An exploration of public spaces

The last two days I explored the northeastern half of the strip stretching from Coroa in the northeast to Villa Nova Conceicao, just southwest of Ibirapuera Park. In this exploration I documented the public spaces in the different neighbourhoods, trying to find the different established approaches in dealing with these spaces. In my last blog I tried to state some phenomena that make Sao Paulo’s public spaces and public culture different from what I’ve seen in other cities. While describing phenomena usually end up in generalizations, my intention was not to generalize Sao Paulo’s approach towards this theme but to find some similarities in the public spaces throughout the various neighbourhoods that influence the experience of the public culture of the user.

This exploration confirmed most of my thoughts towards the allocation of the most interesting public spaces. Indeed many are found behind fences or facades, making them well-controlled and well-maintained. But I also found places where it’s not this black and white. Here there is the potential to develop into something more. Something that is not anchored to this specific location and only available from time to time. But something that is on the border of the street, where there often is no alternative for using it for transportation, and the public or semi-public domain. It is these spaces that allow a different usage by different users whilst not restricting it to specific time periods or a specific group of people.

Another important discovery has been that walking through a big part of the strip I got a better understanding of the different neighbourhoods and their approach towards public space as a tool to create an interesting environment where it is nice to remain for a while. These different neighbourhoods all have an own identity, and looking at their public spaces I found some variables that influence the use of these spaces and its flexibility:
- profile of the streets
- programme
- maintenance/security
- location (within logistical and demographic web)
- connections between concentrations of interesting public spaces
- accessibility

All these variables differed highly from neighbourhood to neighbourhood and determine how the public spaces are used right now and their potential in developing into a more flexible/dynamical public culture since most of these spaces right now only allow for on specific type of use. This leads to my approach towards my presentation on this theme. It consists of 2 parts:
- documentation of the actual situation regarding the public spaces and culture throughout the different neighbourhoods
- creating strategies to change the spaces that only allow for a singular use or almost no use at all

Finally I will summarize in what kind of products this will result. The documentation consists of maps where I define the different neighbourhoods and their different approaches/situation regarding the public spaces/culture. These maps will be accompanied by pictures and diagrams that show their design, use and an explanation of this type of use on these specific locations. The strategies will consist of a listing of interventions that could be made in order to redevelop the public spaces and culture that need attention because they are lacking quality at the moment. Step by step I will address these interventions and accompany them with diagrams, referential spaces and text that explain how they can improve these public spaces and their use.

a knot

…a knot in the public web, triggered by some pedestrian space and a subway station, a infrastructure joint.

Publicness

The project in short
Perception of architectural space

The theme for my graduation project is driven first by the fascination of the role that human perception and phenomenological experience plays in architecture and second by the curiosity about the public web in the urban structure, the city life.

In short to describe what the project will be about I would like to statement that I understand the public network along with the interaction in it as the city life. If we look at public buildings we might say that public buildings express the society, the common public life. There from rises the general question ‘how build material can express?’ and more related to the theme of the public ‘How do we perceive a public building as being public and when do we experiencing pleasure as well as feeling invited?’ These question leads to phenomenology and from its discourse I would like to build up the design arguments for a public building supposedly related to cultural as a fine art.


Focus in Sao Paulo
Publicness

Based on its enormous diversity, complexity, history and cultural richness the city of Sao Paulo offers a fascinating frame for a thesis project that has the concern about publicness and the interdependence of public and representation. This in mind I chose Sao Paulo as the context of the design project.

With the focus on publicness I would like to walk through the defined strip of Sao Paulo looking for public spaces. Defining public spaces as the places where strangers meet I would like to study the conditions of these particular public places asking ‘What turns them into what they are?’ with a particular view on public buildings and its particular use as well as its respond to its environment. With the result I will define a potential location for the design object of the graduation project.

As a method the walk will be tracked by GPS and documented by photography with particular focus on the transition/entrance from the street to the inside of public buildings.

Discovering the place of informality within a formalized public world

My project is based on the experiences I had when I traveled through Brazil last year. When I came to Sao Paulo I had already been in Brazil for nearly two months and explored both numerous cities, like Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, Recife, Natal, Fortaleza, and the interior of Brazil with its more remote culture. Back then I found the public culture in Sao Paulo was entirely different from all the other cities I had visited. Of course you can’t generalize cities into one kind of public culture and especially in Brazil where most cities have an entirely different background, population and so on. But in general, looking at the public culture of the cities, they all have one thing in common. Brazil has an unrivalled outdoor culture which exposes itself in people using the streets, beaches and parks as the extension of their home. Compared to Dutch public culture, the ‘Brazilian version’ is much more vivid and tangible. Here people tend to use the home for eating and sleeping, but other than that they prefer to go somewhere in order to find a location for their activities.

Looking at its public culture, Sao Paulo is a different story though. Here the public life is not as much on the foreground as we could find in other Brazilian cities. This could mean two things: either the public life is only present to a smaller extent, or it is less visible. This could have to do with different variables, among which the enormous scale of the city, which could result in a flattening or spread of the public culture, with the way the city of Sao Paulo has developed a strategy to give a place and time for public culture, or with characteristics of the city and its inhabitants, like economy, historical background, growth, climate and so on. Whatever reasons there may behind it, one thing is for sure: the typical Brazilian outdoor culture is less present or at least differently arranged in Sao Paulo compared to the majority of Brazilian cities. This discovery has been the starting point for my project proposal.

In my view, this difference could be the consequence of two phenomena. Either the public culture in Sao Paulo is drawn inside or it is restricted to certain areas. Also important to point out is the difference in use of public space at day and at night. At daytime the majority of public space is used for infrastructural, logistical reasons. This in itself is not that strange, since a city’s public space mostly consists of streets that take people from one place to another. But where in other cities these streets and squares are also used for a more diverse and longer use, in Sao Paulo the streets seem to be used to go from one interior to the next. It makes the public space a dynamical whole, but one without any surprises, spontaneous events and other kinds of informal responses to this formal use. At night, the dynamical whole is totally gone. The streets become deserted, emptiness with nothing more than here and there a taxi passing by. Almost everything is closed, even most of the cash machines. This is all because of the lurking danger, but on the same time this desertedness increases the danger too.

At the moment there is almost no space for informal responses in the formal city, which makes its public culture rather predictable. Even the informal responses to this predictable formality are as much as possible being staged by the municipality by giving it a place in time and space. Both temporal and local responses happen in- and outdoors. Examples are Ibirapuera, Centro or the way part of Sao Paulo’s highway is closed off on sundays in order to provide, aware of its lack, public space for the Paulistanas. This has led to my theory in which the formalized city of Sao Paulo is split into so called free zones and controlled zones. In the free zones there is room for informality, here you can do whatever you want to. In the controlled zones informality is tied as much as possible, here you do what is expected of you. The obvious critique is that informality can’t be controlled by limiting it to a time or space, since informality is a response to this exact formalization.

My goals for this workshop are twofold. Firstly, I want to put this theory to the test. This I’ll do by walking the strip and mapping it into different zones for different public cultures while trying to find out whether this free zones–controlled zones contrast is really as black and white as I just elaborated. This will result into a map in which these formal and informal zones are given a place, accompanied by recordings of these different zones, either through pictures, videos or audio recordings. This I’d like to finish on Tuesday or Wednesday around noon at its latest. Secondly, I’ll think of alternative strategies in order to revitalize Sao Paulo’s tied public culture, both day and night. To me it has become clear that the public culture in its actual appearances has a lot of potential that is not being fully employed. These alternative strategies will be visualized in text, diagrams, sketches and/or pictures. In the post-production phase this could lead to alternative designs for the public space of one or two locations that have the highest potential.