Sao Paulo, Brazil, a megacity home to 22.4 million inhabitants as of 2022 has “one of the most inequitable distributions of wealth in the world” (Caldeira 1996, 303). In the various districts, the inequality either shouts or whispers its presence. An open city, where the street-scape is the backdrop for social convergence, segregates itself in Sao Paulo as a space of clear definition of the haves and have-nots. Within the urban condition “…the physical distances separating rich and poor have decreased at the same time that the mechanism to keep them apart have become more obvious and more complex” (Caldeira 1996, 304). As Brazil’s economic and political conditions exponentially shifted so did the reshaping of the built landscape – with that, the right to the city for the urban poor became intangible. Through the process of ‘autoconstruction’ even the poorest of citizens could gain access to the city. However, due to economic restructuring, new generations are even more at a disadvantage to precarious living conditions.

On the opposite spectrum, for the well-off, the current city skyline is arrayed with inward turned urban enclaves; congruently polarizing amenities once connected to the public street (i.e., parks, residential complexes, schools). These vertical communities retain all that is necessary within a private and autonomous space and can be positioned almost anywhere, independent of their context. In many cases, they are placed at the periphery directly neighboring auto-constructed settlements. As Caldeira coins it, “…Sao Paulo is today a city of walls” as the disparity between classes became something quite defined and accepted with the fear of crime fueling changes to all forms of public exchange (Caldeira 1996, 307). Within this, emerges a dynamic, one of codependence. The poor rely on the city for financial prosperity; the wealthy rely on the labor of the poor.

As the government begins to address housing for the city’s most marginalized through large-scale residential blocks – as a means to domesticate the transient realities of Sao Paulo’s contemporary urban condition - the notions of social segregation are still wide and apparent. As the favela is stigmatized with housing a certain social class, so is the governmental housing, and so is the urban enclave. Each environment has become categorical; of separate and unequal atmospheres devoid of connection. However, is there a way for these atmospheres to communicate? In his book, Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City, Richard Sennett refers to three types of repair: restoration, remediation, and reconfiguration. In the case of Grajau – a peripheral district of Sao Paulo constituting for a majority of the city’s urban poor – Sennett’s ideas of repair can be disseminated within its changing context. Restoration, looking to accept the exiting approaches to marginalized housing. The second, remediation, looking to build upon existing solutions, interchanging and exchanging certain elements for an improved whole. Lastly, reconfiguration giving space for new typologies with the use of existing forms. This brings into question:

How could a kit-of-parts approach marry the efficiency of a top-down approach & the resilience of a bottom-up approach to enable place-making in self-built settlements of Grajau?
a. How can participatory process be a part of the planning process for social housing?
b. What spatial structures help create/enable the development of social cohesion in self-built settlements?
c. How can a catalogue of dwelling types adapt and meet community needs over time?