Farm Cultural Park SLS Sao Paulo

SPONTANEOUS LIVING SPACE - SAO PAULO

Palazzo Cafisi, Farm Cultural Park, Favara, Italy, 2021

Countless Cities 2021 | The Biennial of the Cities of the World

PEOPLE LIVE HERE A more human approach

Self-construction determines a large part of the urban landscape of cities in developing countries.

Dwellings and settlements born from need, from haste and from limited economical resources, with formal or informal methods, are often thought as temporary at the time of their construction but then they evolve becoming constituent parts of the urban fabric.

Loosing their temporary character, it becomes necessary to consider them as an integral part of the city.

Tackling the issue of self built houses, it is important to take into account that they have always been part of the urban structure. Therefore, the contemporary self-built settlements need to be recognized, documented and studied as a stage of development of the city, to identify and analyse the spontaneous characters of contemporary living.

Assuming that living is a cultural process, the results of the Spontaneous Living Spaces research are aimed at representing the cultural landscape of a place, with its cultural identity.

The Sao Paulo case study is the first among those of Spontaneous Living Spaces. It focuses on the neighbourhood Jardim Filhos da Terra, a favela called Guapira II, that started its regularization process in 2008.

The case study was developed in 2012 under the supervision of Stefano Boeri and Pier Paolo Tamburelli and with the support of the Municipality of Sao Paulo and it was published within the book Jardim Filhos da Terra published by LetteraVentidue in 2021.

The case study includes an extensive architectural/photographic and video survey that documents the living and self-built houses of the neighbourhood.

The Pavilion

The pavilion wants the visitor to live the experience of discovering, in another guise, what is already known. Jardim Filhos da Terra is in fact a landscape example very close to that of Favara both for human and natural elements.

The relationships between Jardim Filhos da Terra and Favara that the pavilion creates are of various kinds: between the outside and the inside, between the institutions, between the communities, between formal and informal architectures, between the mineral and natural elements that make up the landscape of the two realities.

Curatorship

Corinna Del Bianco

Team

Research, texts, drawings and photographs

Corinna Del Bianco

Pavilion curatorship and design

Corinna Del Bianco

Costanza Leoni

Plants selection and descriptions

Francesca Pandolfi – Landscape Architect, UK

Photographs of the diptychs

Filippo Romano Photography