about Pedro Rivera, who will be having a conversation with Marta first. And Pedro has hot at the PUC in Rio, the University of Sao. He's also a partner in Rua Arquitetos with Pedro Evora. His work in research examines globalized cities and how they can be signified. Particularly the recent urban interventions of FIFA and the Olympics in Rio that flooded the city with global financing and tourists and also architecture and urbanism. But disrupting the already frayed imbalances of poverty and wealth, public space and policing, ecology and development. He has contributed to several international exhibitions, including most recently the Brazilian Pavilion at the recent Venice Biennale. As the director of Studio X Rio, he has been deeply engaged in bringing architects and developers, academics and government officials together to exchange both local and global viewpoints. His conversation with Marta Moriera, he will actually give an introduction to her, will be followed by Impo Mazzipa, who is an adjunct assistant professor of architecture here at GSAP. She's the curator of Studio X, Johannesburg. She's also a researcher at the Vitz City Institute at the University of Vitz-Vautesrand in South Africa. Trained as an architect and historian, Impo's research has been recognized through several prestigious awards, including a Fulbright scholarship and a Carmichael Grant. Her work has been shortlisted at two national design competitions. Her critical essays and reviews explore public art, culture, spatial justice, inequalities, globalizations and race and representation in African cities. She has curated several exhibitions, including the South African Pavilion at the 11th International Architectural Exhibition at the Venice Biennale. And she has been most recently the curator of Studio X, Johannesburg, which has served as an experimental public platform of architecture in the city. So I want to start with Pedro, who will introduce Marta. Thank you, Mabel. I just want to make a very short introduction about the context of Brazil. As you probably know, it's one of the largest countries in the world. It's more than 200 million people, and it's basically also an urban country. More than 85% of Brazilian population lives in cities. It's also a very, very unequal society. And this inequality has a series of impacts within cities, within the challenge that the cities have. Services and infrastructures, of course, are not well distributed in all the cities. And many times, people have to manage those things by themselves. It's either by building infrastructure, either by managing infrastructure. The state is very weak in some regions of the country. And of course, I mean, housing has a crucial role on this. Housing is a central topic, and it's a topic that we've been investigating. Not only Studio X real, but across Studio X, employees are also investigating this. And in the actual moment, we've been working with this for about two years, but in the actual moment, we're looking into social housing. So inviting Marta here was also an opportunity to deeper look at this. The project that Marta will show is Jardim Jit, which is a carefully designed social housing complex located in the center of Sao Paulo. In a context of Brazil that's focusing housing production in the peripheries, somehow this project challenges what is being built in the country. I think that her contribution becomes, Marta's contribution here is even more relevant when we think about the context of events in the globe. So I also want to bring that to the table. Her office was funded in 1991 by Fernando Mello Franco, Miltom Braga and Marta Moreira herself. Their former partners include Rajulbut and Vinicius Gorgatti. Fernando is actually licensed to be the office, licensed for the office to be the secretary of bourbon development of the city of Sao Paulo. So this is just to give also for you a little bit of understanding of their engagement with the context of the city and how can it work. They all graduated at the Sao Paulo State School of Architecture, which was a very experimental school founded by Artigas, a leading architecture and thinker in Brazil. And it's also many among their main contributions of Artigas was Paulo Magda Rocha, which you probably know. It's a Pritzker-Paris architect. I think their work is really rooted in that tradition. I mean, not all MBB works, but there is a series of offices in Sao Paulo which are deeply rooted in this tradition and they have been bringing this to the present times. One of the main collaborations between Paulo Magdas recently opened in Lisbon. Well, Marta is a professor also. She teaches at Escola da Cidade in Sao Paulo since 2001 and was a guest professor at Faculdade Architecturale de Zen in Santiago in Chile. So I would like to welcome Marta. It's a pleasure to be here with you and I thank Longia University for the invitation because the difficulty with the language I'm going to read, I'm sorry. And if I have some difficulties or if it's not clear enough, you can interrupt and ask. So, Jardim Editi was a project made by MIMBB in association with Agama Ezef, that's another office. I'm here to speak about the Jardim Editi housing project but before I would like to show you some images of Sao Paulo and to talk a little about the city in order that you know better the context in which this work was developed. So that's the image of one of the buildings of Jardim Editi when it was recently finished. This is a photo from the Copan window. Copan is a building in the center of Sao Paulo I'm approached by Niemeyer and I like very much this photo that was taken by Muto, my partner and that shows very much the density of the city. As a first characteristic, I think we could say that Sao Paulo is a modern city. Although founded 450 years ago, the city that today we face was basically built in the 20th century. Today, a little more than 100 years later, the greater Sao Paulo metropolis has more than 20 million inhabitants. This increase of population corresponded to a growth of times 70. Sao Paulo, which was a small city in the first four centuries of Brazilian history, became the main economical and cultural center of Brazil during the 20th century. That satellite image of Sao Paulo shows the east-west axis. The city is about 60 kilometers long and the north-south is about 50 kilometers long. What I would like to show you here because it's related to what we are going to talk next is the two main rivers. This is Tieta River and this is Spinheiro's River. As a result of this brutal development and of the related radical transformations, the city today has almost no buildings from centuries previous to the 20th century. Although in the center of the city we can find many eclectic buildings, most of them important ones and urban references like the old railway stations. The central areas of Sao Paulo are constituted and characterized by large groups of modern buildings, built mainly in the 40s to the 70s. Here I can see Copan. This is Praça da República, a very important spot in the city. And large infrastructure. A second characteristic relevant to the contextualization of Tardim Editing is that Sao Paulo lies within a hydrographic basin on a plateau delineated by a network of water curses flowing through a river town. The metropolis is directly related to the trunk of the waterway system in the sketchment basin that is formed by Riu Tieta and Pinheiros which determines a constellation of discontinuous sectors. The railway system established from the second half of the 20th century as an important link between Sao Paulo and the Port of Santos for the transport of coffee beans in searching for available flat and cheap land chose mostly trajectories parallel to the main rivers. Tieta and Pinheiros is starting the irreversible process of building the wetlands as an habitable space. So the yellow lines is the railway and here Tieta and Pinheiros. It was quite a disastrous way of beginning the occupation of the city, the wetlands but it was a plan. The railway, the industries and so on that images the railway passing through and the river was still in its natural way here. At the beginning of the 20th century with mostly foreign investments several interventions were carried out along the axis of Sao Paulo's valleys aiming to generate and distribute energy for the city. The canalization of the rivers and draining of the wetlands opened up new fields of opportunities for real estate investments. That image is here Pinheiros because it's a very flat land the river goes farther in big curves and now it's showing already the canal marked where it's going to be the future canal. The highways established from the 40s displaced the axis of industrial concentration to their own adjacent areas outside of Sao Paulo. However, since almost all the highways converge and connect based on the expressways parallel to the Tieta and Pinheiros rivers the strategic value of the wetlands was preserved. These expressways continue being until today the route of outflow of production of the entire state of the mandatory passage for the flow of cargo and passengers to and from the metropolis. So this is a pretty recent photograph. The materialized investment attracted the service sector in search of the now vacant leave vacuumed by the industries and cheaper areas with greater accessibility. As such, advanced service the headquarters of multinationals the wholesale sector and entertainment and leisure industry established themselves mainly in the wetlands where they remain until today. This photo shows the banks of Pinheiros and this area is very close where Jardim Egiti is placed. And so we finally arrived at the location of Jardim Egiti indicated by the red dot at the point where the Aguas Esprayadas river flows into the Pinheiros. The area shaded in blue indicated the limits of the Aguas Esprayadas basin. The public sector not being formed into the development of this region has been an activation in the building of infrastructure investing large amount in this particular area. The axis of the Aguas Esprayadas river being part of an important connection within the city underwent a process we call urban operation. This is an important airport in Sao Paulo that's in the middle of the city. And this ring connects the airport to all these areas in Pinheiros and also Amorumbi crossing the river Amorumbi that is a more residential area but at this time was developing. An urban operation is a legal instrument that through the selling of constructive potential allows the participation of private investment in the urban improvement of a certain area. When the Aguas Esprayadas urban operation was initiated there were 68 favelas along the river. Among them, Jardim Edith. The dots are the favelas. The wetlands of Aguas Esprayadas being partially public lands left vacant because of a change in the planning of a ring road system for Sao Paulo drew the settlement of favelas on the banks of the river. The architect, Mariana Fix published an important book whose title we can translate as Partners of Exclusion. That was her undergraduate thesis. It is a field study of the conflicted process of negotiation between the population and the infrastructure being built. The partners, the title refers to are the private and public agents. Mariana Fix was in the favelas following the process of people taking off the favelas so the infrastructure could be built or even with the land getting much more available available, no. So it's a very confident book. I don't know if the English translation is right enough but in Portuguese it's very very strong partners of exclusion meaning partners of exclusion. And this is the paradigm the paradigm of the technical the technical the technicals treat the wetlands of the rivers, you see because there is just a technical meaning or a technique to solve sort out a technical condition and there was not a plan thinking of the urban quality of the area. So there on the top they say congratulations because they had that and now they have that. It's a pretty disastrous but it's a difficult question because in another hand you can't have that it's dangerous it's in the wetlands so it's a very delicate negotiation. When we started the Jardim Editi project in 2009 the bridge that became one of the postcards of Sao Paulo was being inaugurated in the middle of the ongoing negotiations because the private sector then buy the license to build more and this money is applied again in the area but the question is what is more urgent? So they built this huge bridge with this emphasis but the favela was just next to the bridge. So when we started the project the favela was like that and there was this graffiti so this one fewer bridges and more housing for the people the other one less corruption and more housing. The favela initially the site on which the future housing complex was to be built was bigger with the provision of 500 units during the process the guidelines changed a few times according to the negotiations the municipality was still leading with the population of the favela and the middle class residents of the neighborhood because there was also this agent there the middle class people living in the same block didn't want the housing the social housing complex next to their houses so it's pretty complex the municipality was dealing with that as well and the whole project was intermediated by the municipality because there was this judicial question with the community and so on. Finally the project was built on a smaller site with 252 units for us the main challenge was to successfully integrate the housing complex within a context of high investment and of developments this thought was taken from one of the buildings the window of one of the buildings that was under construction of Jardim Editi we therefore consider that the urban ground level should be public use to achieve this the ground floor plan of Jardim Editi was designated for public service such as a nursery, health service and a restaurant school which additionally met the demands made by the population we were very much involved in the rehabilitation of mixed use which although is not a novelty became impossible in the context of social housing in Sao Paulo thanks to the effort and political will of Elizabeth França who led the housing department during the Cassabe Majority and who fought to facilitate the coordination between the different departments of the municipality responsible for each of the services because the municipality is one but there are different departments each one with different budgets and different politics and trying to find different space to put their equipments and different space to put their housing as like they don't talk with each other so it's not an easy articulation this photo is the nursery internal garden by having public service on the ground floor the responsibility for the maintenance of the urban floor is giving back to the public sector in Sao Paulo the person that lives is responsible for the pavement in front of their house so sometimes or normally for this population is hard to maintain the quality of the ground floor plan because it's expensive and so when the equipments are in contact of the urban plan they, you give back to then this responsibility what is a I think is a good strategy the restaurant school is now in process of occupation and soon will be functioning it's a program that is for the formation of professionals related with the chef's or waitress or barman this photo is the central reception area of the health center that is also used as a meeting point for the whole community that is the ground floor plan so Jadini Ditis organizing two blocks and the first block we have two buildings of 17 floors with elevators and one linear building afterwards we are going to see better that runs here connecting both and here the restaurant school a garden that separates both and then the health center in the second block one of more 17 floor floor tower another linear of 50 floor here and the nursery in social housing those areas legislation in Sao Paulo demands that certain areas around the construction on a site be left empty like 5 meters in the front 3 meters in each side of the building in social housing those areas usually remain unused and consequently un-maintained then thanks to the limits of Jadini Ditis avoids problem by incorporating these areas into the now improved public space so that is one of the buildings of 17 floor buildings the open door is directly related with the city and what should be the 5 meters in front is now incorporated of the public space that is the entrance of the 5 floor building this is also one thing that I think was important because even if you have the sobreposition of use one thing that I think is very important is to be very well characterised characterised the address of each building to not have so each building has a very characterised address characterised address the area above the service building is designated as collective use in each block every residential building has shared access to this space that is a transversion section of block 1 so we are talking about this level this is a common area the 7th floor building the 5th floor building here transversion cross section of block 2 and that is during the process of handing over the apartments the municipality made a huge mistake by considering each building as a separate entity having the principle of shared use and also what happened when they consider each building as a separate entity they close the doors that connect the building with that common level so today the only building that has access to this to this local is this 5th floor building the two other ones they have a locked door so no access because it started a big conversation about I have a lift, you don't have a lift you can't use my lift because you don't pay for that and I think the municipality when they say that each one is each they made a huge enormous mistake because it was the beginning it started wrongly recitation for plan longitudinal cross section over the two blocks the plan of the 5th floor buildings the units must be most 15 square meters because of the rules of the social housing financing system well, talking about the unit we always have the cross ventilation because we face two sides always and also there is this possibility of closing a small bedroom here for a grandmother for an instance or a small office or you can open everything your children grow up so it's a flexible typology by law a building with more than 4 floors requires an elevator in the case of judging a GT the supply of units without having to install an elevator we occupy the top floor with duplex units and also the there are some space also in that building of 5th floor in the other one of this 17th floor that's a kind of prolongation of the house like a small courtyard that communicates for instance because when they give the the units they try to put together people from the same family or they can choose where to go so they articulate among themselves so those spaces walking like a Christmas party they open the doors and goes outside as well we occupy the unit I like very much this photo because it's impressive the way that is caprichado carefully done because she painted the space in the same color of the walls no, it's true because it's very carefully done in as we say caprichados the floor plan of the 7th floor building with 4 units and 2 different typologies one typology here and the other one in the middle the landing shared by 4 apartments on each floor built beyond the minimum legal requirement works as an extension like a front yard this really works like that because people do birthday parties the unit is very small the families are very big so when they have this kind of birthday party the party work is here, is in this space is an extension of the house the unit as it is delivered so the municipality delivered as that the unit and thank you very much thank you Martin it was a wonderful presentation that gives a little bit of perspective how did you get that hello yes so I think it was a wonderful presentation I want to thank you it gave a little bit of a perspective about the city and about the scale of the challenges of the city and it's such a wonderful project and it immediately reminds me about the past two day reviews here at GSEP of the housing studios and one of the questions although these studios are not about social housing they are focused in an area in the Bronx one of the questions that many of the students were exploring was the question of shared spaces and also one of the main topics that came out in the reviews were about the ground floor and how the ground floor is occupied in your presentation I think you're talking about both things you mentioned your strategy to accomplish not only the usage of the ground floor to guarantee this and the visual recognition of what is what as well even the maintenance of how these things can happen and when you talk specifically about the corridor and I was looking when she was presenting and there was one of the drawings one of the floor plans that there was a bike and I was thinking yes this is the building with Martha actually the picture you showed there were no bikes but actually people used the place to store their bikes I was really thinking about this is shared space this is what we can say this is an extension of home this is also an urban space in the way that it has the role of just open your door and sit there and talk to the neighbors I think this is really wonderful but I want to ask you something and how did it happen along the project there is a lot of skeptical skeptical scepticism scepticism scepticism scepticism scepticism in Brazil when talking about going vertical in social housing and I know that this was a long process of negotiation with the people who were living there with the social movements the leaders the municipality and how was this negotiated how was this perceived did you take in the project imagine the future I mean how those things would happen well relating to the verticalization when we the municipality had a difficult to think in verticalization but in that place we were able to think in not verticalization or taking the most advantage of the land because it's not because the value it's because the urban value because there are transportation there are services there are jobs it's a very important area for people to be that's why we did these two offers one building that elevator vertical and with elevators so the maintenance it's a little bit more expensive so it's for a certain families and there are the other one that is not so expensive because there is no elevator so I think should be more even Renat was talking with me he's not here he was just talking about the vertical buildings and how so maybe you can say afterwards I don't know around here and so on I don't know I think it's it's fine and what happens is that this land that you give for sharing or for apartments it works because the mother can be in the kitchen cooking and the small child is just there so I think it's a concession a concession that the situation of the verticalization but there is another the thing that I would like to comment that is the common level on top of the equipment because that is an area that today I think is questionable well we thought that could work very well being a very much infrastructure side so you have this big avenues and so on and because the ground floor is all occupied almost all occupied by equipment we thought that that area would be important but maybe I think what would be much better if the city could could make this this role the squares there is a square just next door to the nursery the city could offer this kind of shared space I think because when you create this shared space inside the housing again is an area that can need maintenance and I think this population is very hard for them to have this the maintenance of the areas like that and also the houses is such a urgent need that you make your house as better as possible so today I think that I don't know maybe in the future they can manage to have a management that open the door really tends to be a shared area also in Jardim Editi there is another situation that is almost impossible to deal that is with the drugs that are there because Jardim Editi is not a favela anymore but the demand of the drugs users are just there so it's a big spot and for them they want to have the control they don't want to have the circulation going through everywhere they want to have a door that they control who comes in and who comes out so it's pretty difficult in that sense I don't know so perhaps it's also a matter of scale in public space the scale of what is public for how many people it serves so there is a certain point that it becomes harder and it should go outside yes it's in the city it's for everybody I don't know that's the question I made myself after seeing what's going on I think we're going to have questions in the end right? sorry and then this comment about drug dealing and how they try to control space in there this is something which happened when the favela was there of course the favela it's excluded but it's also self excluded but not by all this population but by these sectors for example that they want to keep it some kind of border some kind of limits so this brings this question they are the same people and they moved from one place to the other the population is the same even the drug dealers they also moved and I wonder how was this process because I imagine there was a decision to tear down the favela which happened at some point of the urban operation they said we're going to tear it down and I imagine that there was a lot of pressure from the inhabitants or social movements to keep them there but once this is established how was this process of design did the leaders or the inhabitants associations they participate on the projects how was this process yes they participated but in the case of Shadjin Ejiti because just one thing on the Agus Esparada river there are several other housing under construction and other ones just in project but there are other ones and the conversation of the community was always in the case of Shadjin Ejiti intermediated by the municipality because unfortunately there was for us there was a judicial action going on because the population was in judicial terms municipality because the value of the land in the favela what they were going to receive because you know that is difficult as well because they are going to receive a 50 square meters apartment some of them lived in the favela in big houses is ok there was no sun there was problems with floods there was questions but sometimes the precaried the precaried business allows situations that at first moment is more valuable because there was the the main liderança leadership I went several times at his house it was like that you went to the other room to the other room so it was a big house so yes we had the conversation but there was always that going on until today the municipality is finishing another block in front that the project inside the municipality and there was no mixed use so the ground floor is all fenced so I don't know and the community was asking for a complementation of the health service over there but it's still going on all the negotiation I don't know sometimes I think that the main role of the architect also is to participation of this process of conciliation because there's so many agents you can't say for instance that the private sector is an enemy no should be one part of the whole yes so the architect in this case is an agent and we were having this conversation about advocacy so somehow identifying potential other usages for example the nursery the restaurant school talking to the different you mentioned that there was no conversation between the different departments of the city so you had to go after them and somehow bring as an external agent also you're not from inside so at some point you have certain kind of neutrality that allows you to set the table and say good guys I mean you are not competing with them as long as the agents are in the same page in the same I mean because that was important Elisabeth Franca was inside the private sector so she was able we really much fight that and she was able to do it because she was inside there so every agent and also you can't say that the private sector is an enemy because it is there as well so just to finish right I think we're on time just one question I mean what what lessons do you think you learned from this project and what lessons do you think this project leads to think about social housing in the city in the city well I learned that we were involved also in another project that is Paraisopolis and I learned that the passive process is fundamental you can't do anything without listening on the parts because it is very complex it's not like the bad guys and the good guys and that's it so it's clear where to I think it's complicated it's a question of try to consummate all the parts and sometimes it's not so easy to see the real problem the real question that is involved and I think more and more that for the projects when you are able to formulate the right problem you you are fine I think it's more the question of which is the real question and the real problem ok I think that's it thanks a lot Marta now thank you so much Pedro and Marta Cape Town and São Paulo are not necessarily the most obvious paid cities but I think that what Pedro and I felt quite strongly as some of the earlier conversations about architecture practice in the city was to really sort of think about practices that are tackling difficult challenges of inequality in our various environments and because the socioeconomic realities in South Africa and Brazil are so similar we were thinking much more at the scale of building rather than at the scale of cities so even though São Paulo and Cape Town are two very very different topographies and population densities the reality of they're both grappling with postcolonial realities they're both grappling with issues of neoliberalism and also market driven real estate development and so on so I have the pleasure of welcoming and introducing Wolf Architects which is a husband and wife team from Cape Town and also very long time friends of mine from South Africa Wolf Architects is a design studio based in Cape Town directed by Ilza Wolf and Heinrich Wolf Heinrich has 20 years experience as a project architect and project manager and has won several international awards including the Daimler Chrysler Award for Architecture in 2007 the Lubecten Award in 2005 and in 2011 he was elected the designer of the future by the Vota McMac Foundation he's held several academic appointments internationally including being a visiting professor at the University High in Zurich from 2014 to 2015 IU, AV and Venice in 2013 as well as an adjunct associate professor at the University of Cape Town in South Africa the other half of this dynamic duo is Ilza Wolf who is a partner of Wolf and graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Cape Town in addition to that she also received an info in Heritage and Public Culture in the African Studies Unit at the University of Cape Town Ilza Ilza co-founded Open House Architecture in 2007 a transdisciplinary research practice which she continues to direct parallel to Wolf Architects both the principles of Wolf have taught and lectured internationally including Switzerland, Germany the United States, Canada, Japan and India and they continue to do so and who knows maybe sometime in the future also at GSAP the work of the practice has also been included in various international exhibitions in Biennale including the Shenzhen Biennale the Venice Architecture Biennale the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and the Chicago Architectural Biennale last year the Chicago Biennale and the South American Architecture Biennale so I I know that Ilza and Heinrich would like to introduce their practice I don't want to take up too much space and time so that we can just get a sense of the breadth of their engagement with architectural practice from Heritage to Research to producing new and interesting and challenging typologies for dealing with spatial form so please join me in welcoming them Hi, good afternoon it's a pleasure to be here for both of us seeing that we found each other in the city after losing each other but after that the city turns out to be very big thank you very much for the invitation Paul and everybody from Studio X and GSAP it's a real honour to be here to see how much institutions like this are interested in the real gritty issues of environments like South Africa so we want to talk about the production of the city the historic production of the city and our contemporary participation in the production of the city and our motivation is a very simple and basic one is that South Africa unfortunately is famous for inventing apate well we learnt a lot from the US but this as a system of racist segregation used the city as the primary instrument of division and 22 years after the end of apate that instrument still exists with a beating heart exercising the power over its society that it had during the middle of apate so it's an embarrassment for us so we actively try to understand how this came about and how to antagonise such massive construction the other one is that whatever you say of inequality in Brazil South Africa unfortunately is the most unequal society on earth it's far more unequal than Brazil unfortunately so this is a very painful reality of how our society is constructed and of course there is an innocent participant in that and our postulation is that as much as the economy constructs the city the city constructs the economy and we would like to talk today about how such constructs come about and how they are antagonised thank you so our interest in Cape Town also is along the historical engagement with sites and with cities and forced removals histories of labour the racialisation of the city and the effect on the social imagination haunts our thinking around the city of Cape Town and the way it has been produced this year we were lucky to work with one of Cape Town's most interesting and up and coming artists in producing an intervention in the city that talks about how historical events and historical practices have been lost and how one can in some way through heritage and through an art practice can begin to intervene in a way that pays homage to a practice for instance like going to the cinema we discovered through our research that there was an old cinema that existed in Burkhap which is a neighbourhood where our practice is situated and in 1984 this cinema was demolished to make way for a generic office block which is situated there but the cinema used to be a final refuge for city inhabitants that were forcibly removed from the inner city of Cape Town to linger in a city that they were no longer welcome in the Alabama cinema was demolished but what we discovered was that the film that was playing minutes before the bulldozers came in was stopped and interrupted, it was a very typical 1970s flick starring Sophia Loren and they actually interrupted the film and made people get out of the cinema and then the bulldozers came in and what we did was in order to pay homage to this moment and to reflect on the social imagination is to replay the film to the full extent on the site where the old Alabama cinema used to be and in that way create some kind of a public culture around that cinema and to reflect on the memory of that space people came on the evening of the 7th of April and essentially it was just a kind of a way to remember that space and pay homage and the idea was that we would play the film exhibit some of the newspaper clippings inside the corner shop and also produce a pamphlet, a little publication where we would exchange ideas and letters around the history of this place another project that we are currently involved in with Wale Uleri is the memory of Luyolo which was a township outside of Simon's town on the very touristy side of Cape Town Luyolo was a neighborhood that was designated for a whole range of people that were brought in to establish the infrastructure of Cape Town many people from West Africa were housed the indigenous indigenous people and essentially it was a black neighborhood that was completely raised in 1965 and today it is a beautiful sort of paradise kind of a neighborhood where we really don't have any trace or sense that this neighborhood even existed so what we are trying to do is to recollect pay homage to Luyolo by again writing letters to people that perhaps live there there is an exchange of letters between Kimang and I Kimang's interest is in the fact that he is from Guguletu where most of the people from Luyolo were then removed too so in a sense our interest as architects is to think about the kind of unequal relationship between black labor and white capital and the kind of infrastructure that emerged out of that unequal relationship so these people that lived there were responsible for the building of major infrastructure in Cape Town the railway lines, the harbors and roads in Cape Town and now thinking around here at the justice to remember and be conscious of that Haini will talk about another kind of research practice that also falls our engagement with the city and in terms of falls our consciousness when we design and when China makes shifts in our Cape Town has been produced this research project is a project really into the spatialization of the economy with the aim of saying well if one wants to make the city more penetrable for poorer people one must study the economic practices in the context of poverty and economic practices in their spatialization so without going to any depth of anything that we studied we studied the whole series of rental apartments it's self-built by people without any financing but fundamentally the lesson that came out of this is that in the context of great opportunity areas people make very very small parcels of land the average apartment size is eight square meters and the rental per square meter is similar to penthouses in the center of the city so it means that people turn land that appears to be marginal into very valuable land by parceling it in small pockets we looked at AK centers and the issue at interest here the conclusion that we came out is this issue of threshold to entry this is in the context of subsidized government housing but the woman who run these day care centers if they have a subsidized house have a zero threshold to enter into an economy and into an economic practice and this interest us is what how can we lower the threshold to entry into the economy can we study infrastructural things like this neighborhood as a hold of cul-de-sacs in it dead end streets and we studied how several economic practices but significantly motor car repair and how a piece of infrastructure with no imagination of this economic activity has in many many of these cul-de-sacs you find this motor car repair activity that's happening so this idea that generic infrastructure can support very specific economic activity and that we have to set up these opportunities as designers and then the last lesson this is a very typical taxi interchange but what we are interested in here is economic interrelationships so take the taxi stop there's funny there's a building it's not used all the taxi stop outside of the building it's designed for their purpose and then there's a series of shops around it but these shops can't exist if it were not for this activity this is one of these shops and we are interested in these activities that can exist next to it so the taxi business being the primary business these shops being the secondary business and these sort of car repair and motor wash and all sorts of other businesses being tertiary businesses so the fact that opportunity is stratified and that they are minor businesses that can only exist because of the major businesses but that's a spatial setup that architects can participate in so just to move closer to the site where the watershed was developed this is a historical map of the V&A waterfront and in terms of how we engage with our historical consciousness and also our research around how the city is produced around spatial economies through the research in the noon and taxi rings we thought that this can all feed into a very dynamic way of thinking about the waterfront which is in effect is the most explicit kind of site for this production of the unequal relationship between black labour and white capital in terms of the waterfront was the first site in a way where you find a labour compound that was completely racialised that location there and our site is just north of that and also there's a jail that was established essentially to for convict labour convict labour was established to build this kind of infrastructure so this is another image from 1905 where you can see that location, the labour compound over there and our intervention would be situated right over there so we were conscious of this calcifying effect that continues to happen the and our design of the watershed is trying to just think about and be conscious of this very big sort of retail environment that is sort of produced around the historical effect and trying to make a shift, trying to make a shift and make it more porous for small scale economies and marginalised economies and marginalised people. This is an image of Cape Town a historical image of Cape Town where what you don't see is that the kind of this is the harbour the V&M harbour and this is the big piece of reclaimed land in the foreshore development and this whole section on this side has been cleared as part of a sort of forced removal and racialisation of Cape Town, this is District 6 so this part of Cape Town does not exist anymore and essentially that is the kind of sitting that we needed to be conscious of when we tried to make an intervention that could possibly open up the city to economies. I think it's significant to know is that the event that preceded the making of the waterfront is declaring the city white removing non-white people entirely from the city and then suddenly a property is developed and it's hugely successful. One could claim that those things are independent of each other but of course they are not. So what we want to show is this was the building before we got involved it's next to a dry dock it's a very successful aquarium it gets 400,000 visitors a year and it's 25 400,000 people a year and 25 million people a year come here this area receives more visitors than any other site in Africa more people in the pyramids in a year so it's the most popular site in the continent. So we were approached in the front part of the shed to build a business incubator the shed had fairly conventional interior with crane rails and a wooden floor and we were asked to basically make an interior project of this and occupy the space and make a business incubator. Now for those of you who don't know business incubators are things that to stimulate new small businesses individuals coming into it with the ideas that with institutional support the businesses are more likely to take hold succeed and be successful the statistics that prove this so this of course is the agenda of our client we never pretend to have the same agenda as our client because we don't run business incubators we run an architectural studio we are concerned about the city so the question is what is the architectural corollary of a business incubator so we were saying to ourselves if we are asked to make a building that can stimulate business what would be the architectural and urban counter form of such an idea the yellow area was the area that we were given there was an existing market and there pedestrians had to move around this building to the aquarium and shopping center on that side so it's a very busy area but this building being a complete congestion to that area so then we thought this project that we were asked to do is not a good one because we can't do it well we do not believe that design can save projects because there's no amount of design that can dig you out of a bad hole you've got to get into another position in order to make a good design so what we did and because we were concerned about the logic of this whole project as to whether we can do a good job Ilz and I decided to risk the whole job and not do what they asked us at all to design another building and to propose a completely different thing so instead of making this business incubator as an interior job we decided to make it an exterior instead of making an inside we made an outside instead of making it a building we made it a piece of city so what we did is we proposed that we amalgamate functions in the building and build a road right through the building and then float the business incubator above it and use the business incubator to create economic opportunities and read below it so in other words this thing that it proposes that it can do to stimulate business in the city because the fundamental proposal is here is that an unequal city is produced by the upper classes and by the wealthy and by the powerful it's not produced by the poor the poor are not the agents of inequality so the idea is that if the actions of the powerful and the wealthy can be adjusted there is something about how they act in the city that it could be more responsible and more porous to economic opportunity so you can see this is the building within this network and so this is the network that we try to support some of this network of course pre existed but it's particularly this line through here and the connections are up that we try to support so this in essence is the ground floor plan it makes a very basic route through it the simplest architectural move we can have it's a really straight very legible line and then makes many many pockets of very small space four square meters I'll show you now even two square meter spaces retail spaces and many many of them so the idea is that one uses this intense foot traffic that this big commercial property has and begin to make this an opportunity for many and then to make things like a big hall for exhibitions that draw people into it because and you can see it's not a dead end it's a continuation and so on we are very concerned in the structure of the city with impermeability and discontinuities discontinuities is the fundamental production of segregation so in South Africa the urban plans of Lewis Mumford were racialized and then you just make buffer zones which we learned from you guys and you get very very durable segregations that last for decades so this idea of not making segregated spaces and having these continuations through this is important this is the first floor plan what you would call the second floor which is where the business incubator is and this as a series of mezzanine levels that look out this is a big flying floor a 50 by 50 meter steel structure with huge holes cut into it we can see down into the market but with the fundamental features in a café right in the centre so it's boardrooms is a social space and the idea is that everybody looks down into the social space and that fundamental growth of the organization happens through meeting of strangers and new interaction and that happens through social interaction rather than necessarily through work this is the section you can see the market down here the big dry dock on this side this is the suspended floor of the crane rails so column 3 space made here you can see a mezzanine up there and the idea is that it overlooks this space so that everybody can see each other it constructs a kind of institutional intimidation and it can look down onto the market so that there's a reciprocity between traders and established business and new business because each can teach each other something else and in this big exhibition hall that sits here that draws crowds through this because our fundamental idea was instead of making this business incubator instead of making one building function let's make a series of urban functions in other words make a multiplicity of functions and increase human density and increase the diversity of activity so that people don't come to this place for one purpose alone but they come for a variety of purposes then you can see there's the floor hanging the floor hangs within this existing warehouse and it doesn't touch the sides and where it's short of the sides there's a park like space made in between and a big stair that then overlooks this dried off this is the end of the building where it's a single barrel and I'll speak a bit about these freestanding they like little shops and things built in underneath here but this was basically made as a space for expansion for the business incubator this is the ceiling plan where you see the underside of this big grid with the holes cut into it now this is very important because this building started its life as a university who proposed this business incubator now we live in a country where a representation is an absolute crisis it's very hard to know what to refer to history is corrupted and the idea that in this building we will not produce an appearance we will produce an effect in other words the business that it stimulates is what you will remember this thing by rather than what it looks like so we produce an insubstantial appearance and the most substantial part of this building instead of being an elevation is in fact a ceiling and it's not its own ceiling it's not the ceiling that defines the business incubator it's the underside of the floor below it that stimulates the business and that is how we try to deflect what this architecture is about so business incubators up here this market is down here the next two slides are very important because it shows our imagination and our aspiration for this space through architectural rendering and we can talk a little bit later how those aspirations were met with our client but essentially what we aspire that the space becomes an open space with a kind of a market that is for everyone that you can move in is a there's a market in Cape Town called the Moulnerton Market and we learnt a lot from that in terms of how it could really just be not a curated kind of a setup where there's a people that choose a lifestyle or kind of a lifestyle set but it's really kind of a very open and democratic kind of space this is the same shows a different time where we show what can be a market could be a place for fashion shows could be a place for selling Ferraris now you can say how do Marxists make buildings for selling Ferraris we are interested not in the Ferraris we are interested in the tertiary business that comes off somebody selling expensive cars or something so there's this thing is that you can do something to draw big and small business can make some money off the side of it so this is the building when the suspended floor was finished and it was not occupied yet I'll show you now what it looked like when it's occupied but I want to draw your attention to the urbanity of this building that this building really is much more of a city than it is a building so this is in a way a building very little to this building so we inserted into it a hanging floor with big stairs on the side on the side we made two spaces for expansion with fire scapes and this of course is permanent but that's all that's permanent about it so the most permanent thing in this building is actually the roof but then we made these little this is all to the same scale by the way we made these little things it's between furniture and buildings and the reason why we made them like furniture is that they become trivialized in a way then we make smaller things it's much more very much like furniture but a little bit like a wall store and then we made things that's entirely like a cupboard and then we made a thing that's a little thing like that now you can appreciate that if you lose this thing the building is not affected by that if you lose this thing it's not affected if you lose that one you're not affected if you paint that pink blue throw it away it doesn't matter and that is what we try to do it's a building that stops making itself earlier on in other words its fabric does not matter so I think in South Africa we're fairly unique in that we make buildings where we don't care that much about the appearance we care a great deal about its operation and right when the building was done I was teaching at ETH and I got this angry phone call from the officer the people are painting the stuff pink and blue and they're throwing them away it's fantastic you know that was the setting as it sits next to another and you can see the street just running right through it it's very difficult to see this building because it's very successful so there's tons of people in it but you can see there's this hanging floor that sits in this double barrel side of this warehouse this is the side of it you can see it's just hanging and you see these big stairs going up there this is again the side of it where you see some of the trees it's planted between the new hanging floor and the existing shed we didn't do this part of the building and this is underneath this hanging floor where you see the market now here these things are still fairly intact but if you look at some of them people painted in black and if you go there today they are very very different and people are adding doors to them and all sorts of crazy things and it really doesn't matter the fundamental thing is this floor that's gone through and we haven't even made this because this is the factory floor as we found it the important thing is the reciprocal relationship between this market and the business incubator up above here we are on the upper level before the cafe was fitted out and you can see the market up here and the business incubator up there there you can see the cafe sits right at the entrance and the idea is that people sit and work here in these upper levels view of the mountain and the harbour but yet you can see what your colleagues are doing what they're producing and you can see who's meeting there and if you're a junior in the organisation you see a senior person there and you don't have a cup of tea with them or you like them, you want to date them you can do that and that's the cafe that's been in the centre of this business incubator and just in some conclusions you can see this is a two square meter tendency this person pays per square meter more than Louis Vuitton in the same space because the space is so available and it's a really good deal because they make really good money this is a four square meter tendency and this woman is making some beadwork that she's selling right day so she's producing and selling it right in the same space it is not a very high price you've got to pay for it because it's not a lot of space but you get a few million people a year that walk past you just to also add to that is that one needs to understand that the waterfront as a retail environment is extremely exclusive for business owners particularly we've just got H&M now we're excited about H&M being there but that is a kind of big scale corporation that is in the waterfront and for a building for the waterfront to open itself up to possibilities of small scale retail we've found that it's something very progressive that we could push with our agenda as well in terms of opening up the economies to many people into small scale traders maybe we should conclude because we're running out of time this is a plan instead of the configuration just showing the activity and what it just shows is an amassment of small businesses that could be craft people people selling vegetables people doing hairdressing clothing and those sorts of things but the idea is that there's an amassment of this opportunity supported by bigger institutions around that draw people to it and through it and that's in this kind of a way we are adjusting the morphology of the city which adjust the morphology of the economy and in this way we're aiming to make the economy more permeable to small scale business and we've taken the same kind of a thing and we've done it with office buildings where we make very very small office space but with the idea is that the privileged part of town must be transformed in a way to allow this permeability thank you very much thank you thank you so much Ilza and Heinrich for just giving us the same stuff the scale of your engagement with the city I thought that the relationship between the research that you do in Cape Town and how it informs your design intervention and design thinking was really really fascinating especially with regards to micro economies and microspaces and making the city more permeable I was wondering though you've done this research in Danune and also well let's just focus on the Danune example and I was wondering what kinds of challenges you faced from shifting from looking at economies that are embedded in communities in the Cape Flats and shifting it into the waterfront so what do you think was gained, what do you think might have been lost in that kind of shift it's an interesting question I would have to think long and hard when I can give you the answer right now is that the thing for us is that the communality is a fundamental thing that is opportunity so close to a big public transport hub or something like that very often in South Africa that has a segregated view of the economy they very often talk about the first economy and the second economy the second economy being sort of unregulated so-called informal often thought of as illegal non-tax sparing etc etc and then very often not properly theorised in economic terms or in spatial terms there's something that people miss the fact that the only is opportunity so you can go and do it anyway in the city as long as you have opportunities in a way the problem is the owners of that opportunity you know is it the city the property development and that is where the challenge lies because of course those owners if it's a public authority they have certain kinds of agendas and so on and people are worried about the effects of small scale business and the management of small scale business but within a democratic constitutional state the care of small scale business is of course a fundamental thing because the growth of the economy lies in that location so the challenges lie for us and the people do not have any conception of the nature of that economy of how small space can be and how useful it can be and how economically so in this case what we did is the person who worked with us from the developers largely kept people around him in the dark as to how this thing will work until he could declare the kind of money that was made because everybody likes the money that comes out of it but the reality of the small scale space was a difficult thing for people to get their heads around that was a bit of a challenge I don't know if that answers your question I think it does in part and it kind of leads on to my next question which has to do with your role as an architect and how were you able to negotiate your relationship to the future imagined occupants of the building and your various clients because you were dealing with a lot of competing impulses around this project so how were you able to navigate those power relationships well I think we were not as successful as we would have hoped to be because it's unfortunately the slide I skipped right in the end to speed up but we had an idea of very ordinary city trade like hairdressers and tailors and clothes sellers and all sorts of people there because the question for me is not who is there whether they pay the rent or not you know as far as I'm concerned if you pay the rent you're okay but the landlords intervene by appointing curators for the market and then they sort of looked at the best kind of merchandise and made it a super attractive in that sense so they added to the economic success of it but I think that it in our mind still has the potential of being more ordinary because I think spaces like this does not have to be extraordinary they can be quite ordinary and as long as you can pay the rent you have high income generating spaces that's good for the developers but it's good for whatever tenant takes that space you know so we hope to make many more of these spaces in the city I just want to add to that in that you know this project was extremely far spaced I mean it was 18 months right from the beginning of the you know presenting the project until the completion of the project and I think that was kind of to our advantage in a way because at the same time this project was being imagined and implanted it was really under the radar of the waterfront at large because Thomas Hedlowek was doing his beautiful sort of folding on the silo that was everybody's attention focused on the opening and the design of that project and this one was very happily under the radar in a way and we were we were successful in terms of China like push things that normally I think would have been much more focused and thought about and you know questioned a little bit more and also I think the developer that we had on our team was really very interested in pushing some kind of a different retail environment and for a long time this project was sort of left vacant because there was an imagination that could propel it in a way to this kind of thing so when we proposed this sort of kind of small scale economic idea it was very happily accepted but at the same time when it came to the when it became a focus in a way other people came on board curators lifestyle enthusiasts those kinds of people I would have been very very nice under the radar the entire time so it could have been a little bit we could have been given a little bit more freedom to choose or would be intervening in terms of the kind of people that occupy eventually I mean I think that also connects to a question of scale right like what can architects and architecture achieve in the city in order to be transformative and I'm wondering I mean you know the appearance of the lifestyle curator I don't know if that's a person that's a job okay so the appearance of the lifestyle curator which is sort of like a micro management of the aesthetics of your intervention and then there's another scale which is the real estate developer which is like this privately owned massive real estate and somewhere in that is the architect and I'm wondering what the what the points of friction were for you and what do you think what do you think are the the points of friction but also the things that maybe needs to be tackled in a much more sort of aggressive or at a different scale right there's only so much that an individual building can achieve so what kinds of shifts do you think would be necessary in order to test this prototype to make it or to make it sustainable or viable I can maybe first talk about the frictions and then about the successes the frictions were immense in the beginning you must appreciate we've got a brief and a commission people said to us please we need this building fast we changed the site and the brief so when we presented this in the first meeting the client was red in her face she wanted to murder us she wanted to fire us immediately and get another architect who could be more obedient and go and do what the arses for so we had the argument that a flying structure would be cheaper a flying structure in a bigger envelope with more actors would be cheaper than an interior job and it really turned to be factually correct simply because of common interest we established common interest between the V&A was the property holder and this business incubator that was a tenant so to speak and because common interest was behind it people everybody pushed to get the building but it took the business incubator client much more to understand the project than the commercial side the commercial side of course being more practice in developing buildings I mean it's a very plain reason but the property developer was hugely supportive because basically we showed him the money so we've learned I mean it's a very weird thing but you know we can piddled very aggressive social agendas if we show people the money so somebody says I want the 9% yield on this development you show them the 9% and then you can go it's like your ticket it's your ticket to play if you can't make them the money they don't want to participate if it's commercial because their pension fund behind it but people who are appointed to make the pension growth they're not going to do anything else you're in Cloud Cuckoo Land if you think you're going to propose an agenda that doesn't make money for them so we had to show them the money and then the doors of heaven opened so the success in a way is a curious one and that has been hugely successful it prints money it is so successful the client entered the two awards that we first giggled when we heard we sort of won the award the shopping centre of the year award and the property developers it's like very coveted awards the shopping centre innovation award property developers retail award and we would never enter it for things like that and then we really thought that we didn't think it was a shopping centre I mean I did my thesis now to destroy the typology of shopping centres so what is interesting is that it becomes influential that other developers see it they hear about the money that's being made they look at how you make the money say wow you didn't go to any of the big chain stores you didn't speak to any of the successful entities you just made small space you know so suddenly we show that it is not a sort of philanthropic heart that is required to lead the poor into our cities there's a certain kind of a business practice that can maintain itself whilst transforming the city and we think that is probably the biggest success of it okay thanks I think we're very rapidly running out of time so and I'm sure that there are questions from the floor so I have more questions but I can ask yeah I can ask this tonight yeah I know I think one of the questions that we had and there are a number of them one had to do in scale and I think that was the value of actually looking at both these projects it's the question of the architect's intent but also while wrestling with all of these major issues around landscapes of inequality the histories municipalities you know you've got private sector but you also have the residents themselves and one of the last questions that we had developed was who are the agents of a particular project in the process of design particularly following the post occupancy period and I think both both of you talked about the ways in which the residents themselves regardless of maybe what the client's intent was and the architect's intent was transform the intention of the architect in that regard so I'm just wondering if you could both follow up on that and then we can just open it out so in Jardim Editi I think it's pretty active because as I was saying before the precarity sometimes allows certain relations that when you formalize is not acceptable anymore that is very weird thing to say because it's not an apology of precarious not at all but the fact is that even the people that live there they used to live in a certain way that afterwards it becomes like a conflict they can't manage anymore because they could accept when they lived in favela across the backyard of their neighbors but they can't accept anymore to share a common area like I was talking about it's difficult to manage it to so it's very weird sometimes it's hard to understand what are the process I didn't answer your question did I let's try there I think for us it was very important to understand that the city is at the same time very calcified in terms of its sort of practice around retail and commercial development and at the same time also very kinetic you know so that you know you have what we learned from our research in the noon that there's a very sort of intense kinetic sort of ways of working and specializing economies and at the same time in a situation like the V&A waterfront it's quite calcified and it's a direct relation to the histories of long histories of inequalities and so on and I think that what we try to think about is that simultaneity of that kineticism and calcification and I think housing is similar in a way that it's not stable the idea that you know these things these things are always kind of in flux and what we try to do with the waterfront is try to make one kind of gesture that is that perhaps could then direct or mitigate the sort of simultaneity which is the street this market street and moving through that and I think for me that is the interest in that project for me is like how does that street become the sort of single or stable gesture for the economy so I'll be very interested to see how I'm looking at the sort of future of that street in a way I think the formal device through which participation of people is ensured is not finishing the building so there's something about this very pristine well considered beautiful architectural artifact that is so superior to other artifacts made by ordinary people that is an antagonistic aggressive thing so there's something about making it incomplete allowing a degree of its completion and its continual completion open to the residents the tenants in the case of our building and also the I agree completely with that and also the common areas will suffer certain transformations people start to I hope they do in Jardin Agit because it's very recent the occupation there so I hope that with time also they can make it much more active the influence and for sure I mean the idea of that I mean the future of the building the post occupancy and how how does it happens and how it doesn't becomes like some individuals initiative but becomes more like a collective agreement is pretty much related on how things are conceived in the terms of how people were engaged in the process because when people are engaged in the process and they feel part of the process they recognize each other they recognize their decision so this is their decision and this for sure has huge impact on how the building develops in the future yes I feel like both you know both of those projects are very intent on how they design their socio-spatial ecologies because of how you study the transformation of the city and it's just very clear in terms of like how you know the occupants the residents then have agencies in that space to transform over time which is very important yes do you know that there is a thing about also Jardim and Diti because that is hard to think because the place where it is that's very valuable there was a thing like that well everybody's going to sell their units and go away because sometimes the urgency is so big the people think well I can have some money now so sell it it's what people said wow it's going to be sold and this population go away and in fact that it didn't happen because the recognition of the process of the battle to keep being there and also the recognition of being in this place of the city again not because it's rich no but because it's very much an integrated city there is transport, there is jobs there is the square is a nice place to live so people didn't sell that's a good thing I think so questions so one point I wanted to bring this question is about how after the building was under the municipality and how they broke your plan of the ground floor by putting the doors and fences and whatever it's more about how in the project still could integrate this function of the municipal system or the public service that is going to be in charge of the space and how to make sure that these strategies that like what you projected was a shared ground space will survive despite or will function or will happen in spite of a dysfunction in public system it's not so much a question but more a reflection on how to integrate like in the project and in the design the other factors that go beyond after it so I can tell you how to implement lessons maybe from the city well in actually is not in the ground floor that was broke I think the ground floor works very successfully in terms of conveins and everything was the top of it when the common area on roof of the equipment that I ask myself if it's really interesting to make a space like that as I said I think the city should make this role, the city in itself but I think one of the things that is the participative process that in Jardim and Diti was big but was very conflictive I think that was a problem I mean it's a historical process that is good to be like that because guarantee is the existence of this housing there but the conflict sometimes is prejudice is a prejudice if you can get a degree of and there is not cuckoo land like you said but if you can get a degree of consents it's possible because as you said as well people that the private sector is getting money from it, that's possible I don't think that it's not bad, they can get money, great to make think that is good for everybody great so I think that is the main question first I really appreciate this initiative to put together Brazil and Africa because we are all I'm Brazilian professor we are all condemned to be Latin American and sometimes it's split as from part of our past and the huge presence of African culture in Brazil due to Portuguese empire and colonization so it's very interesting and I think that the South African series, big series has so much things in common with Brazilian metropolis that we should do that often not to have to came to US to meet you it's a remarkable point we have to be more in contact but as we are all content to be to be more integrated with the close neighbors that is good is not bad but we have this part of us that is separate from us so this is one point, the second point is how to think the public spaces in the housing and in the renovations like that that you propose I'm living here since August in Harlem I'm visiting professor of the Department of Art History at Harlem I'm changing my mind about this some remarkable statements criticism on the projects because when I arrived in Selma the housing projects the towers, the space between them very intensively occupied used by people so there's no difference from the traditional old public spaces of the streets in the neighborhood so the old streets and the modern space between the towers are both intensively used so I think 56 years later we have to review Jenny Jacobs in the way how we think about the streets as behaviourist approach to architecture and urban planning and urban design one thing that Marta I never heard you saying that public space semi-public space above the facilities are a problem now but this is not intensively used but this is common I visit often housing projects everywhere it's not my main research line but in England if you go to the all this movement of landscape, urban design for the elevated catwalks those places are impossible to go you feel afraid to pass through an elevated catwalk in the need or any of those buildings of the states while the old Corbusian style states are very well because you have the buildings over streets over public space and people are using it as well as the neighbor traditional place I think we have to review some statements that were conceived in the 60s criticism to modernism mainly in these because what you did is levate and free the ground for people and create facilities to intensively be used it's so obvious but why we don't do that that's not the question sorry it's not the question that's the question I have a quick response to that I'll give you part of it I'll take a second I actually think your observation is absolutely right because I live near the grand houses down the street public housing and I don't think New York has ever torn down any of its public housing I may be wrong about that but unlike Chicago, St. Louis and many of the other cities the public housing survives everything to do with the history of social movements within public housing to maintain various social services the fact that there's always a high level of union organization so people had jobs which then fostered businesses that were locally owned there was a kind of ecology around public housing that allowed it to sustain itself in the city in ways that other cities failed precisely because the poor were always marginalized they were often exploited and then their contributions diminished so they weren't actively engaged with the larger kind of ecologies that allowed life to be sustained in a way and it's very different in your sense when you walk through public housing in New York for sure, certainly at this moment I guess this question is not going to mark that but I also would be interested in that I think I also have to say as well about how to preserve the informal social organization in the favelas when you move into a vertical more formalized space like you have common spaces that you talked about, how do you maintain kind of familial relations or kind of broader social kind of organization in these new spaces actually what are some of the other social issues that you mentioned about this person well, they in terms of in the particular case of Shadyen Jinshin they were really very much well articulated because a long history of fight for to be there as I showed you so this changing was not so big they had their leadership or they have this organization of the community and this organization keep being until today and of course when you put in a vertical communion the completion of much more used to be horizontally but it's like any vertical communion you have to start to learn how to to up floor, down floor and everything but in the case of Shadyen Jinshin they keep being much because they work already what I was referring is that what screws is that some kind of acceptance in the form of heavy acceptance is not that people no together much easier I think than in the formalization of a vertical so they start to fight for things that before they accept better I don't know but in the case of Shadyen Jinshin there was this there was not a big change in kind of your translation but there is a thing that I could just say that also in some part there is no rental social rental social housing for rent one of the times is much easier for everybody I think because this steel the management is very hard in terms of maintenance it's expensive but sometimes it's not well maintained and so on so I don't know I don't know why it's not there is not but I think this I think that the new the new master plan master plan can change I think it's a very good way of thinking the housing for rent we've been involved in some housing projects as well you mentioned that people were given the right to choose building neighbors across the state and this thing of being able to choose your neighbors is a very fundamental thing in constructing a new community and why that is such a useful device not only because you can choose your neighbors which will come to you very often the context of social housing the units are identical precisely identical for fairness in a way so you have thousand people, thousand recipients thousand identical units architecture is a very difficult thing to handle but to make units in such a way we do it very often much more horizontally but so that people could say turn which other turn around so you begin to get a diversity that comes out of the urban space although the basic components are similar and it's a very useful thing both in the social reconstruction of a thing but also in the architectural design to give it life we have two good questions so I really sort of wanted to go back to maybe an issue that has been sort of presented to both of you separate here and that's the sort of issue of the position that the architect can occupy through design in relation to the power and almost infinite in terms of sub power in the infinite vastness of the city and its administration in a sense and the ease with which I think that infinity can subvert some of the very close intimate work that you might have been doing as you evolved and responded to a brief that you might have been given I think in your case Martha the very idea that you probably went into negotiations or meetings with the community as you were developing the project and then it sounds like you were very regretful that that the units were sort of split apart so the high rise ones were the middle ones in terms of how they understood you correctly in terms of how they were subsequently managed you're saying that they're sort of privatized but the occupants own the spaces did I understand that correctly? No, what happened is the two vertical buildings they closed their doors because there is a region of access so this common level connected the three blocks, the three buildings the two big ones closed their doors so the only one that has an access is the smaller and lower one so but there must have been a logic to that closing the doors the closing the door is because they they say we pay for our lift so the other ones that has no need, there is no right to come through the door and connect it and use our limited but that's a question I don't think it's the question of the person that thinks that the problem is that the municipality go there and say that's one building, that's one building that's one building, three buildings yeah separate ones so as you were developing the project I presume you were in constant meeting then did they buy that idea to start with and then somehow post the project being completed they because in a sense I would presume that as you were developing the project some of the things that they loved about the project in the first place yes but that's one question that we couldn't develop so closely with the community because there was a judicial condition between the community and the municipality they were fighting so our relation with the community sometime was informal because they called the office and discussed like that but the municipality obeys any of the relation we had with the community be through them so it was not really was strong because the community was well organized so they managed to to do but unless there was a little for the municipality would be a little relation because it was a fight going for a long time there so it's sort of the city overcoming the drive and the interest of the community at the early stages of the project also but some of the things I think really both community and also the municipality because not that the municipality was a fight they were fighting because there was not another way to be in that case in that moment but for instance the equivalent the community was asking the municipality obeying the municipality the municipality used to have the equipment they never imagined that the equipment could be underneath the the unit because they wanted the equipment as a separate entity equipment is like the nursery and the nursery so we have time for one more actually actually so I have something for that we'll just have one more time for one more thank you thank you I know I've been working both on the housing projects but also urban and green programs I've been working with the municipality on what's there in about both these different choices on how to deal and tackle with problem problems I'd say and also I'd love to hear about how this programs are being out in K-Dom or in South Africa we can try in terms of housing and other discussions from the 50s in the open terminology and talking about it or maybe it's a long line that has to be really interrupted so would you have a straight opinion about it or do you think it's a case each case deserves a different but I think that it should be better if it's not a housing project if it's a number of great problems or that's the right decision to make the housing project that's the question in South Africa we sit in a curious position in that we've had government policies of subsidized housing like I've seen in Brazil except the government kind of afforded it so there's a promise that every family earning a certain amount of money will get a subsidized government house lifetime on lists hoping for and they don't get it and the influx into the cities are greater than the pace at which these houses are built it is a crisis so the idea of self built housing and incremental housing or assisted housing all of those things of course making a very big comeback simply because that is what the government can afford in dispensing its constitutional duty of providing decent housing to some extent but we are particularly concerned with the neglect of the superstructure in the city the infrastructure because there's such a focus on the house the individual unit dwelling as opposed to say business so people construct space for people to sleep and have dinner in the cook but they don't actually construct spaces for people to for economic opportunity or for socialization so I mean the presentation that we did at the Shenzhen Biennale dealt with this thing of the construction of opportunity so we said that the construction of infrastructure is important as the construction of opportunity so we are very concerned about debates around housing that focus us on housing and that is all that as well the idea is that we must make a structure for the city that accommodates living, working and socialization and not just residential opportunity yes and also you said about working on air or on a scale in fact I think it's all the same question that's on the table because in some part of the infrastructure in case of Shadi the money because the government hasn't got many money as well in case of Shadi it was the woman operation of the others that made the money totally because the private sector was much more interested in this area the question was in the others Shadi therefore was the first thing that the government put the money to make because they choose for instance to make this scandalous horrible bridge instead of making just the crossing as it means to be or something like that instead of investing more money in the housing process for instance I think is always talking about which kind of city you are going to create actually because the infrastructure as the way it is conceived is disastrous you saw the river now with two stress waves each side no human quality at all so even in Paraiso I think I think it's always almost the same discussion that is how it makes a city with quality and sometimes it's not necessarily more money it's just question because the government put lots of money in infrastructure for this noise is a it's like a water reservoir for rainwater to retain and it's disastrous because they build what technically is necessary okay, retains water but in terms of humanity it's absolutely exhausting so it's a lot of money and it's a lot of money that's put on the very, very fakie areas to solve a problem that's in the safety of the city and there is not a a problem of investing that money in creating a city so I think it's maybe not to be a problem of coming from Canada in terms of housing one can see as kind of the instrument for it has to be in a way in terms of how people are sort of housed or the purpose of labour the purpose of living for a free of care and housing is integral because of how the city can be cleared and in a way networks of people in colleges and not just the gold factory we're talking about social networks and have been taken out of the city so one thinks about a commercial project a housing project an educational innovation in the city I think when the different developers see the team to how to reconstruct those those kinds of lost networks as well so with this housing project I think one has to think about how can we reconstruct a neighbourhood networks of social imagination within the project that you're working with so I think for me housing in a way is kind of one of the key ways of cooperating appearing is kind of a very important part of the city and one can I would prefer to think of housing as to continue some of those violent practices in a way cooperating and restoring spatial justice so I would like to thank our panelists