Informal rooting

informal stays in the contemporary city

Abstract

The work starts from the observation that a process of rooting, in contemporary metropolises, of “informal cities” that are structured about themselves and remain and settle in the collective imagination, producing an unprecedented sociocultural mutation. This paradigm shift always generates more diffusely invariant processes that are also expressed through the body physical structure of these settlements, which begin to change and assume logics of stabilization and reorganization. The work aims to address in a systematic and rigorous way the reading of this phenomenon, analyzing the urban fabric from a morphological point of view of four favelas in Rio de Janeiro, a privileged scope of observation regarding of informality. These territories, after having been crossed for a long time, observed, surveyed, mapped and redesigned, are analyzed on a territorial scale, to probe the incidence of rootedness in metropolises, and on a spatial scale, to identify and understand the syntaxes of evolution and micro-transformation of its urban fabric. The basic idea of the work is to look at these territories, until then not explored with the necessary precision by the scientific literature, with “the eyes of architect”, overcoming the wall represented by hypercomplexity, marginality and difficulty of access. The aim is to build a specific and unprecedented informal catalog that brings together the heritage of actions, forms and urban spaces generated within rootedness, and usable as an instrument for rigorous knowledge and interpretation of informality. The themes confronted in this study seek to provide a significant contribution – if not a preliminary answer – to issues of particular relevance in the scientific debate: which urban scenarios are generated from informal roots? What urban and spatial grammar are generated? Can urban theory absorb these new questions and translate them into precise project action methods?