Housing for a favela: Parque Santo Amaro V

For example, this wasn't like this. It was like this. This was translucent. We always try, with the new architecture, the new rooms, to dialogue with their geography and with the already built condition in a friendly way. How, through our intervention, which sometimes are tiny in relation to the big problem of the periphery of São Paulo, how we can establish a condition of citizenship. We had to find a way to recover the valley as a point of reference fundamental for the neighborhood, possibly the only point where we can have a green area and a laser area. These were the starting points. My name is José Geraldo de Sousa. I was chosen as the general mayor of the building. It's my job here. And what people ask of me, I'll do my best to explain to bring everyone together. This is the Nova Santa Mora Park, which is a manatee area. But it could be Jardim Ângela, São Paulo, which is the right location. Those who came in the past and come now, it's a different thing, right? I didn't imagine it would be like this, what it is today. Wonderful. Before, it was a favela. There were tents up and down. There's nothing to say about the building, about the apartments. I think everyone has gained a lot. Our housing has improved a lot. There's just not that corridor. When it rained, my house was full of water. The laundry was very, very, very, a lot of water when it rained. So we had that concern. Nowadays, no. We're at peace. I lived in the favela. It was just two rooms. And now I'm here in this wonderful house that I managed to get. Just to get to the favela, there's at least water, sewage, everything on the ground. And here, no. Here, you arrive, you open the gate of the apartment, you're quiet, you're calm, right? You stay quiet at home. A lot of difference. This mirror of water, when we came in, wow, very clean, very beautiful. That over there, the most beautiful thing. This mirror of water has a problem of residents not being from the condominium, residents of other houses, they started to put their sewage. And everyone could get together and continue. But some want, and others don't want, my son. Then it got very ugly, dry. I think it should be up there, at the beginning of it, right? To channel it, for it to go under, to come out in the sewage. But when the work was done, they found several springs. So I said, what are we going to do? Are we going to cover those springs? Are we going to take this clean water to the sewage? It didn't make much sense. So I said, well, let's channel the springs to a mirror of water, that is a place that gives a more interesting climatic condition, and the children can play with water and all that. But it came dry, and I want to believe that the water has disappeared from the springs. People complain a lot about skates. You go until midnight, one o'clock in the morning, there are people who work and get up early, right? If it were like this, to have a skate track, they had access, they had the right time to enter and leave, they respected the residents, most of them would have no problem. Because I think it's even beautiful when they come. Here, in the South Zone, no one has a skate track like this. So people from Jabaquara come here, people from Nakamura come, people from all neighborhoods come to this place. So by the end of the week, when they're competing, it's really cool. The external problems, like the time of chaos, because now, by the end of the week, there's a big fight. The problem of cars, high speed, motorcycles, children don't have the freedom to go down, to play in the playground. Here, in the area, there was already a run-in. They ran over a child, they ran over an elderly person. When they handed it over, it was open, but in the same week that the residents closed, they put the gate. It was too much, the guy was riding a motorcycle up here. There's no way, right? A child who has to go to school and has to go all the way around because the intersection was dangerous and it was impossible from the point of view of a walk through the valley, let's say, more than a kilometer, to have a school that is 150 meters away. So we made crossings that allow the city to cross, to mix with this new structure that we are putting. If you close there and put a gate here, it will be useless. The crosswalk, because people have access to both streets, there are a lot of people at dawn. People go to the bar, to the club, they come and drink there, then they make noise. It's the outside that comes to mess up in here, it's not the inside. Most of these broken things, it's not who lives here. It's all outside that comes to break, that broke everything. These are places that are in need, for example, of a leisure space, of trees, of lawns, of water. So, obviously, all the children, all the youth, we create a meeting point, a point of animation. This can be very good, this can be very bad, because you are creating an extraordinary condition for the neighborhood. Because we think that park is a park for the neighborhood, it's not just a park for the residents of the housing complex. It's a public park. This is a public park. There were too many people, right? A lot of people came from outside, making a lot of noise. So, closing is much better for us. We are closed and we organize better, right? I think it would be good to close and all the residents would meet to maintain, right? This condition that now everyone invades that place, this is a demonstration of the weakness and the lack of a public infrastructure that meets the needs of a very large population that we have involved. So, they want to turn that into a closed condominium. Here we are going to take a big gate to the other column over there, right? More or less here, there has to be an official gate which is the place where the firemen enter. Otherwise, they don't approve, right? Then they put the fence up. From here to there. I think that the closed condominium, both in these areas and in the areas, in other areas of São Paulo, is a cancer, right? It's the anticity that we are creating. This was made for all of us, right? Everyone had to collaborate and clean because it's very beautiful, everything is clean, those plants over there. It's hard to live in a housing complex where you don't think alone, the decision is not only yours, the decision is together, you have to see what is best for others, not just for you. There are a lot of people who have this problem because they think they have to live on their own, and that's not how it is in society. It's gratifying to know that we did something that collectively generates enthusiasm, generates the desire to stay there. This leisure space, this leisure space that is suddenly missing. But we have to recognize that this is also a problem if these leisure spaces are limited only to the exercise of a project. If we put in the project a mode of transformation and that we believe in this mode of transformation, but as long as this mode of transformation is multiplied with an example of this type, we will not transform these common areas like where we are working. For more UN videos visit www.un.org