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Ivone is 25 years old and has dark skin. She lives under a bridge with her husband, her two daughters, ages 2 and 4, and her 1-year-old son, whom she breastfeeds sitting on a couch on the sidewalk. Since 2019, she has been sleeping in a house in which the walls are planks and the roof is the viaduct of a highway: the Radial Este near Brás, a middle-class neighborhood very close to the center of São Paulo. She was born in the South Zone and arrived in Brás at the age of 12, accompanying her mother. She “she slept in a squatted boarding house and also on the street. About 200 families with 20 children live here now. We have occupied the tennis court next door to have a kitchen, bathroom and a pantry where we can store food donations. This community started about ten years ago, but the City Council wants to kick us out since the pandemic, I guess because they are building housing towers on this street,” she says.
In the kilometer that measures Piratininga Street, there are dozens of industrial warehouses where industrial machinery is sold. At least five are now evangelical churches, very abundant in the Eastern Zone of São Paulo. Cranes appear lifting residential buildings, such as those of the future Palace private condominium from the construction company Lavvi, which promises “complete leisure in a 37-story tower,” on a sign with the image of a swimming pool with water bluer than the sky.
Ivone cannot access those apartments that are being built next to where she lives and she does not feel welcomed by the neighborhood. “There are a lot of people who don't want us to be here. They look at us badly or don't even look at us, and they close the car window as they pass. We are humans too, and when you have nowhere to go the feeling is very bad. If you also don't know where to lie down, you get desperate,” she says. And she points to the other side of the road, where a metal fence encloses the space under the bridge: “The City Council has closed it so that no one can settle under it.” Next to the fence, three men sleep huddled on the sidewalk. “There at the back, on another stretch of the highway, the ground is full of sharp stones,” adds one of her neighbors.
A law against hostile architecture
“They are putting stones under the bridges, because they do not want the poorest to even have the right to sleep there,” denounced the president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, when he faced his rival Jair Bolsonaro in the 2022 general elections. The national law against hostile architecture had just been approved, these elements so that urban spaces are not used in an unwanted way, according to those who install them. Spikes, stones, bars, nets or fences that prevent people from lying down, sitting or just being. Bolsonaro vetoed the law, but Congress finally managed to pass it. And they called it the Father Julio Lancellotti Law in homage to the Catholic priest who coordinates the Pastoral do Povo de Rua (Pastoral of the street population), which is two kilometers from the bridge where Ivone lives.
For more than 40 years, Lancellotti has defended those who live on the streets of São Paulo, the most populated and richest city in South America, where there are 50,000 homeless people, according to the 2022 Census of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). He is an uncomfortable priest for some, who has personally gone to break the stones installed under a viaduct and who in his sermons tells his faithful that going to church does not humanize, that what one should do is help one's neighbor. . “A city that has many hospitals is because the people are very sick. A city that has many churches is because the people are very inhumane,” he states flatly. And he remembers that, although in São Paulo there are thousands of religious centers and nearly 6,000 evangelical churches, it is a cruel city in which more and more people sleep on the street.
At 75 years old, the parish priest fights energetically against aporophobia, the fear of the poor, and defends the right to housing and the city. He regularly uses Instagram social network, where he has more than two million followers, to denounce the hostile architecture, which he considers inhumane. “They install stones, spikes, spears, or wet the ground with water or oil, instead of providing humanizing and welcoming solutions,” he concludes in an angry tone, and emphasizes that these types of “anti-beggar” devices—as he calls them—are also a risk to citizens in general.
The sidewalk ballet
In the mid-20th century, during the demographic explosion of many American cities, hygienic urban renewal projects were imposed that promoted social control in the streets and architectural solutions that favor the use of automobiles, but are hostile to certain groups. population such as children, women, elderly people, people with reduced mobility or homeless. In the midst of the rise of the modern city with its apology for the segregation of uses in the streets, urban planners as influential as the Canadian Jane Jacobs – who worked mainly in New York and who is the author of the well-known essay Death and life of big cities-, they confronted this way of designing urban space.
They defended that a lively and attractive city is one that can be used by all citizens; It is walkable, its streets are used for many things and people walk through them, turning them into useful, pleasant and safe spaces. “The intricate mix of diverse (urban) uses in cities is not a form of chaos. On the contrary, it represents a complex and highly developed form of order,” said Jacobs, who compared the streets to a ballet: “Not a precise and uniform dance in which everyone lifts their leg at the same time, spins capriciously and does mass bowing, but an intricate ballet where each of the dancers and ensembles have diverse roles that miraculously reinforce each other and compose an ordered ensemble.”
But most large American cities did not follow that drift. Like São Paulo, where the streets are more designed for cars than for people. Although, paradoxically, one of its icons is the MASP (Museum of Modern Art), a building that generates democratic public space on Paulista Avenue, one of the main arteries of the city. It was designed by the Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi and inaugurated in 1947. Part of the museum hangs from a structure of concrete pillars painted red, in a radical gesture that leaves the ground floor free at street level. The architect's decision creates a plaza covered by a 70-meter span that gives continuity to the public space. Under its shadow, all kinds of activities take place: open-air cinema, shows, various meetings, sales of crafts and the concentration of large public demonstrations, such as the celebration of Lula's victory in the 2022 general elections or the recent event called by Bolsonaro in February 2024. And now, with the severe housing crisis that the city is experiencing, some people spend the night there. Like Antonio, who moves in his wheelchair with some difficulty across the cobblestones of the square.
Citizen urbanism in Latin America
Despite the lack of quality urban planning and public safety in most Latin American cities, in general public space is used in a more democratic and spontaneous way than in places like Europe or the United States. But it is the most unequal region on the planet and that is reflected in its streets, which vary greatly from one neighborhood to another. Most are not welcoming because they do not have basic facilities and services, such as good paving, water drainage, street furniture, signage, lighting, garbage collection, public transportation or vegetation.
In response to the lack of care of Latin American public spaces, which are hostile to many people, initiatives are emerging to promote inclusive and democratic urban design. As the international event Insurgencies: Experiences from the Public Space, held in Rio de Janeiro in September 2023, in which dozens of projects were presented to make Latin cities friendlier, avoiding hostile urban planning and architecture. “As an insurgency we understand any intervention to transform urban space in a tactical, punctual, collaborative and high-impact way. It can be temporary or permanent, material or immaterial, local or regional,” explain Adriana Sansão and Lucía Nogales, the event's coordinating architects.
Nogales is Spanish, but she carries out much of her activity in Peru, where she directs the organization Occupy Your Street, which promotes citizen urbanism as an alternative to the imposed design and planning model. “Citizen urban planning integrates technical knowledge with that of those who live in cities. It is born from the initiatives and dynamics of people, it is designed with their diversity in mind and encourages citizens to participate at all levels of decision-making. But we cannot do it alone, we want governments to take ownership of this policy to create more just, inclusive and equitable cities,” he says. Ocupa Tu Calle has participated together with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and Ciudades Comunes (Argentina) in the publication Citizen urbanism in Latin America: superbook of civic actions for the transformation of citieswhich includes a compilation of 76 successful cases from 38 cities in the region.
Citizen urban planning has been practiced in Latin American cities for a decade, but for it to transcend public policies and spread is a slow process in which a paradigm shift is necessary: for people, with all their diversity, to be the protagonists. of public spaces.
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