Fazendinhando

I always told myself that whatever profession I decided to pursue, no matter what, it would have to impact the place where I come from. I didn’t want any child to go through what I went through as a child. At first, I wanted to be a teacher. A dear friend, who somehow saw this in me, suggested I study architecture. I told my mother and grandmother about this possibility. My grandmother was a housekeeper, and her employers always gave her magazines – décor magazines – which she started giving to me. I thought it was all very beautiful and cool, but I didn’t understand how architecture could help people.

I was born in Jardim Colombo, a neighborhood in the Paraisópolis complex, in the West Zone of São Paulo city, near the Morumbi Football Stadium. There is a huge contrast between our neighborhood and the big buildings, schools, and sports courts around it – all private. Our experience has always been one of great scarcity.

There is a stream in Jardim Colombo that runs through the entire neighborhood and floods when it rains. Our house wasn’t even that close to the stream, but we suffered from flooding. My sister and I played in the dirty water that entered the house, which for us was kind of like a swimming pool. If today I say this jokingly, it is also very sad because people would lose their belonging in the floods. The rain season brought desperation! Also, there was a garbage dump in front of our house, which is no longer there. And the garbage attracted rats and cockroaches that ended up entering our house, and we were afraid of them. To this day I am afraid of rats because of what I experienced as a child.

Jardim Colombo never had a school. The nearest school was about a 30-minute walk, and the route was complicated, especially on rainy days. The way there was bad, we were afraid of abusers who were in cars, lurking. We tried going in groups of children so nothing would happen.

In my last year of high school, I had to research the profession I would like to pursue. For this, I approached some architects who were working for the city hall on urbanization and landscaping projects within the Paraisópolis complex. I remember that, walking through the community with one of the architects, I began to understand the potential of that profession: yes, I could change the lives of many people.

In college, despite the tools and techniques I was learning, I quickly realized that I would not have contact with specific projects for favelas.(1) It just wasn’t a subject. All the architects we studied were great architects or architects from outside Brazil, and the way communities(2) were discussed was very succinct. At most, we went through the topic in a broad and distanced way in urban planning classes, without studying anything about them at other scales, nor were they considered to be in fact a territory. It was not easy to move forward in the course, I thought several times about giving up. The material was quite expensive, and it required a lot of time.

“Wow, I would never have imagined that this would happen, that things were like this!”, my colleagues often told me, they were surprised by the information I brought. I know a lot about these territories and these communities because of my experience. Most people don’t know that we have problems like asthma, sinusitis, bronchitis, and rhinitis, which are caused by the way we live. I am proof of that: the house we lived in when I was a child caused me breathing problems that I no longer have. Our health is very much linked to the way we live, where we live, to the contact we have with public spaces, with green areas. We’re talking about survival issues.

It is important to talk about this, to show in universities that not everyone needs to build 400m² houses, that not everyone will work with decoration. Today we cannot look at the informal city and the formal city separately. They are one and the same, and we need to study both sides. It is necessary to have disciplines that deal with these subjects. It is also necessary to make the work of architects who work directly with favelas visible, and who think about social entrepreneurship. And this kind of debate should start in schools, even before people enter university.

There are still a lot of people who don’t know what happens inside a community. Many only learned recently, during the pandemic, that there is hunger; that basic sanitation is still almost non-existent in many places; that there are people who need to share the bathroom with a neighbor or with another family; that rats and cockroaches enter the houses frequently. These are things that still happen, that still exist, and many people are unaware that the problem is there. It’s very cruel. They have no idea what each inhabitant of favela carries within.

I graduated in 2017. At that time, my father, who is president of the Resident Union (União de Moradores), was in contact with the platform Arq. Futuro, which studies the planning and future of cities. My father met Arq. Futuro in a lecture he was invited to give. They exchanged contacts, went to visit our community and, on this visit, came across Fazendinha.(3) We started talking, they started to support us, and we started thinking together about alternatives for that space.

Fazendinha was one of the few free urban spaces in the Paraisópolis complex and the city of São Paulo, but it was filled with a huge amount of garbage. They were amazed at that and told us about a project that had been done by Mauro Quintanilha in the Vidigal favela in Rio de Janeiro. He had transformed a dump with an area almost eight times larger than our area in Paraisópolis.

Jardim Colombo used to be composed of farms. With time, the neighborhood profile started changing. When I was a child, Mr. Chico still lived in the plot of land that had become a landfill. He took care of his animals – chickens and cows –, and that is why everyone knew that place as Mr. Chico’s little farm (or Fazendinha in Portuguese).

It was very hard to arrange enough trucks for all the garbage. We had to ask for help at the sub-city hall of Butantã, which, initially didn’t want to help us, despite the plot of land being theirs. Only after much persistence did trucks become available. We scheduled a task force with the community, but on the scheduled day it was just me, my father, and another resident. We were desperate! That was when external volunteers from Arq. Futuro began to arrive and get their hands dirty, literally.

To remove the garbage from the land and take it to the trucks, it was necessary to go through a narrow alley. It wasn’t easy, but we didn’t stop. We spent the months of December 2017 and January 2018 organizing task forces to take the garbage to the trucks. There were more than 40 trucks full of garbage, just in that first moment of collective effort – and all of it was taken out manually!

Until then, the residents were not participating. We concluded that it was because they were tired of projects that never left the drawing board. This happens very often, especially with projects coming from the city hall. We had to show them that it was different now, that we were really looking for a change. That was when, at the end of May, António Moela Torre, a former MIT student, arrived in the community, proposing to work with culture as an infrastructure for vulnerable territories. For two months we worked together and created our first Art Festival (Festival de Arte).

For the Festival to take place, however, we had to move forward with the construction. The Fazendinha land slopes 18 meters from the highest point to the lowest point, and we decided to create platforms. Mauro Quintanilha suggested that the containment could be done with tires, and so we went after tires. The companies we asked for help didn’t respond, so we looked for tires in the community, engaging people.

We created a pre-festival with workshops: photography, woodworking with pallets, and cement vases. We took the children on a tour of the community, talking about environmental issues. The most interesting thing, however, was that we started to listen to the local residents. We visited many houses and asked what they would like to see at the festival.

When the Festival took place, we used not only Fazendinha, but also the street parallel to it. We had a great lunch, theater, jiu-jitsu, garden workshop, recycling. We closed the street to vehicles and opened the street to culture. One of the workshops was called Fazendinhando (making farm, this article title), in which we took a model so that the children could understand the terrain and could draw what they wanted for that space.

Although we had architects involved, it was also very important for us to understand what the community expected from Fazendinha. In 2019, we carried out a survey called Escuta Ativa (Active Listening), in which we spoke with local residents from the whole community – children, men, women, older men and women, and young people – to understand what they thought of the transformations, if they wanted to help, what their expectations were.

The first Art Festival showed us that it was not possible to think only about the physical transformation of that place; we would need to think about cultural issues and transformations, from awareness to involvement. We then started to organize monthly workshops at Fazendinha. And the residents began to feel that they were a part of it, that their children were also a part of it.

The Fazendinhando logo was made with the children, they chose the colors and design they wanted, and we simply replicated what they did. The kids asked for a court, so we put one in the flattest part, as well as a climbing wall, a slide, and a playground. Everything was done based on what the kids asked for.

It is never easy to work with few resources. It was also not easy to understand how to engage residents and how to make them participate, speak, understand that they are transforming agents with enormous potential. People who live in communities tend to think that they have no potential, that they need to limit themselves, and what we have tried to show is that they can indeed achieve their goals, and pursue their dreams. People need to grow, believe, and sometimes all it takes is a little push!

Today we have WhatsApp groups and, through them, we communicate with the residents. We often feed the groups, trying to maintain support and engagement. And we also seek to always have activities to offer. Small changes make a difference, and if a lot of people do just a little bit, that little bit will turn into a lot. We started with the transformation of a garbage dump into a park and today we are already handling many other projects.

The word community has great weight and importance for us. I use the word favela a lot, I have no problem with it, but I see Jardim Colombo as a community, because, despite all the problems we face, all the issues and difficulties, I feel that we can always count on each other. I like to reinforce this word, to reinforce that in the community there is affection, there is struggle, there is persistence and that, despite all the fears, all the anxieties, all the bad things that happen, communities are strong when people unite in them.

In March 2020 we did our last task force. At that moment we were scared, because, with Covid-19, many residents came to talk to us asking for help. They were losing their jobs and many no longer had enough to eat at home. Desperate, we had to find new alternatives to help Jardim Columbus. The first campaign we carried out was small: we were able to help some families but we were not able to feed the almost 5,000 families that were in need, but we had to start somehow.

It was disheartening to distribute the food going from house to house: the houses were in very bad state, and people really had nothing to eat. So, to our surprise, a solidarity network started within Jardim Colombo. Donations began to increase thanks to that network we were creating over the years through horizontal and shared management, and we began to work with the community. We made flyers asking people to stay home; we created a specific flyer about hygiene protocols, and we also improvised a motorcycle with a sound system attached to it to disseminate true information to the community, as there were a series of fake news circulating and people did not know what they should listen to.

On the second round of donations, we were able to help 500 families, but it was a complete disaster! The residents were not wearing masks, there were crowds, we didn’t know what to do and people kept asking: “Where is the food? I really need it, what can I do?”. There was a lot of people in need, they were anxious, worried, and afraid the food would run out. The day ended and we knew we needed to improve.

We then formed a team of about 50 volunteers who went from house to house, from alley to alley, and from door to door in Jardim Colombo to create a register. This record included the number of people in each house, their name, document, address, family income, property status, and telephone. From there, we started to draw up lists that included the families that would be served each day. We created five WhatsApp groups, each with around 200 people. This helped a lot, because one was telling the other: “Look, your name is on the list today!”. We distributed a password that the person had to present, and we also did the registration for families that, by chance, had not been included in the mapping.

We set up a space that served not only for the delivery of food, but also for the supply, assembly, and control of products. A group of people was responsible for signing a term to prove that each person had received food. It was almost a multiplication of bread and fish, because from the 28 families we helped in the beginning, we helped 25 thousand families with food, in addition to a very large amount of hygiene and cleaning products, diapers and clothing donations.

We had a place for the children, and we also had a deactivated community kitchen that we reactivated, so that we managed to generate income for five women in the community with the production of takeaway lunches, focusing mainly on homeless people and the elderly. In the end, we managed to help not only the entire Jardim Colombo community, but also 13 other communities in the State of São Paulo.

Some cases scared us, like that of a man who lives with his brother in a house that doesn’t have water. It’s impossible not to wonder how, in the 21st century, in the Morumbi region, in São Paulo city, we have families that don’t have water at home, right? This man’s house looked like a movie set… I’ve entered many poor houses in my life, but I could barely get in that wooden shack. We asked them how they showered or drank water, and they told us that they put buckets in the backyard to catch rainwater. And when it doesn’t rain, they ask the neighbors for help.

It was only possible to discover cases like that because of the painstaking work done by the volunteers. The amazing thing is that the city hall and other public agencies have no idea about these things! In this same survey, we noticed that there were a very large number of unemployed women, single mothers paying rent, experiencing various difficulties. We could not leave these women helpless, and we ended up creating a project called Fazendeiras (farm women), which envisions the qualification of women in the fields of gastronomy and civil construction. In addition to training (many of them had never taken any course in their lives), the most interesting thing was the relationship that was established between them. Today, when one of them needs support at home, she advertises in the group and the other women help immediately.

With all of this, people started seeing potential in themselves they didn’t think they had before. In some way we were moving these potential people had kept inside them. When the local residents started to participate and engage, they saw that they could change the community’s reality and their own.

The pandemic showed us that we cannot live in bubbles, we must build bridges. This will be clear to all at some point. If it is not clear to you yet, it will be, all this poverty, these terrible things that have been happening in vulnerable territories. We can no longer think about life without collaboration, without participatory processes, without union, without solidarity. What we have in our community is valuable, and we need to show that to people outside the community.

As a researcher, I try to bring this topic to the university whenever I can. I have been to several architecture schools, and I never get tired of saying that the university must act in these territories, it must be one of the pillars of transformation. The university has great potential to produce content and research to explain and catalog these methodologies and to make sure their students are debating these subjects. We have the solutions, we know what we want and what we need to do – what we lack, most of the time, is support.

Language within a community is very different from academic language. People don’t understand what is produced in the academy, it’s all very different from the language that communities know and with which they work. Residents are more used to seeing images, working with graffiti, with art, with dance, with music. How to transport an academic article to the residents? There are people there who barely know how to read or who simply won’t read. I also try to somehow talk about this at the university, about the language we want to use to talk to communities. It is evident that there is an extremely important technical knowledge, but it is still being produced from a very distant place. That’s why we need to have, within the academy, more people from these territories.

I am the first person from Jardim Colombo, which has 5,000 families, and probably from the entire Paraisópolis complex, to study for a master’s degree. We urgently need to have more diversity, and we need to debate this issue, because exchanges are important and very rich. I want to see more and more people like me entering universities. I want to see young people giving back to their communities, graduating, but not forgetting their origins.

I didn’t personally know any architects during my graduation, not even during my master’s degree. I have always admired several architects, but there has never been one that I could identify with, that I saw as a source of inspiration. It was my English teacher who recommended to me, once, a video about Francis Kéré, an architect who was born in Africa, in a very small community where there were no schools, there was no infrastructure, there was almost nothing. He went to study architecture in Germany, opened an architectural office and an institute, and returned to where he came from. There, he built the first school, and was the person responsible for bringing water to the community. He works with sustainable projects, using local materials. When I discovered Kéré’s work, I was very impressed! How had I never heard about him in college?

The experience at Fazendinha showed us that there are other Fazendinhas in other places, and that’s why I recently started mapping these places in the city of São Paulo. There are other spaces that are degraded and that have not received attention. It is essential that we start looking at them, because this brings us to the issue of climate change. São Paulo is a very dense and impermeable city, and every day we lose free and green areas that could be gardens and conviviality spaces. People need these spaces, these voids are very important, especially in territories as densely occupied as communities tend to be, with one house on top of another and very few free spaces.

We can no longer think about cities without taking into account climate issues, without thinking that our way of life will cause a series of problems in the future. In this sense, I feel that Jardim Colombo has the enormous potential to be a model community, also because it shows that these transformations do not require a lot of money. In the urbanization project proposed by the city hall, there is a linear park to be built that will run through the entire community, and if this really happens, it will be extremely important – but we could also have a school. We could be a reference in recycling. We could clean the source of the stream that is in the neighborhood. We could see this clean stream someday, full of fish. Those are my dreams.

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