Gabriel Duarte
Department of Urbanism, SPACELAB – Research Laboratory for the Contemporary City, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
Stephan Read
Department of Urbanism, SPACELAB – Research Laboratory for the Contemporary City, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
Download article
Published in: The ESF-LiU Conference Cities and Media: Cultural Perspectives on Urban Identities in a Mediatized World Vadstena; Sweden; 25-29 October; 2
Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 20:8, p. 79–92
Published: 2007-03-06
ISBN:
ISSN: 1650-3686 (print), 1650-3740 (online)
Urban mobility infrastructures leave behind spatial residues that generate regions of ambiguous character; often described as blighted. Paradoxically; such regions also offer optimal conditions for normally undesired urban functions that are related to intense mobility of people and commercial goods/services. They are being silently re-born with very specific functions: heavily connected and ’unwanted’ commerce; where the grime of hardware retail; car-repair and small industrial activities can freely happen.
This work investigated cases in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) in which formal; social and economical conditions led to the emergence of alternative economies affected by politics of exclusion from local planning agencies. Existing economical and social statistics were cross-referenced against topological and geographical analyses. Through diagrams that confronted both quantitative and qualitative aspects; it was possible to recognize how the study areas operate within hybrid urban scales.
By analysing the paradoxical conditions of these areas; it became clear how provisional the contemporary urban social-economical envelope became. The complex negotiations between metropolitan levels and technologies studied here are crucial for a critical shift on how contemporary urban planning operates. Even with a complete lack of public investment; such areas are having an economical performance comparable to more ’established’ locations and an unimagined socio-political representability.
Amin; Ash; Thrift; Nigel. Cities: Reimagining the Urban. London; Polity Press; 2002.
Augé; Marc; Howe; John (translation). Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso; 1995.
Balcells; Conxita; Bru; Josepa. Al Lado de / Alongside. Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili; 2002.
Bell; Jonathan. CARCHITECTURE: When the car and the City Collide. Basel: Birkhäuser Publishers for Architecture; 2001.
Borden; Iain; “Body Architecture: Skateboarding and the Creation of Super-Architctural Space”; in Hill; Jonathan (ed.). Occupying Architecture – Between the Architect and the User. London: Routledge; 1999.
Certaeu; Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press; 1988.
Chase; John; Crawford; Margaret; Kaliski; John (ed.). Everyday Urbanism. New York: Monacelli Press; 1999.
Foucault; Michel. The Archeology of Knowledge & the Discourse on Language. New York: Pantheon Books; 1972.
Gausa; Manuel; Salazar; Jaime. Housing/Single-Family Housing. Basel: Birkhäuser; 2002.
Graham; Stephen; Marvin; Simon. Splintering Urbanism – Networked Infrastructures; Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. London: Routledge; 2001.
Harvey; David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing; 1990.
Kwinter; Sanford. “La Città Nuova: Modernity and Continuity”; in Hays; Michael (ed.). Architecture Theory Since 1968. Cambridge: MIT Press; 1998.
Lefebvre; Henri; Nicholson-Smith; Donald (translation). The Production of Space. London: Blackwell Publishing; 1991.
Lefebvre; Henri. The Critique of Everyday Life; Vol. 1. London: Verso; 1991.
Mateo; Josep Lluis. “Els Immaterials”; in Quaderns d’Arquitectura i Urbanisme v.187; Barcelona: Col.legi de Arquitectes de Catalunya; 1990.
Virilio; Paul. A Landscape of Events. Cambridge: MIT Press; 2000.
