Urban and Regional Planning and Design
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/26353
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Item The High-Rise and The Shack: Rhizomatic Collisions In Caracas’ Torre David(University of British Columbia, Okanagan, 2020) Irazabal, Clara; Sosa, Irene; Schlenker, Lee EvanA 45-story tower in Caracas formerly occupied by some 5,000 squatters, Torre David was touted by international media accounts as the world’s most spectacular “vertical slum.” This, among other sensationalized accounts, failed to consider the paradoxical ways in which Caracas’ formal and informal, urban and architectural trajectories literally collided with each other in Torre David. The modern high-rise and the self-built shack—antagonist spatial typologies in Caracas’ growth—were dramatically superposed in the tower, unleashing hitherto un(fore)seen dynamics. Through site fieldwork, interviews, film production, media analysis, and historical research, we offer a nuanced theorization of Torre David that grapples with its charged tensions between the formal and informal, modern and traditional, modernity and postmodernity, reality and imagination, and capitalism and socialism. We begin our investigation with a historical account of the tower’s construction, abandonment, and ultimate occupation. This is followed by a theoretical positioning of Torre David as a social and physical space ‘in-between’. Ultimately, we argue that these tensions created a rhizomatic socio-spatial field heavily pregnant with both risks and hopes for the people, the government, and the spatial disciplines.Item Counter Land Grabbing by the Precariat: Housing Movements and Restorative Justice in Brazil(MDPI, 2018) Irazabal, ClaraSocial housing movements in Brazil, whose majority members are part of Brazil’s precariat or lowest-income class, are courageously pressing for true urban reform in Brazil, whose old promise has been systematically delayed and subverted, even by some of those who were put in power to realize it. By occupying vacant and underutilized land and buildings, not only are these movements confronting neoliberalism in Brazil at a time of the model’s highest level of hegemony in the country and the world, they are also unveiling the impossibility of the system to deliver sociospatial justice to the poor and are enacting an alternative. Through restorative justice practices, they go beyond critique and press for an alternate sociopolitical project that would allow millions of people in Brazil access to decent housing, and through it, to a myriad of other opportunities, including the right to the city. As shown in the experiences of those participating in housing struggles, restorative justice deserves further exploration as an alternative planning mode that can combine the strengths of advocacy planning and communicative action while reducing their drawbacks. These reflections focus on the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sen Teto (MTST) and partially feed from team ethnographic and planning studio work on several building and land occupations in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in Brazil in 2016.