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Alfredo Brillembourg: (my) city (ethics) of the future

We spoke to the Urban Think Tank founder following his lecture “Making Urban Utopias from Peripheries” at the Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Foundation during Milan Arch Week.

Alfredo Brillembourg, an architect of South American origin but born in New York, has been studying the mechanisms of development of the contemporary metropolis for years, explaining them to students at New York Columbia University and the Polytechnic of Zurich where he teaches and experiments in the field in the most deprived urban areas in the world – from Caracas to Sao Paulo and Cape Town. When I ask him what the goal of his work is, he simply replies: "Building houses for the poorest people".

It's a programme that sounds almost revolutionary...
No, you don't need a revolution to implement it... But when I opened my own studio in Caracas in 1998, together with Hubert Klumpner (an architect of Austrian origin), I called it Urban Think-Tank, thinking of using the term 'tank' with a dual meaning: 'urban container' but also in the most provocative sense of 'tank'.

Within that choice, in fact, there was (and there is) all our desire to act, to 'fight', in short, the urgency of making it clear, even to the younger generations, that architecture must become an instrument of real transformation, capable of achieving a concrete social impact. In other words, it means relying on the participation and collaboration of people, overcoming the political, social, cultural and economic barriers that megalopolises inevitably build.

Are you saying that you believe in a social and civil role on the part of the architect?
I would say above all political. Don't get me wrong: I'm not interested in being the ideologue of a political party. I mean that architects must become activists, promoters, facilitators or, even better, mediators between those who decide at a political and administrative level and those who will be the users, namely the citizens. We must not forget that the word city comes from the Greek Polis and the Polis were born for people and concern people, especially the poor.

Would you like to give us a concrete example?
The project I am carrying out in South Africa. It is called Empower Shack and its name already clarifies its objective: to give ethical and aesthetic dignity to the 'shacks' of the Khayelitsha district, on the outskirts of Cape Town, where 400,000 people live in inadequate housing. The idea of our studio is to be 'facilitators', i.e. technicians who provide the local population with a solution to create economic and sustainable housing units, which are then built by the inhabitants themselves. In other words, people living in illegal houses of a very poor precarious informal housing become for the first time an active part of the project to rebuild their own home. We have stood aside to give them the space to do so. And the participation is surprising.

Alfredo Brillembourg. Photo by Daniel Schwartz

What are you doing in Caracas?
At this moment we closed the studio, moving all the way to Zurich, where we teach. The situation in the country is very serious. However, I am comforted that almost all the projects we designed as Urban Think-Tank (the cable car, the vertical gym, etc.) have been completed and are working very well. But we are working on new initiatives, together with many Venezuelans, to reinvent a new Caracas when democracy returns. Because it's not here now.

The 'hot' themes to face for the city of the future?
I would say three. First, building housing for the poor and less fortunate; second, building social infrastructure; and third, focusing on sustainable mobility.

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