Justin McGuirk

What makes the city of the future? How do you heal a divided city? In Radical Cities, Justin McGuirk travels across Latin America in search of the activist architects, maverick politicians and alternative communities already answering these questions. From Brazil to Venezuela, and from Mexico to Argentina, McGuirk discovers the people and ideas shaping the way cities are evolving. Ever since the mid twentieth century, when the dream of modernist utopia went to Latin America to die, the continent has been a testing ground for exciting new conceptions of the city. An architect in Chile has designed a form of social housing where only half of the house is built, allowing the owners to adapt the rest; Medellín, formerly the world’s murder capital, has been transformed with innovative public architecture; squatters in Caracas have taken over the forty-five-story Torre David skyscraper; and Rio is on a mission to incorporate its favelas into the rest of the city. Here, in the most urbanised continent on the planet, extreme cities have bred extreme conditions, from vast housing estates to sprawling slums. But after decades of social and political failure, a new generation has revitalised architecture and urban design in order to address persistent poverty and inequality. Together, these activists, pragmatists and social idealists are performing bold experiments that the rest of the world may learn from. Radical Cities is a colorful journey through Latin America—a crucible of architectural and urban innovation.

Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture

Radical Cities

architecture as a tool to prevent revolution or foster social cohesion and aims. what is the role of the activist architect today?

Rebecca Lum

In the 1960s the favelas were considered breeding grounds of communist revolt. In the grip of Cold War paranoia, the US was on guard against future Cubas in the making, and sponsored mass housebuilding programmes in Brazil to help eradicate the favelas. One of these was Cidade de Deus, or City of God. It is no coincidence that it resembled the American suburban model of detached (albeit rudimentary) houses arranged in neat blocks around playing fields. From the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s, the government built 40,000 such homes, resettling nearly 30 per cent of Rio's favela population far away on the outskirts […] Part of what motivated this mass uprooting was the belief that if people were made homeowners they were less likely to become revolutionaries.

What is the role of the activist architect today? […] To establish relations with people, to force doors open, to impose a dialogue, to provoke.

…established a set of inviolate principles that determined everything they would do. "We want to get into power - why? What are the problems we are going to solve?’ Like an architect, as he speaks he starts to sketch a diagram. 'What we want to attack is inequality, violence and corruption, he says, giving each vice its own box. Throughout our con- versation he keeps coming back to that diagram. When he mentions building schools and libraries, he points his pen at the inequality box. When he refers to new public spaces, it lingers over the violence box. It was his disciplined focus on social goals that he feels gave the urban renewal projects of Medellín their political power. But in order to implement his [Sergio Fajardo] vision, he had to overcome target number three: corruption.

Building schools and libraries was his way of tackling inequality, while building new parks and plazas provided a support system that addressed violence by offering citizens the chance to reconnect. ‘Where there is fear, you get a fragmented society,’ he says. ‘The fear and violence destroy any kind of citizenship, any working together. There are no citizens living there, only individuals surviving – "save yourself". So everyone is resigned to living in their place, and public space is basically destroyed as a site of reunion for communities.’ What was most significant about Fajardo’s programme was the decision to concentrate the municipal budget in the poorest districts of the city. This was an act of political will, but also an essential urban design strategy.

… social change and the creation of a more equitable city are not a question of good buildings. They are a question of civic imagination. And that is something that has been sorely eroded by the neoliberal economic policies of recent decades.

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