Jardim Filhos da Terra - Spontaneous Living Spaces in São Paulo

Jardim Filhos da Terra is the first case study developed within the framework of the research project Spontaneous Living Spaces aimed at documenting the diversity of the culture of living through the survey and analysis of self-built studies. The research recognizes the self-built and informal parts of the urban fabric as one of the city’s cultural landscapes, enhancing its inhabitants’ cultural background and traditional knowledge as part of the local cultural identity. The rapid increase in spontaneous settlements is considered as a phase of development physically representing an exponentially growing and changing urban environment. Up to today, the research counts three case studies: Jardim Filhos da Terra in São Paulo, Pok Fu Lam in Hong Kong and four selected neighbourhoods of Pemba in Mozambique. The Brazilian case study was undertaken under the supervision of Stefano Boeri and Pier Paolo Tamburelli as part of the author’s master’s thesis research in 2012 at the Politecnico di Milano. Jardim Filhos da Terra and the selected block in the Guapira II favela were spontaneously born in 1984 and are currently under a regularization process. Here, an integrated survey was carried out with videos, interviews, photographic reportages, and a historical and demographical analysis accompanying the typo-morphological study of the neighbourhood. The outcome of the typological analysis was the hypothesis of the determination of the prevailing settlements’ trends and dynamics and the evolution of the house within a plot. The morphological analysis highlighted the lack of public spaces, which was further studied by a project involving two open-air ecumenical churches: an Afro-Brazilian and a Christian one. For its second publication (2021), the documentation was updated with a reflection on the evolution of the neighbourhood in the last eight years. A new on-site survey was intended, but unfortunately it was not possible because of the Covid-19 pandemic.