Mapping Urban Situations
R. Smithson e R. Morris
The process of delimitating the urban area for Arte/Cidade project and the mapping of possible intervention situations went through several years. The adopted procedure was to identify uses, important fluxes and dynamics in the area, showing them through the selection of specific urban situations. Having as start point a reading of this region configuration within the metropolis, the project tried to evidence in the situations the resultant spatiality of reorganization processes on the urban space, so chaotic and unpredictable to the first sight.
This research had to take in consideration larger scales, factors not immediately visible, but determinative in the region’s reorganization. Each of the selected situations sends to this reconfiguration process of the local spatiality, due to metropolitan and global scale processes. Difficult to perceive in local, pedestrian scale.
The survey obeyed to certain basic criteria: situations that presented space or social tensions, complex and disorganized patterns due to the implantation of expressways, relocation of productive activities and services, industrial equipment deactivation and informal occupation. The selection of the intervention sites was based on the structural complexity (space and social) presented by each situation. In this way, the selected sites show features determined by larger processes, resultant of the East Zone insertion in metropolitan and global contexts. They are exemplary of the local impact of the whole area urban reorganization, due to the consolidation of a new mode of large-scale spatialization.
A new mode of selecting the intervention situations was therefore configured. The search is not for "sites": the locations are not understood as autonomous, but they send to larger urban processes. The site notion is not adjusted to apprehend these more complex urban situations. The selection of the specific intervention sites then was not made by the participant artists and architects from a general urban framing, as in the previous Arte/Cidade projects, because of the actual scale and complexity. It was mediated by this mapping, the participants having then to opt for one of the selected situations. On the other hand, they contributed with important contributions, reading suggestions and new situations, which substantially modified the original mapping.
