Modernidades Industriais no Maranhão

In the construction of the memory of the modern city, the industrial vestiges are an important part in the understanding of the modernities in Brazilian cities. The ICOMOS advisory body evaluation, when evaluating the candidature of São Luís do Maranhão as a UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHL, 1997), argues that the capital was "a relevant textile producer until the middle of the twenty century, giving the city an important role in national culture, represented by the work of its poets, writers and politicians and in material terms by its urban fabric of open spaces and housing". This article aims to understand the industrial modernities of Maranhão, addressing to how the economic cycles, urban development and the implementation of factories, from the turn of the nineteenth century to the twentieth, was influenced the urban transformations of São Luís, Brazil. Between the city center and the axes of urban expansion, from the Caminho Grande to the Anil River, the article highlight the emersion of bourgeois bungalows and working-class districts such as Filipinho district. In conclusion, the study presents a reflection of the urban development of industrial areas should be recognized as a Brazilian industrial heritage.

Roundabouts and City Limits: The Agency of Visual Phenomena

Antoine Vialle

This contribution proposal is based on a photographic campaign I have conducted over the last years on the borders of the Paris metropolitan and more specifically on the science campus located on the agricultural plateau of Saclay. It is supplemented with an analysis of both implicit and explicit roadbuilding normative standards I am now conducting as first step of my PHD research. Like most of the most of the traffic devices that modern road design practices have introduced in the non-dense urban territories, the roundabout is often regarded as being an impediment to urbanity. Indeed, considering its formal aspect, the roundabout implies intense and discontinuous land consumption. Associated with strict programmatic zoning and separation of traffic flows, it generates spatial and programmatic segregation. Considering its functional aspect, it increases fluidity and security of car traffic flow, precluding sensory interactions with the surrounding context. Beyond its material and technical rationality, the roundabout is implemented with untouchable ornaments, often considered as kitsch. Its esthetical aspect is thus based on top-down territorial branding strategies. Being composed of a highly visible green space, it also has a strong non-urban connotation. However, its ancestor, the “rond-point”, was formerly used in forest landscape design to articulate the collective hunting practices and visual sequences of bridle paths. Then it became the backbone of city’s extension plans for the “embellissement des villes”, during the first modernity of the 18th century. Today, even if the modern roundabout has little to do with what the traditional public square used to be, it is still a landmark for the driver: it signals the exit from the highway network, the entrance in the urbanized area and the immediate proximity of industrial and commercial zones. Despite its triviality, the roundabout is thus related to the expression of city limits, which are not any more embodied in a single unitary device. Which role does the roundabout play then in the spatial, social and symbolic emergence of urbanity? To understand and evaluate the monumental dimension of such a traffic device, it seams necessary to consider not only the material aspects, the social uses or the discourses that underpin its design, but also the dynamic interactions between the user and the built environment. Herein, the sophisticated visual phenomena generated by the roundabout are quite informative. Making the car flow rotate around an inaccessible platform that is vegetated as an idealized piece of nature, this perfectly circular device disorientates the driver and immerses him into the road network. We can observe then how the roundabout involves a special cognition of the urban footprint – usually symbolized by a circular surface in the European culture, as opposed to its supposedly natural limit. In this purpose, we will make a comparison with another circular device that belongs to the spectacular domain: the painted panorama in the 19th century, which played an important role in the evolution of urban and territorial representations at the time of the mergence of metropolises, during the first industrial revolution. The aim of this proposed contribution is to consider how the visual phenomena generated by the technical and normed roundabout device contribute to the current redefinition of the “urban” and the “natural”. It also aims to discuss about the agency of what may be called the urban landscape or image, compared to the one of the physical built environment.

2015

Singularité des slums: Production de l'espace dans la ville indienne

Salomé Clémentine Houllier Binder

Contemporary urbanism, as a science and ideology, sometimes induces a violence of urbanization that is exercised through formal planning on informal settlements. The latter are marginalized through processes of (in)visibility that exclude them from the city development. In the face of this domination, informal settlements are resisting their programmed erasure through self-construction and assemblage practices. They continue to grow massively in cities around the world, to the point of becoming the most important form of urban housing of the 21st century. By analyzing Indian informal settlements, the slums, the thesis focuses on the production of urban space and its spatial contradictions resulting mainly from a dichotomous relationship between the formal and the informal, which most often stems from the city's decision-makers. In this way, it helps to understand how norms are constantly being reworked and creating their own transgressions. This phenomenon leads to the production of a heterogeneous and multiple city. While scientific literature on slums has long focused on describing a condition considered unacceptable by elites and governments, the research is based on a field of study that attempts to highlight the reality and practices of these marginalized neighborhoods. The slum is thus established as a heuristic object in order to operate an epistemological rupture between the slum as a deficient element of the city and the slum as a driving principle of urban planning. The aim is therefore to show how slum-dwellers are resisting and overcoming, both socially and spatially, the informal status assigned to them by the Indian government, reflecting a new type of hybrid urbanity. By combining a critical approach of power relationships between dominant and dominated with empirical research carried out in several slums in Chennai (Tamil Nadu), the thesis questions the production of space in slums in two ways: the complex reality of power relations between urban planning and urban dwellers that contribute to the formation and destruction of slums; and the spatial and social practices carried out by slum-dwellers. These two ways allows us to understand the slum, not as a failure of urban development, but as a singularity of the Indian city. This recognition leads to a new urban order that considers the spatial logic of its occupants as an "alternative modernity". It makes it possible to (re)theorize the Indian city as a result of urban struggles between dominant and dominated groups as well as hybridization processes between vernacular traditions and modern practices. Considered as a theoretical figure, the slum leads to an innovative interpretation of the urban problems that constitutes an alternative to universalizing urban theories but also, and especially, to the practices that result from them. It is thus possible to consider a dialogue between modern spatial production, local practices and self-construction in order to better understand the processes of space production in Global South cities. In this manner, the slum becomes a new Indian urban paradigm, but also an universal object of contemporary urbanization that planners and architects must take into account in order to propose a type of urban planning that aims at reducing the inadequacies between "conceived space" and "lived space".

EPFL2019

Comprendre la construction des périphéries urbaines à Lomé et Yaoundé

Armel Firmin Kemajou Mbianda

Urbanization in Sub-Saharan Africa is mainly marked by an extremely high speed. For a couple of decades, it has become more and more difficult to study and control the urbanization processes using the available means due to their rapidity. These conditions do not allow to master social, cultural and economic potentials of urbanization at their best so as to develop the countries in the sub-Saharan region of Africa. The binding speed of urban sprawl that we are witnessing further leads to an accelerated consumption of natural spaces, and more generally, to a degradation of natural ecosystems; while the urgency to tackle the environmental crisis requires the establishment of more sustainable models of cities. Indeed, in addition to the rapid consumption of natural spaces, cities are responsible the most for the global production of greenhouse gases and other negative externalities for the environment. This is why our response to climate change necessarily involves smart choices in urban planning. In my doctoral research the urban peripheries are what constitute the most relevant research objects â the crucial ingredients to debate on the African city of the future. Surprisingly, very little attention has ever been drawn on them. I hold that no urban planning would be effective without a careful study of the shared reality of social, economic, political and cultural dynamics of the cities concerned. This hypothesis further leads me to offer a solid understanding of construction mechanisms in the peripheral areas of such two large cities as LomÃ© and YaoundÃ© in thinking about the models of the future. A two-tier triangulation is used to achieve the study goal. Three different thematic entries namely urban land, mobility and the legal framework for town planning get used at the theoretical level. At the methodological one, a variety of tools are made available for data collection and analysis to deal with the difficult processes of accessing urban data. GPS tracking of motorcycle taxis operating in emerging neighborhoods, participatory mapping for land use and prices at the agglomeration level, Geo-Computation, Geo-visualization, content analysis and more traditional interviews are the main methods used in my research. The thesis shows that the construction of a larger portion of new neighborhoods in the cities of LomÃ© and YaoundÃ© result in a weaving of a sort of âindividual urbanistic projectsâ, which are totally outside the rule of law. The speed and spatiality of this process are also strongly increased by motorcycle taxisâmeans of transport unprecedented in their scaleâwhich come massively along with the new residentsâ home ownership projects. Again, the thesis highlights that the configuration of the land market escapes the administrative limits of cities, thus rendering the lawful measures non-operational in the planning and monitoring of space. All in all, the research results reveal individual strategies to be extremely varied and complex even if all residents of urban peripheries seem like to âbet onâ their urban status to regain it later. This latest finding dispels the myth that the lower middle class moves as far from the city center as possible in search of affordable land. On the basis of major results, the thesis formulates practical recommendations aimed at improving urban planning policies in sub-Saharan Africa, in the sense of making them more in line with the reality of the cityâs production processes.

EPFL2020