+ TRAVESSAS TAMANDUATEÍ [Speculative Project]

SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL / 2018

Reimagining São Paulo’s Tamanduateí Industrial Crescent

Collaboration
Leticia Palazzi Perez, Kirsten Larsen, Nathan Brigmon, Joanna Corbett, Jason Sowell

INTERDISCIPLINARY DESIGN COLLABORATION | POSTINDUSTRIAL URBAN CORRIDORS | HOUSING

As Brazilian cities promote the redevelopment of high-growth transit corridors, their adjacent informal settlements are at risk for displacement. To mitigate these dynamics, this project developed scenarios to help government, community, and private actors prioritize where and how to infill redevelop vacant tracts along São Paulo’s Tamanduateí corridor with Minha Casa Minha Vida (MCMV, translated as My House My Life) housing.

MCMV is a federal program that has been highly critiqued for constructing low-income housing on peripheral, isolated sites, thus worsening social and spatial segregation. The proposal shown here explores how MCMV housing models can be used as infill instead.

We tested MCMV housing models infill in one of São Paulo’s five major development districts, the Operação Urbana Consorciada Bairros do Tamanduateí (OUCBT, Lei 723/2015), a 4,000-acre strategic planning zone in São Paulo’s eastern industrial crescent. Within the OUCBT, 14% of the land is designated as Zonas Especiais de Interesse Social (ZEIS, Zones of Special Social Interest), which are designed to transfer the surplus gained in wealthy development districts to poor ones. To aid in the distribution of urban resources, we categorized these ZEIS into majority housing or ecological programs, based on vulnerability to flooding. 

Drawing on an engagement process (September – December, 2015) led by Kristine Stiphany with residents and leaders of the Heliópolis favela, the team developed four design principles, which guided eight transversal development corridors, or travessas, that divide the OUCBT into smaller neighborhoods. Keeping this neighborhood sense in mind, each travessa was programmed relative to the assets and opportunities that should be delivered via the ZEIS, rather than the default of only housing or large-scale infrastructure that governments tend to build out. 

By interweaving small travessas into a large corridor and using MCMV housing to infill redevelop a constellation of sites, the project presents a broad framework for communities, governments, and private actors to co-synthesize small urbanistic actions into comprehensive plans for important urban areas.