{"id":17744,"date":"2014-09-27T09:00:22","date_gmt":"2014-09-27T12:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rioonwatch.org\/?p=17744"},"modified":"2025-08-07T12:08:08","modified_gmt":"2025-08-07T15:08:08","slug":"radical-cities-across-latin-america-in-search-of-a-new-architecture-by-justin-mcguirk-book-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/?p=17744","title":{"rendered":"Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture by Justin McGuirk [BOOK REVIEW]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Clique aqui para Portugu\u00eas\"\"<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

In his book\u00a0Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture<\/a><\/em>, art critic Justin McGuirk<\/a> takes\u00a0readers on a ride across the physical and social landscapes of urban Latin America<\/a>, criss-crossing the continent, centralizing exceptional stories of urban innovation.<\/p>\n

The ride starts in\u00a0T\u00fapac Amaru, a housing collective in Argentina. McGuirk then makes his way north, analyzing government intervention and public housing in Lima, Peru, and Santiago, Chile; favelas, informality and urban integration in Rio de Janeiro; and the politics of place at the famous Torre David<\/a> in Caracas, Venezuela. He takes a long\u00a0pause in Colombia, celebrating accounts of creative urban revitalization in Bogot\u00e1 and Medell\u00edn. Finally, readers are left at\u00a0what McGuirk calls the \u2018political equator,\u2019 where the logistics of transnational metropolitan spaces and the environmental ties between subdivisions in San Diego, USA, and colonias<\/em><\/a> in Tijuana, Mexico, complicate an already tense relationship.<\/p>\n

Through these stories, McGuirk tells the contemporary urban history of Latin America, highlighting the movement away from the modernist utopias that were pursued (often under military rule), using mass social housing as a tool for evictions and relocations<\/a>, towards a more sensitive, place-based style of urban development, coined \u201curban acupuncture<\/a>.\u201d Indeed, there were economic and political factors that favored this change, including the recognition of the failures of modernist mega-projects and the embrace of neoliberalism. In Radical Cities<\/em>, McGuirk highlights the contributions of individuals responsible for this new approach to urban planning, acknowledging a new, albeit small generation of architects, organizers and politicians who have taken on the role of \u201cidealistic pragmatists,” for whom an understanding of favelas as solutions<\/a> is at the core of their work.<\/p>\n

Empirically, it makes sense to address and adapt to informality rather than to ignore it. In highly urbanized Latin America, one third of all city dwellers live in informal conditions. McGuirk complements this well-known statistic with another: the fact that 85% of housing worldwide is built illegally. This makes residents of informal settlements\u00a0the primary developers of urban spaces, dictating the design and use of more square miles than architects and governments. With this in mind, McGuirk\u00a0poses two questions: \u201cWhen will we come to terms with the fact that the favelas are not a problem of urbanity, but the solution<\/a>? And, when will we accept that the favela is the city?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Anonymous,<\/a>
\nThe history of Torre David in Venezuela is certainly emblematic of the union between informal settlements and the city. It is an unfinished 42-story tower in downtown Caracas that was initially destined to be prime commercial real estate. When developer David Brillembourg passed away and finances dried up, the building sat half-built and unoccupied until a group of individuals in Caracas occupied the building in 2007 and revolutionized its use<\/a>. Since then, roughly three thousand\u00a0people have called Torre David\u00a0home. Urban Think Tank<\/a>, a group of architects from Venezuela, have been instrumental in documenting and exhibiting the unique model\u2013an informally occupied skyscraper\u2013even showcasing the building at the Venice Biennale in 2012<\/a>. Like many, McGuirk is fascinated by the building, referring to it as a “pirate utopia,” in which\u00a0residents overcame impossible conditions<\/a> to create a home and a community.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, in the chapter on Rio de Janeiro entitled \u201cThe Favela is the City,\u201d McGuirk does not focus on\u00a0one architect or project, but recounts the origins and history of favelas in Rio, discussing the wide range of policies and programs that have turned the city into somewhat of a living urban laboratory. Concerned with the integration of the favela, McGuirk comments on pacification programs<\/a>, Favela Bairro<\/a>, and the unique, yet misguided, task of planning for mega-events<\/a>.<\/p>\n

While certain recent developments in Rio could be characterized as urban acupuncture, incorporating new and emerging innovations, McGuirk does\u00a0acknowledge that evictions and mass housing production, the old tools of the trade in “dealing with” favelas, are still practiced in Brazil and throughout Latin America. The re-emergence of distant<\/a> mass-produced social housing in Brazil through the program Minha Casa Minha Vida<\/a>, with over two million housing units built since 2009, represents\u00a0the\u00a0antithesis of his proposal for urban acupuncture.<\/p>\n

The tension between competing approaches to government intervention and the feasibility of a more sensitive approach<\/a> is acutely visible last\u00a0week as news broke that the government of Caracas has begun\u00a0evictions at Torre David<\/a>. In even more despairing news, it was revealed that\u00a0the structure\u00a0has been slated for demolition. Families will be moved to a new social housing project roughly an hour out of the city center.\u00a0This action threatens to erase the rich urban social history that emerged since the 2007 occupation.\u00a0The unfortunate irony is that while McGuirk explored\u00a0the potential replicability of a Torre David-esque model in order to challenge the market-driven status quo in which the\u00a0urban poor are pushed\u00a0to spontaneous settlements\u00a0on the periphery while buildings sit idle and empty in the city center, the government and private developers\u00a0had other plans.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Despite McGuirk\u2019s celebration of the informal, his analysis favors the creativity and charisma of architects, politicians and organizers, who are celebrated for accomplishing big innovations on small(er) budgets, over the discrete\u00a0actions by individuals responsible for building the\u00a0informal city. In doing so, the author\u00a0risks undermining the adaptive capacity of residents and communities to design and build locally. In actuality, the “radical” nature of Latin American cities highlighted in the book reflects a reconceptualization of architecture to directly engage with informality using scarce resources, instead of a new\/radical understanding of who occupies or has a say in our urban future. Nevertheless, he positions the Latin American urban experience as relevant and exemplar\u00a0on a global scale, per McGuirk:\u00a0\u201caccepting the informal city as an unavoidable feature of the urban condition, and not as a city-in-waiting<\/a>, is the key lesson that this generation of Latin American architects can offer the world.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clique aqui para Portugu\u00eas In his book\u00a0Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture, art critic Justin McGuirk takes\u00a0readers on a ride across the physical and social landscapes of urban Latin America, […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":61,"featured_media":17768,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1288,1271,1282,1334,329,328,1365,1329],"tags":[1361,29,852,342,857,187,223,11,282,26,359,859,878,1342,1259,157,1403,1432,1431,778],"writer":[1324],"translator":[],"illustrator":[],"photographer":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-17744","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-highlight","8":"category-favelaqualities","9":"category-research-analysis","10":"category-reviews","11":"category-solutions","12":"category-understanding-rio","13":"category-whats-a-favela-2","14":"category-by-international-observers","15":"tag-endfavelastigma","16":"tag-architecture","17":"tag-book","18":"tag-favela-architecture","19":"tag-favela-design","20":"tag-favela-bairro","21":"tag-favela-as-a-model","22":"tag-forced-evictions","23":"tag-housing","24":"tag-housing-rights","25":"tag-informality","26":"tag-innovation","27":"tag-international-comparison","28":"tag-latin-america","29":"tag-mega-events","30":"tag-minha-casa-minha-vida","31":"tag-solution","32":"tag-torre-david","33":"tag-venezuela","34":"tag-whats-a-favela","35":"writer-sara-mctarnaghan"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/61"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17744"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17744\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81375,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17744\/revisions\/81375"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/17768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17744"},{"taxonomy":"writer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fwriter&post=17744"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftranslator&post=17744"},{"taxonomy":"illustrator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fillustrator&post=17744"},{"taxonomy":"photographer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fphotographer&post=17744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}