KRZYSZTOF WODICZKO

The initial proposal of Krzysztof Wodiczko consists of developing "critical vehicles" for dislocated populations _ initially migrants, but they also can be peddlers or homeless groups _ that occupies areas of the east zone of São Paulo.
These vehicles will be projected and constructed from the transport and communication devices developed by these individuals to survive in the new metropolitan conditions.

The work of Wodiczko, says Rosalyn Deutsche, defines a position in the politics of urban space. It refers to the architecture capitulation to real estate industry conditions, to the use of monuments and past architectures in “revitalization” designs that imply private and exclusive appropriation of the urban space. It reinserts the architectural objects in the urban environment, understood as place of economic, social and political processes. They are projects that illuminate the relations of domination and conflict, the mechanisms of gentrification and social exclusion, that support institutionalized urban planning.

The homeless vehicles represent the excluded as active resident whose means of subsistence is a legitimate element of the urban social structure. In their double function, practical and symbolic, they operate as an instrument against the apparatus of redevelopment. When illuminating the homeless mobile existence, the vehicles evidence the link between evicted populations and urban renovation processes. They facilitate the seizure of space by homeless subjects, rather than containing them in prescribed locations. They legitimize people without homes, rather than the space that exclude them.

The critical vehicles announce a new function for urban environment: the fulfillment of the travel needs of the evicted. In contraposition to the system of shelters, that legitimizes the confinement, the vehicles imply one another mode of 'urban design'. They allow a reappropriation of the space of the city, according to social necessities, against the space organized for profit and control.

In São Paulo, Wodiczko established the principles and general guide lines of a project, from meetings with the pickers-paper organisations, the IPT _ Institut of Technological Research _ and Ary Perez, from the Arte/Cidade team. For its development, once it was impossible to follow closely the design work, Wodiczko worked as a consultant.

R. Deutsche, Evictions, Cambridge, MIT, 1996.