- It is very tempting to seduce ourselves, as architects or as anybody keen on architecture or otherwise involved in the design process that the answer to our problems lies with buildings. Do you actually believe you can separate buildings out from the infrastructure of cities and mobility of transit and the expectations and incentives of people?
- Why do people tend to believe that what is financially profitable (for developers) is not actually equivalent to economically feasible (positive impacts on social welfare)? How would you show that this does not necessarily have to be like this (but rather the opposite)?
The city is the result of buildings aggregation, as far as a city grows buildings follow it and are followed, when a city planning is not organized the buildings grow follow the nature, when is organized the city planning force the nature, in an other way we can call these processes natural or unnatural planning. When you are in an old village you feel its age, when you are in a big planned city you see its transformation.
In the natural planning the buildings follows the lifestyle and the environment conditions, for example in the north african old city the streets related with the different families connections are small to protect the houses and the people from the sun, the building aggregation shape the city.
In the unnatural planning the nature, the people, the environment is forgotten or are not correlated, an extreme example is Brasilia, a city designed for representative purpose, far away to be suitable for people, a city designed for cars.
The battle between this two processes is the city of Rio de Janeiro, the planned city face off with the “natural planned” one, a city inside a city, illegitimate child of an unattainable dream life, abandoned down on its knees.
“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
That to say that more than buildings I wish to talk about society, the city grown is the expression of the society grown, and the society wishes are expressed today by starved politicians with starved constructor which created one of the biggest civilization paradigm, increasing numbers of evicted people an increasing numbers of empty houses for a market without buyers.
There is a problem, people without house and there is a solution, make this people able to have an house, but there is a complication, the developers behavior which desegregate this simple equation.
Here we are talking only about something that is not financially profitable and economically feasible at the same time, the collapse of the real estate market brings the government economy with.
The distance between what is financially profitable (for developers) and economically feasible stay in the target they focus on, if the target is the society, and the common behavior, is it possible to fill this gap?
“…the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping…something runs among them, an exchange of glances like lines that connect one figure with another and draw arrows, stars, triangles, until all combinations are used up in a moment, and other characters come on to the scene… ”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities