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Radical Cities —
Across Latin America
in Search of a New
Architecture
Justin McGuirk
Verso, £18.99
Review by Thomas Wensing
This is a riveting travelogue that
narrates the stories and lives of activist
architects, politicians and radical
communities in pursuit of a more
dignified existence for the inhabitants
of barrios, barriadas, villas miserias
and favelas across South America.
The title alludes to both David
Harvey’s Rebel Cities and to Le
Corbusier’s famous manifesto;
author Justin McGuirk is clearly
inspired by both the utopianism of
modernism in Henri Lefebvre’s Right
to the City, and by the anarchism
of John Turner, a British architect
who worked in disadvantaged
communities in Peru in the Sixties.
The book starts with a visit
to one of the Mexican superblock
housing estates. Tlatelolco was
a bafflingly technocratic and
gargantuan modernist estate
designed in the Sixties by Mario Pani
around the Plaza de las Tres Culturas.
‘South and Central America were
home to some of the greatest
experiments in urban living in the
20th century,’ McGuirk contends.
But however large, the projects were
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´tokenistic´ in comparison to the
scale of the problems of poverty,
explosive population growth and
mass urban migration.
It is telling that in Tlatelolco the
modernist layer was superimposed
on an archaeological site, and centred
around a square adorned by Aztec
pyramids and a Spanish Colonial
church. It was supposed to be the
symbol of a bright future but was
not immune to the violence of an
oppressive regime and the effects
of natural disaster: before the Mexican
Olympics of 1968 protesting students
were murdered by the military and
during the earthquake of 1985 some of
the towers, which had been poorly
built by corrupt contractors, came
crashing down.
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McGuirk is spot on in his
observation that the
argument for self-help
programmes has been
turned against itself...
with ‘activist’ politicians such as
Antanas Mockus, a philosopher and
mathematician who became the
mayor of Bogotá and whose
unorthodox approach helped to turn
the city around. His political career
was launched on the platform of
‘No P’ — no publicity, no politics,
no party and no plata (money),
and he famously and successfully
employed 400 mime artists to
regulate the city’s unruly traffic.
We currently live in a neo-liberal
society, which is to say that our laws
and governments continue to be
dedicated to the promotion of the
ideology of neo-liberalism, and that
the opposition between corporate
power and the state has all but
1 IWAN BAAN 2 THELMA VILAS BOAS 3 CRISTOBAL PALMA 4 TOMÁS GARCÍA PUENTE
Book
The estate continues to
deteriorate, since the state has largely
withdrawn from public housing
expenditure. Such, in a nutshell, are
the problems one continues to deal
with in South America and which
McGuirk emphatically explores.
‘Latin America is where modernist
Utopia went to die,’ he dramatically
asserts, and this sets the tone for the
argument for the more democratic,
egalitarian and inclusive urbanism
as practised by the communities,
politicians and activist architects in the
book. As such the book effectively
reiterates several points made by the
self-help pioneer John Turner decades
before: among others that favelas are
the primary urban condition of
growing cities, and that no state can
afford to finance the total demand for
housing, but more importantly that
the people themselves are best
equipped to build for themselves and
decide how to live, given the chance.
The comparison of the relative
merits of top-down, large-scale
housing programmes and the
bottom-up empowerment of self-help
programmes and participatory design
is one among many narrative strands
in the book, but the argument runs
much deeper than this. McGuirk is
spot on in his observation that the
argument for the support of self-help
programmes has been turned against
itself: governments withdrew from
public housing programmes, trying
instead to ‘manage’ the growth of
informal settlements, but in essence
accepted and reinforced the deep
class divisions expressed by the
favelas and the formal city. The
problem of housing was left to the
free market, architecture became
spectacle, form without Utopia, and
architects lost their social purpose.
The turn to neo-liberalism in
political-economic practices from the
Eighties onwards is, of course, not
unique to Latin America. But through
the IMF’s restructuring programmes
in Latin America, the disastrous effects
of these economic policies are more
acutely felt. This in turn has led to
original and hopeful responses of
citizens, who despite the pressures of
laissez-faire, extreme poverty, conflict
and violence, continue to resist these
oppressive structures and collectively
build a better future.
McGuirk visits radical communities,
for instance Túpac Amaru in Argentina,
a collective movement which builds its
own houses, swimming pools, and
community facilities at a fraction of
the cost of regular house builders. He
meets with the squatters occupying the
Torre David, an empty and unfinished
office building in the centre of Caracas.
He explores the projects and picks the
brains of several activist architects,
including Alejandro Aravena of
Elemental and Alfredo Brillembourg
and Hubert Klumpner of Urban Think
Tank. And last but not least he meets
vanished. This collusion between state
and private interests has eroded the
rights of citizens and is a continuous
threat to democracy, especially in
the fragile economies of South
America. This generation of activists,
pragmatists and social idealists are
finding successful ways to address
poverty and inequality, and to my
mind their power lies in the paradigm
shift they bring about.
Inequality is one of the biggest
problems which needs to be
addressed at the start of the 21st
century and I think it is to McGuirk’s
credit for delivering a book that
strikes a hopeful tone, is multifaceted,
personal, and yet is realistic about the
challenges that need to be faced.
1 – A panoramic view from the Caracas metro
cable car, an infrastructural masterstroke
2 – ‘Ruins’ of favelas at Manguinhos, Rio
3 – The celebrated Quinta Monroy incremental
housing, by Alejandro Aravena & ELEMENTAL
4 – Alto Comedero, a ‘new town’ in the
Argentinian city of San Salvador de Jujuy
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