Designing urban renewal: shifting between plan and project

Abstract

Discussions on city transformations over the last twenty years have been based on the unreasonable rivalry between urban plans and projects. Regarding some remarkable experiments of the twentieth century – Plan Obus for Algiers, Le Corbusier (1929-30), and the Metabolist superstructures in Japan (1960) – and supported by authors focused on urban contemporaneity, this paper suggests the reconciliation of these two instances of propositional thinking about contemporary cities. Urban planning and urban design are described as complementary aspects of the same process of facing urban issues, since a guideline between reflection and action in the city is identified. The need of an urban holder is exposed; a support tough enough to keep the set of interventions under the same horizon of meaning and flexible enough to be shaped by the interventions themselves and to be transformed by advances in production systems. That holder shall be a result of the collective desires of a society and, at the same time, recognized as part of the authorial design of planners. It is about speculations on the scale of action of urbanism, taking into account the contemporary reality of São Paulo. Plans and urban planning instruments in use – and others no longer valid – define the boundaries of this paper, and trigger an early discussion of the possibilities and necessities of performance in the built environment of this great city, offering field for thought which realigns plans and projects. Therefore it is an attempt to break the historical split between two professional activity areas that should be reconciled as one same process.