São Paulo: the metropolis's skyline

A radical revolution has affected the concept of the city. Over a billion people live in urban, informal, settlements which go under names that are synonyms: of slums, favelas or chabolas. These kind of alternative and self-managed “cities” are the more populated horizon in large cities, although they are included in the “regular” one. An architectural research on these new non-structured cities is needed for it could contribute to the solution of the immense problems which are posed by such an unplanned, brittle and impetuous urban development. Our research should carry the "hard concrete poetry of your street corners," as Caetano Veloso (Sampa, 1985), sings of São Paulo The paper (wich will be send) focalizes in the paulista’s experience the embryo of a possible change: it is generated from a situation where - to continue to cite Veloso - everything coexists with its opposite, “where the power of money creates and destroys beauty ...and ugly smoke rises and erases the stars” No utopia has the instruments and the force to solve both the problem of the premature decay of contemporary architecture and the growth of favelas as an improvised solution to the need for housing. We should start from the construction of an ethical project that has no desire, no illusions of effacing reality. On the other hand we should accept and embrace the heritage of the São Paulo’s tradition which is based on the “principle of reality”. We should aim at the social sharing of the root of a dialectical process that interprets architecture as a collective means and perceives aesthetics as the daughter of a new ethics.