cadê os arquitetos e urbanistas?

imagem by studio teddy cruz


um artigo de Jim Lewis no New York Times de 8 de junho sobre a crise da habitação (principalmente a partir do problemas dos refugiados de toda natureza) é tão bom que merece ter alguns parágrafos citados aqui na íntegra, principalmente no que se refere à pergunta que dá título a este post.

Refugee crises are usually seen as a stark example of the more general problem of disaster relief, which is similarly urgent though in crucial ways different. (Hurricanes, earthquakes and the like are usually over quickly, the affected population remains near home and rebuilding can begin almost immediately.) But it may be more useful to see them in the context of the enormous new tide of urban migration, a trend that has created at least 26 cities worldwide with a population greater than 10 million.

This has created an ongoing housing emergency: megaslums, shantytowns, favelas, squatter’s colonies. There are 80,000 people living on top of a garbage dump in Manila; a population of indeterminate size — perhaps as many as a million — who sleep every night in the cemeteries of Cairo; homeless encampments in San Francisco, Atlanta and Houston; guest workers camped beside the towers of the Persian Gulf; migrant workers in the San Fernando Valley. They are all displaced people.

You may be asking where the architects are in all of this, the urbanists and city planners, the people who are trained to address this sort of thing. I asked, too, and it took me a while to find anyone.

There was a time when they were everywhere. Modernist architecture was created to be, among other things, a way of providing housing for the masses in buildings that were dignified, aesthetically pleasing, practical and inexpensive. The Bauhaus, at least under Walter Gropius, was committed to working-class housing, and Le Corbusier helped found the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne to spread the notion of cities dotted with affordable residential towers across the world. The project failed, or perhaps it succeeded too well, in time degenerating into hideous and soulless apartment blocks. The emblem of that failure, the spectacular demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects in St. Louis in 1972, marks the end of Modernism as well as anything does

As the world’s population has grown and its disparities have become more evident, the needs Modernism addressed have become greater and more pressing, while most of our architecture continues to be built for the relatively well-off. Still, if you look hard enough, you can find a few strands of practice committed to housing the unhoused. There is a history and tradition that includes figures like Hassan Fathy, a Cairene architect who, starting in the 1930s, trained the poor of Egypt to build homes from mud bricks; Buckminster Fuller, with his geodesic domes; and Habitat for Humanity.

o texto inteiro pode (e deve) ser lido aqui no NYTimes.