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G. Masera et al.
1 Introduction
As the urban population of the world is increasing dramatically, it is predicted that
by the year 2050 about 70% of this population will live in informal settlements.
While this is an alarming matter for policy makers and urban managers around the
world to revise and replan development, it highlights the importance of studying such
organizations for scientific communities too.
Depending on the local environment, cultural context, size, and the contextual
relationships with the surrounding urban areas, the informal settlements could appear
in a variety of shapes and forms. Nonetheless, there are structural features shared
among them worldwide. There are innate characteristics such as high population
densities, poor infrastructures, and social segregation associated with them which
make them much more challenging to manage, and at the same time, there are also
surprising peculiarities, like certain environmental behaviors, offered by them to
learn from. Working on such human organization can provide valuable opportunities
to examine the capacity of today’s ability for managing tomorrow’s likely threats, on
the one hand, and unveil the inherent capacities, on the other hand, of these integral
contexts for efficiency in energy consumption.
This text summarizes the morphological studies of the project “PolimiparaRocinha”, a 2016 Polisocial winner dedicated to the Favela Rocinha which is the biggest
single favela in Brazil. PolimiparaRocinha is an interdisciplinary project coordinated
by the Department of Architecture, Built Environment and Construction Engineering (ABC) with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (DICA),
the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies (DAStU) and the Department of
Energy, and several academic and non-academic partners outside the Politecnico di
Milano.
Acknowledging the particularities in all of its aspects, there is no doubt that
Rocinha is far from ordinary urban settlement. Its placement in the heart of Rio,
along with its practical isolation from it, the semi-independent functional distribution within its boundaries, its strong community-oriented social fabric, its informal
organic-like morphology that accommodates an astonishing population density, and
the bewildering energy consumption statistic associated with it outlines a complex
system of multidimensional urban organisms linked to one another in a profound
and occasionally paradoxical way producing a wide variation of situations. Studying
such a context demands a synthesis-based approach able to address its profound systemic interconnectedness and occult qualities which are the source of both strengths
and weaknesses in Rocinha’s performance. The interdisciplinary framework of this
project should also be structured around an operative holistic methodology used as
the departure and reference point for all the defined projects in different realms and
areas.
The core methodological tool for the investigation, evaluation, and project definition used in PolimiparaRocinha is Integrated Modification Methodology (IMM).
IMM is a procedure encompassing a set of scientific techniques for understanding
the systemic structure of urban settlements and proposing modification scenarios
G. Masera et al.
1 Introduction
As the urban population of the world is increasing dramatically, it is predicted that
by the year 2050 about 70% of this population will live in informal settlements.
While this is an alarming matter for policy makers and urban managers around the
world to revise and replan development, it highlights the importance of studying such
organizations for scientific communities too.
Depending on the local environment, cultural context, size, and the contextual
relationships with the surrounding urban areas, the informal settlements could appear
in a variety of shapes and forms. Nonetheless, there are structural features shared
among them worldwide. There are innate characteristics such as high population
densities, poor infrastructures, and social segregation associated with them which
make them much more challenging to manage, and at the same time, there are also
surprising peculiarities, like certain environmental behaviors, offered by them to
learn from. Working on such human organization can provide valuable opportunities
to examine the capacity of today’s ability for managing tomorrow’s likely threats, on
the one hand, and unveil the inherent capacities, on the other hand, of these integral
contexts for efficiency in energy consumption.
This text summarizes the morphological studies of the project “PolimiparaRocinha”, a 2016 Polisocial winner dedicated to the Favela Rocinha which is the biggest
single favela in Brazil. PolimiparaRocinha is an interdisciplinary project coordinated
by the Department of Architecture, Built Environment and Construction Engineering (ABC) with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (DICA),
the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies (DAStU) and the Department of
Energy, and several academic and non-academic partners outside the Politecnico di
Milano.
Acknowledging the particularities in all of its aspects, there is no doubt that
Rocinha is far from ordinary urban settlement. Its placement in the heart of Rio,
along with its practical isolation from it, the semi-independent functional distribution within its boundaries, its strong community-oriented social fabric, its informal
organic-like morphology that accommodates an astonishing population density, and
the bewildering energy consumption statistic associated with it outlines a complex
system of multidimensional urban organisms linked to one another in a profound
and occasionally paradoxical way producing a wide variation of situations. Studying
such a context demands a synthesis-based approach able to address its profound systemic interconnectedness and occult qualities which are the source of both strengths
and weaknesses in Rocinha’s performance. The interdisciplinary framework of this
project should also be structured around an operative holistic methodology used as
the departure and reference point for all the defined projects in different realms and
areas.
The core methodological tool for the investigation, evaluation, and project definition used in PolimiparaRocinha is Integrated Modification Methodology (IMM).
IMM is a procedure encompassing a set of scientific techniques for understanding
the systemic structure of urban settlements and proposing modification scenarios