Metrocable in San Agustín, Caracas, Venezuela
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With design as a central component in the approach and through interventions that acknowledge and legitimize urban informality, the favela has returned to the center of the urban discourse and practice, hinting towards a new paradigm a paradigm that I am calling Favela Chic. It seems as though we have returned to the notion slums of hope, no longer vilifying informal settlements, but viewing them as integral in the development of the city, thereby reformulating the discourse of the growing city and the relations between global and informal.
![tabula facade signage tabula facade signage](https://www.videomappingsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/facadesignage_projection_mapping_software_tutorial6-300x200.jpg)
We are now witnessing spectacular libraries in depressed neighborhoods, gondola systems in marginalized areas, and museums in informal settlements. Following a long history of tabula rasa, public housing, self-help, and sites-and-services schemes, current approaches to the favela have evolved into strategies characterized as urban acupuncture, aiming to minimize displacement and improve the conditions in the area by focusing on the aspects most absent in the settlement: infrastructure, public space, and public equipment. Thus, a redefinition, reevaluation, and reconfiguration of strategies of intervention in the city are essential.Īlthough architects and planners have addressed informal settlements, or favelas, for over sixty years, it is only recently that there has been a shift in the paradigm. With a large percentage of the urbanization in the world today happening informally, how should we manage urban growth? How should we balance the growing urban population, the rights for shelter and rights to the city, with the aims of environmental management and a more inclusive and equitable urbanism and development? Responding to the current increase in urbanization, fragmentation and the resulting marginalization of spaces and people, architecture can no longer simply concern the materiality of inhabited space (urbs) but needs to recognize that the acts of building and claiming space are politically charged acts that define the political status and the right to the city of its inhabitants (civitas). The discourse of the global city can no longer exclude and is no longer separate from the informal one. In reference to Mexico City, architect Jose Castillo points out that the increase of informal settlements has become "the norm rather than the exception," and has therefore eroded our notion of what the city is. The United Nations estimates suggest that today nearly one billion people live in "slums" worldwide.