Project outline development Arife + Toon

Our research topic is Minhocão. The object is a highway dividing the area into two parallel worlds. There is one world on top of the highway and one underneath, both consisting of formal and informal activities.

By day, the deck of the Minhocão is used by cars. It is a busy highway, which is very important for the traffic flow in São Paulo. 80.000 cars pass here each weekday. By night and on Sundays the Minhocão becomes a recreational space. As a formal act it is closed for motorized vehicles; as an informal act it is used for walking, running and cycling.

Under the highway is another busy road. The formal use of the street level consists of several types of businesses and public transport. In the buildings surrounding the highway are shops, some offices, hotels and housing. The space under the highway and in surrounding public spaces is informally used by homeless people and some drug addicts.

Many proposals have been made for Minhocão, examples here, here, here and here. The proposals were made for a design competition. Basically all of them make the Minhocão bigger, and have been designed with little regard for the situation underneath the highway. The informal use is either abandoned or neglected.

Our proposal aims at improving the informal conditions around Minhocão, using minimal, low profile architectural tools. We ultimately want to propose one intervention that effects the informal use both on top and underneath the highway, and connect this to the surrounding public spaces. We will try to do this by stimulating participation of the informal users in their physical environment.

We will map the activities on the highway on different times and different days, using video, photo’s, sections and maps. Eventually we want to propose a design intervention.