~~Situated in the Brazilian highlands, São Paulo is a city of rivers and hills. The Tietê River and its two main tributaries- the Pinheiros and the Tamanduateí- have historically served as source, resource and sink for the industrial and financial capital of South America. Today university campuses and industrial facilities, parklands and freeways, luxury high rises and the most vulnerable favelas inhabit the riverbanks in this metropolis of twenty million. The rivers bear the brunt of the massive city’s industrial effluent, urban runoff, and untreated sewage, performing vital ecological and infrastructural services that often render it an intolerable neighbor. Along these rivers the time and pace of industrialization, large-scale waves of immigration and patterns of population settlement, and great disparities in wealth and income make for a particularly problematic and dynamic ecological and cultural situation. Historically serving as the dividing line between neighborhoods and municipalities within the metropolitan area, the rivers are defined by overlapping jurisdictions and competing concepts of use and care, creating a paradoxical situation of possibility and neglect. São Paulo is an extreme example of a common condition. More than mere dividing lines, urban rivers are borderlands: ambiguous territories marked by conflicting uses, contradictory conditions, and constant change. These borderlands are the sites of conflict, violence, and abuse, but also important production, materials, cultural exchange, ecosystems and aesthetic experiences; they are both cause and effect of violent and vital historical processes. This paper presents the results of a research project focused on São Paulo, combining field visits, archival and primary document research in two languages, mappings, and data modeling and visualization. By considering the extreme and instructive case of São Paulo this talk will offer a conceptual framework for understanding the cultural, ecological, economic, political, and aesthetic potentials of rivers as urban borderlands. Brian Davis is Professor of the Built Environment in the Department of Landscape Architecture. His current outreach efforts are focused on developing and applying cartographic, fieldwork, and data visualization methodologies for and with local communities, especially for studying changes to the local landscape and the performance of water infrastructure such as sewers, green infrastructure, and bulkheads. He is currently working with communities in Troy, NY on the Hudson River through the Water Resources Institute and the Hudson River Estuary Program. The intent is to create new maps and representations that capture and visualize sewer overflows across a range of spatial and temporal scales. The hope is that these forms of representation can help bridge divides between technical disciplines and affected publics.In his practice design is not fundamentally about service, whether for clients or communities. Rather it is a creative act that can take the form of service, but also activism, speculation, teaching and research. It has been his experience that most real projects are a particular blend of each of these modalities and it is imperative on the designer/student to claim and develop a position for their project. Because of this, the problem is not received knowledge from some outside source (a teacher, a client, a competition brief) but is something that must be continually construed in a collaborative and creative fashion as an effort to create conditions in which to carry out the design process.
In teaching he places equal emphasis on concept and technique, idea and execution. This can be seen in the courses he teaches, which range from a unique theory course on urbanism and landscape in the Americas (LA 6140) to Site Construction (LA 3180/6180). he also emphasizes integration of different forms of expertise into the design process (whether technical or local knowledge), rather than mere simulation.
His studio courses are organized according to two main lines: borderlands, and instruments. Each of these draws from a theoretical foundation related to my own research and challenges convention ideas and practices of landscape-making.