Cassio Vasconcellos- Arte/Cidade 1997

How mutations in cities as São Paulo had answered to the international dynamics? The megacities indicates the pattern of a new space, resultant forms of the impact of the globalization. Configurations characterized by the functional connections established in vast extensions of territories, but with important discontinuity in patterns of ground use. The social and functional hierarchies of the megacities are spatially indistinct and mixed, organized in reduced sectors and improvised in irregular manners, with unexpected focus of undesirable uses. It is in this context, larger, many times chaotic, that big projects of reurbanization and international real estate investments are made. The megacities are discontinuous constellations of space fragments, functional parts and social components. 

It will be urbanism capable to invent and to implement in the scale required for the demographic and space development of the cities? The pervasive urbanization has modified the urban condition beyond all recognition. A new urbanism is required here, capable to create fields that accommodate processes without definite form. Capable to expand knowledge, to deny borders, discovering endless hybrids. Manipulating infrastructure for permanent intensification and diversification, irrigating territories with potential. To generate a critical mass of urban renovation. 

To intervene here implies to operate with these tensions, to consider new relations between distant elements, new metropolitan scales. Interferences that reflect the loss of the human scale, proper to the traditional city, engendered by the dimensions of the new situation. The suppression of a measure standard, producing discontinuous structures and relations without hierarchy. 

The megascale makes possible programmatic hybridization, proximities, friction and overlappings. This scale only can support a great proliferation of events in one area, to allow the unexpected. An approach where the city is taken more as a standard of events than an object composition. How to intervene in the chaos?

References:
M. Castells. A Sociedade em Rede. São Paulo, Paz e Terra, 1995.
Rem Koolhaas. SMLXL. Roterdã, 010 Publishers, 1997.