Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture
Justin McGuirk
Verso. 2014
«Rio [de Janeiro] is changing fast. In the run-up to 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, the city faces the prospect of having to build more infrastucture in half a dozen years than it did in the previous fifty. [...] And why is it that the one and a half million citizens of Rio who live in favelas are always treated to 'urban acupuncture', while a two-week global spectacle warrants mega-projects and massive infrastructural investment?»
«Designing a good building becomes a rather academic exercise when the entire system that allows that building to materialise is geared towards increasing social inequality.»
«In the informal economy, as can be witnessed across Latin America, people will find a way to put even the most unpromising or unlikely places to social and economic use. By contrast, the strict regulations governing any American city strive to segregate the domestic from the economic, and categorise the city into zones suitable for property speculation rather than rich social interaction.»
«In positioning the activists as the humbler, shreweder successors of the modernists, are we saying thet idealism yieled to pragmatism? [...] Modernism had a proud tradition of revolt, of categorical rejection of the past. The activisits are not so contrary. [...] City-making in the twenty-first century is not a tabula rasa activity; the solution is always contingent on what is already there. The first rule of the activist architect is that the informal city –the slum– is a fact, and accepting it as a functioning, productive piece of the actual city, and not something to be replaced, is the only way forward.»
«We've seen how the paternalistic attemps to impose order on the city in the middle of the last century failed. This was not just because of a lack of resources and political will, or a one-dimensional approach to urban design. They failed because the slums were too dynamic a force in the city to be subsumed and were consistently underestimated by both planners and architects, who understood the only scantly. The geographer Neil Smith put it succinctly when he said that one of the reasons why the informal city was misunderstood was because it was seen as 'pre-formal', as 'a transitional form of urbanism, en route to formalisation'.»
«What message did we hoppe to convey by exhibiting a squat [Torre David] in the world's most prestigious architecture exhibition [Venice Biennale of Architecture]? The point to make was that the real common ground of the city is not being created by architects at all. In an exhibition that tried to define a common architectural culture, that tried to unite the disparate factions behind the noble cause of architecture, our message was that the real common ground was not to be sought among other architects, but with citizens themselves.»