the informal construction process of the favelas is an architecture derived from our building practices but less inhibited by preconceived notions of design. in times of limited resources, fast urbanization and increasing demand for shelter, such process in which the materials not only come first but arrive at the construction site before any spatial abstraction has been conceived is a challenge to our creative process. the favela studio was a semester-long exploration of informal settlements searching for creative design solutions as well as a deeper understanding of the issues at Acaba-Mundo favela, a settlement of 1200 people in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
Street Matters links urban policy and planning with street protests in Brazil. It begins with the 2013 demonstrations that ostensibly began over public transportation fare increases but quickly grew to address larger questions of inequality. This inequality is physically manifested across Brazil, most visibly in its sprawling urban favelas. The authors propose an understanding of the social and spatial dynamics at play that is based on property, labor, and security. They stitch together the history of plans for urban space with the popular protests that Brazilians organized to fight for property and land. They embed the history of civil society within the history of urban planning and its institutionalization to show how urban and regional planning played a key role in the management of the social conflicts surrounding land ownership. If urban and regional planning at times benefited the expansion of civil rights, it also often worked on behalf of class exploitation, deepening spatial inequalities and conflicts embedded in different city spaces.
As the 20th Century progressed, urban housing became quite homogenized throughout the world. Apartment buildings in Sao Paulo are very similar to those in Seoul, Moscow, and even Chicago. It is clear that the modernist architectural vocabulary made famous by the so-called "International style" has gone much beyond corporation identity buildings and prevails in the housing sector in most of the urbanized world. According to a study supported by the United Nations Habitat (ANGEL, 2000), residential buildings - although varying in size, shape and construction materials - now take on one of four basic forms: the single family house, the row house, the walk-up apartment building and the high-rise. This book is the result of almost a decade of research on multi-family buildings, known worldwide as apartments. The main goal is to investigate the extent to which those buildings are or are not alike, or whether the similarities are more visual than experiential.
Modern Architecture in Latin America: Art, Technology, and Utopia is an introductory text on the issues, polemics, and works that represent the complex processes of political, economic, and cultural modernization in the twentieth century. The number and types of projects varied greatly from country to country, but, as a whole, the region produced a significant body of architecture that has never before been presented in a single volume in any language. Modern Architecture in Latin America is the first comprehensive history of this important production. Designed as a survey and focused on key examples/paradigms arranged chronologically from 1903 to 2003, this volume covers a myriad of countries; historical, social, and political conditions; and projects/developments that range from small houses to urban plans to architectural movements. The book is structured so that it can be read in a variety of ways—as a historically developed narrative of modern architecture in Latin America, as a country-specific chronology, or as a treatment of traditions centered on issues of art, technology, or utopia. This structure allows readers to see the development of multiple and parallel branches/historical strands of architecture and, at times, their interconnections across countries. The authors provide a critical evaluation of the movements presented in relationship to their overall goals and architectural transformations.
The book presents several advances in different research areas related to data storage, from the design of a hierarchical memory subsystem in embedded signal processing systems for data-intensive applications, through data representation in flash memories, data recording and retrieval in conventional optical data storage systems and the more recent holographic systems, to applications in medicine requiring massive image databases.
A forty-year-old Brazilian journalist reduced to living in a dilapidated building inhabited by a bizarre human fauna—fortune-tellers, transvestites, tango-loving Argentinean hustlers—is called upon to track down and write the story of Dulce Veiga, a famous singer who disappeared twenty years earlier on the eve of her first big show. Thus begins a mad race through an underground, nocturnal São Paulo among rock bands with eccentric names, feline reincarnations of Vita Sackville-West, ex-revolutionaries turned junkies, gay Pietas, echoes of Afro-Brazilian religions, and intimations of AIDS . . . Constructed like a mystery, the novel unravels over a week, evoking a decadent and contaminated atmosphere in which the journalist's own search for meaning finds its expression in the elusive Dulce Veiga, who constantly appears to him as if in a dream, her arm pointing heavenward. Whatever Happened to Dulce Veiga? is a descent into the underworld of contemporary megalopolises where, like the inside of a huge TV, life intermingles with bits of music, film clips, and soap opera characters in a crazy and macabre dance, moving toward a possible catharsis.
Approaches to Managing Disaster - Assessing Hazards, Emergencies and Disaster Impacts demonstrates the array of information that is critical for improving disaster management. The book reflects major management components of the disaster continuum (the nature of risk, hazard, vulnerability, planning, response and adaptation) in the context of threats that derive from both nature and technology. The chapters include a selection of original research reports by an array of international scholars focused either on specific locations or on specific events. The chapters are ordered according to the phases of emergencies and disasters. The text reflects the disciplinary diversity found within disaster management and the challenges presented by the co-mingling of science and social science in their collective efforts to promote improvements in the techniques, approaches, and decision-making by emergency-response practitioners and the public. This text demonstrates the growing complexity of disasters and their management, as well as the tests societies face every day.
The Triumph of an Accursed Lineage analyses kingship in Castile between 1252 and 1350, with a particular focus on the pivotal reign of Alfonso XI (r. 1312–1350). This century witnessed significant changes in the ways in which the Castilian monarchy constructed and represented its power in this period. The ideas and motifs used to extoll royal authority, the territorial conceptualisation of the kingdom, the role queens and the royal family played, and the interpersonal relationship between the kings and the nobility were all integral to this process. Ultimately, this book addresses how Alfonso XI, a member of an accursed lineage who rose to the throne when he was an infant, was able to end the internal turmoil which plagued Castile since the 1270s and become a paradigm of successful kingship. This book will appeal to scholars and students of medieval Spain, as well as those interested in the history of kingship.
Walks Through Memories of Oblivion is a collection of short stories and essays about resistance, prison, and exile; a creative nonfiction narrative based on true events; flashbacks from the former political prisoner Fernando Andres Torres once was at eighteen years of age, during the military regime that overthrew democracy and established a brutal dictatorship (1973-90) in Chile, Torres's homeland. These stories are not about politics, they are personal; the flesh and bones behind the young and restless student militant that Torres once was; there is a good game of dark humor and tales of subtle and small victories of human endurance and perseverance.
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