Archinect - News

MIT develops interactive digital environment to understand Brazil’s favelas

2021-04-26T18:47:00-04:00

The MIT Senseable City Lab has unveiled their “Favelas 4D” project, dedicated to mapping the largest favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Using 3D laser scanning technology to analyze the urban landscape of Rocinha, the project seeks to understand and quantify the architectural logic of one of Brazil’s famous informal settlements.

Brazil’s favelas consist of dense, multilayered, informal settlements that dot the hills of large cities such as Rio de Janeiro; their urban chaos contrasting starkly with the planned neighborhoods surrounding them. This spatial complexity makes the favelas a difficult terrain for typical open-source mapping tools such as satellite imagery and Google Street View, leaving much of their labyrinthine cityscapes unmapped and misunderstood.

Favelas 4D. Image: MIT Senseable City Lab

On the importance of mapping these informal settlements, the MIT team explains; “The global trend of urbanization is not limited to shining downtown districts and masterplanned developm...

Olympic Infrastructure Displaces Brazilian Families

2014-09-02T15:21:00-04:00

Later this month, about 900 of the 1,500 families who live in Vila União will start to move out to make way for the TransOlímpica rapid bus system (BRT) to be built for the 2016 Rio Olympics. It is one of the biggest favela resettlements since Rio was chosen to host the games, with some 500 families also resettled from 2010 to 2011 for the construction of the TransOeste BRT.

A Tale Of Two Cities: Mixing The Urban Poor Into A Rich Urban Life

2014-07-01T13:19:00-04:00

Skyscrapers and shanties, gleaming malls and rundown markets, palatial houses and the piss-poor guys who build them: Those are the divides in cities like Mumbai, Nairobi and Manila. Rich and poor do not much mingle. But a movement is afoot to change that. It aims to integrate the poor into the urban bloodstream, instead of shunting them from sight. For this "inclusive cities" movement, urban renewal doesn't require razing slums and markets.

The Trouble with Favela Chic

2014-06-23T18:50:00-04:00

A Milwaukee bar called Nomad World Pub wanted to create a special place for its customers to watch the World Cup, so it decided to set up a faux favela inspired by Rio de Janeiro’s poverty-stricken mountainside slums. The fact the space comes with a taco hut — a type of food not even served in Brazil — reveals the depth of ignorance out of which it was created. You have to wonder: is the menu in Spanish too?

Prepping for World Cup, Brazilian police build mock favelas to train officers

2014-06-16T18:51:00-04:00

Police simulations such as these offer a peculiarly spatial insight into the ways humans attempt to make sense of the world. [...] Someone builds a surrogate or a stand-in—a kind of stage-set on which to test their most viable theories—then they control that replicant world down to every curb height and door frame. Architecture then comes along simply as ornamentation, in order to give this virtual world a physical footprint