to sidestep more systemic problems, social, political, and economic situations. At the same time, a number of disciplines are brought upon to bear on cities and architecture. Cities and buildings are no longer the subject of only planners, architects or urban designers, but also of artists, engineers, social scientists, and in many cases journalists. Qualitative research, theories and analytical models, such as space syntax, are often employed based on various kinds of data that can inform evidence-based design. Today many professionals talk about the built environment as a complex system, and bring evidence from analytical studies to justify design decisions. Yet, when we have to think about the city or architecture innovatively, we should not only be informed by evidence, but also radically re-think them and come with new propositions.
authorless settlements, between the acres of new infrastructures and the thousands of relocations to make way for Olympic projects fundamental questions need to be kept in mind: – Can architecture reclaim its social and political role as a discipline? – Can spatial dimensions alone assure the success of social programmes? – Can theoretical and analytical approaches such as space syntax enable architects to be agents of social and political change? What aspects should these approaches address so as to strengthen architecture’s social and political agency? – How does the designer step back from dictating the form of a building or a city over time? – How does science as the epistemological model with its assumed detached objectivity relate to social and political values and the need to service ethical imperatives? – How do we navigate between the modernist model of architecture and widely spread processes of informal settlements and urbanisation? – Can architecture have the tools to propose an alternative idea about the city (at a time where cities are being shaped by global economics at a speed beyond municipal control)? – How do we overcome the gap between the iconic architectural project and the city as a by-product of urban policy and development? – If one third of the world’s populations have shifted from the country to the periphery of the city, what can we learn from their resilience and resourcefulness?
Rio@Rio: E-merging Design Research
As Justin McGuirk recently asked, ‘if architecture is just speculation then could there be a more fitting legacy of that period than Spain’s 3.5 million empty homes?’ (ibid. p. 15). If 1.5 million citizens of Rio live in the 1,000 favelas, and if squatters around the world build more square miles of city than architects, developers and the government, how can we take the World Cup projects, the Olympic ‘legacy’ seriously? Between the competing agendas of iconic mega architecture and the efforts to combat poverty, between the hunters of land profit and the slums, between the authored creations of architects and the multiple
13 Rio@Rio