Jorge Mario Jaragui
Image of installation in Tijuana, Mexico With an increasing amount of the world’s population living in slum conditions and as we speak cities are growing by one million babies and migrants each week. The conditions are becoming particularly exacerbated in Africa. Latin America still exhibits however some of the largest disparities amidst the rich and the poor. Luxury homes lie side by side with intensely populated areas of people that cannot afford the high prices of what is known as the ‘formal’ city.
The architect and town-planner Jorge Mario Jáuregui (Argentenian, that lives and works in Rio de Janeiro) has become known for his effective interventions in the favelas of Latin America, in particular for the Favela Bairro Programme created by the city of Rio de Janeiro in the mid-1990s. The infrastructural measures to raise the quality of life are the result of intense research and place the moment of participating and having a say in decisions in the forefront. In doing so, Jáuregui´s approach is influenced by psychoanalysis, sociology and philosophy.He works at the interface between the formal and the informal city, the officially planned one as well as the unplanned one growing on the outskirts, in order to establish new links within the existing framework. And so he removes violence from the interface. Jáuregui develops a topology that is geared neither to rejection nor to integration, and re-considers urban functions. Initially, he listens to the residents, reads the layers of the city, the movement, land uses and flows, the transport links, learns to understand the life of the people in the barrios, their desires, the resistance of the places themselves. This entails a respectful approach to what exists and co-operation with local, even Mafia-like, groups.Jáuregui ´s intention is to carve out urban centers, establish new centers for living together and, in this way, develop a new kind of relationship between the public and the private. In spite of strong social dynamics between the residents of the favelas, the living space is predominantly private, there is no public territory.Jáuregui creates public facilities and places where common ground and identity can be established, whether at football matches, dancing samba or celebrations.He identifies the special forms of the favelas and transfers their improvised aesthetics to his architectural forms.
The architect and town-planner Jorge Mario Jáuregui (Argentenian, that lives and works in Rio de Janeiro) has become known for his effective interventions in the favelas of Latin America, in particular for the Favela Bairro Programme created by the city of Rio de Janeiro in the mid-1990s. The infrastructural measures to raise the quality of life are the result of intense research and place the moment of participating and having a say in decisions in the forefront. In doing so, Jáuregui´s approach is influenced by psychoanalysis, sociology and philosophy.He works at the interface between the formal and the informal city, the officially planned one as well as the unplanned one growing on the outskirts, in order to establish new links within the existing framework. And so he removes violence from the interface. Jáuregui develops a topology that is geared neither to rejection nor to integration, and re-considers urban functions. Initially, he listens to the residents, reads the layers of the city, the movement, land uses and flows, the transport links, learns to understand the life of the people in the barrios, their desires, the resistance of the places themselves. This entails a respectful approach to what exists and co-operation with local, even Mafia-like, groups.Jáuregui ´s intention is to carve out urban centers, establish new centers for living together and, in this way, develop a new kind of relationship between the public and the private. In spite of strong social dynamics between the residents of the favelas, the living space is predominantly private, there is no public territory.Jáuregui creates public facilities and places where common ground and identity can be established, whether at football matches, dancing samba or celebrations.He identifies the special forms of the favelas and transfers their improvised aesthetics to his architectural forms.
Image of city (aerial)
Image of projected street
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