Sapé Housing
Sapé’s urban redevelopment is an initiative of Habitation’s Secreteriat of São Paulo City. It attends 2500 families living in precarious conditions in the Rio Pequeno neighbourhood. The concept that structures the general start of the urbanization of the Sapé Slum is the urban seam between the two stream’s borders from the public spaces’ designs. The reading of the physical and social conditions of the community shows an urban discontinuity in several levels of precariousness.
Therefore the project is constituted as a tool of inclusion as its actions design an opportunity of connection, social encounters, experience and exchange in the urbanized public space. Joining in the urban design, infrastructure and habitation, the project creates spaces to improve the urban mobility, the environmental quality, the homes, the leisure, the work, allowing the conscience of belonging that cooperates to the maintenance and improvement of life in the city.
The main goals of the urbanization are the removal of families in risk situations, the implantation of urban infrastructure to all homes and the construction of new residences in the area. Therefore, it was from the reminiscent areas of obliged removals that it was studied the possible areas of settlement linked to a green path along with Sapé’s stream. The urban redevelopment created three areas to new buildings, also structuring the conection points of the community with the neighborhood as along the schools enhancing the public space.
The drainage system’s project of the Sapé’s stream adopted as a reference the project implanted by SVMA at the upstream. Developing the channel’s sections’ geometry, the original bed topography was respected without substantially changing its depth and its width, making a design with several hydraulic sections (in T, mixed and straight). This strategy brings the water’s level visually closer to the walk. In both borders the non aedificandi area was used to reforest the path, create squares for meetings and leisure. Due to the low declivity of the entire path, it was proposed a bike path along the left border that is connected to the bike path designed for the Politécnica Avenue and the C.E.U Butantã, allowing urban longitudinal integration on the 1800 meters of walk.
At the transversal way, the project established two new road conections, improved the pedestrian’s alleyways and the accesses to the reminiscent houses, and built consecutive bridges to facilitate the stream’s transposition. All the internal streets are shared with interlocked pavement, with lowered curb, as in the English Woonerf prioritizing the pedestrian, the car circulates controlled by urban designed elements and landscaping.
The project provides a relation of permeability between the public areas, collectives and privates. Due to the high declivities and the need of contention it was built a physical element that articulated these places, gave unity to the walks without being a segregation and resolved the contentions systems: a concrete wall up until 120cm.
It contained, in support, the constructed bases along with the stream and the green path, accommodating the gardens, stairs and ramps on the urban design, and at the same time established the limit to the condos and new edifications. With this strategy the design and construction, the urban project searched for transpose the different scales of intervention and taking the concept of public space, mobility and leisure to the border of the constructions, inside the alleyways and the small internal squares shaped with the infrastructure works.
The social diagnosis revealed the economic precariousness of the population, and the urban areas turned as well to lift vocations and opportunities. In this direction, the urban project considered the diversity of uses and created spaces along the green path for uses related to the existing services and commerce and further to new places of leisure and the bike path, that may make opportunities for income and urban tools of physical and social integration.
Even during the work it was already possible to notice that the enlargement of the walks offered this opportunity.
The architectural project for the Sapé slum is based in two premises, defined like this:
The unity for the building: the project contemplates seven typologies of habitation unity: two dormitories, three dormitories, duplex and unity of integral accessibility, between 50 and 46m2, beyond the unities of commerce and services. The quantity of each type was defined with the survey of families along the work. The constructive system adopted was optimized, making a pattern of the gaps for doors and windows, of the hydraulic walls with fixed plumbs and provided the crossed ventilation. The horizontal circulation and the collective balconies transposed to the storey a cohabitation environment existent in the slum’s alleyways, creating the opportunity of exchange among the families living at the same storey.
From the city to the building: The structural separation of the circulation volumes, the horizontal, the vertical and the volume of the unities allowed to create flexibility to implement the buildings. Resulted from the several articulations among these three elements an implantation, which accommodated itself to each particularity of each terrain, from the relationship with the surroundings, the situation of the lot in the landscape. Incorporating the landscape of the green path with its vegetation in the emptiness between the volumes, it was possible to integrate these spaces modulating the passage of the public areas to the private ones, in this sense it was pursued to always provide an entrance from the street and another one from the green path to all condos. In this exercise of topographic accommodation, the building lands in the terrain originating unities in the underground that are more connected spatially to the green path.
