Fluvial Metropolis: Making São Paulo Viable

Date: 

Wednesday, April 17, 2019, 12:00pm to 2:00pm

Location: 

CGIS South, S216, 1730 Cambridge Street

Fluvial MetropolisSpeakers: Bruno Carvalho, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures; Affiliated Professor in African and African American Studies; Affiliated Professor in Urban Planning and Design at the GSD; Rafael Marengoni, Architect and Urbanist; Masters Candidate in Architecture of Urban Design at the GSD

Moderator: Frances Hagopian, Jorge Paulo Lemann Senior Lecturer on Government at Harvard University and the Faculty Chair of the Brazil Studies Program

The idea of São Paulo as a Fluvial Metropolis has a deep history. Since the 1990s, architect and planner Alexandre Delijaicov and others have explored the transformative infrastructural and social potentials of recovering the city’s river systems, adapting them to new uses. The seminar will introduce the concept of the Fluvial Metropolis, explore its precedents and discuss it as a viable vision for the largest city in South America.

Bruno Carvalho works on cities as lived and imagined spaces. He studies relationships between cultural practices and urban development, specializing on Brazil from the eighteenth century onward. Situating Brazilian literatures, cultures and built environments within transatlantic and hemispheric contexts is a central concern in his scholarship. Often, he investigates how socio-cultural processes of the past converge in and with the present. His research and teaching interests range from the interplay between urban diversity and segregation to the environmental dimensions of urbanization. Carvalho’s interdisciplinary approaches bridge literary analysis, cultural history, and urban studies. He has published on topics including poetry, cinema, music, architecture, urban planning, environmental justice, proto-fascist politics, and race.

Rafael Marengoni an Architect and Urbanist interested in infrastructure, public policy and sustainable development. He is currently a Masters Candidate in the Urban Design program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he is also a Lemann Fellow. In São Paulo, he worked with Boldarini Arquitetos in urbanization projects for precarious settlements and with Instituto Pedra on the Vila Itororó projects. His experience before Harvard lead him to get involved with the development of the Brazilian Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Biennale of Venice, and with research for the book São Paulo: a Graphic Biography, by Felipe Correa (2018). During his Architecture and Urbanism degree at Unicamp he developed research on investigating Walkability (2016) with the São Paulo Research Foundation (Fapesp) and on the Neocolonial Architecture of Campinas (2012) with the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). His design thesis for his architecture degree was entitled "The Civic Reconversion of Largo da Batata" (2017) and dealt with urban design interventions as means for the creation of democratic urban spaces in São Paulo.