São Paulo as Fluvial Metropolis

São Paulo as Fluvial Metropolis:
Infrastructure, Meta-projects, Imagined Futures and the City as Home

Mario Gandelsonas, architecture and Princeton Environmental Institute, Princeton
Alexandre Delijaicov, architecture and urbanisim, USP.

This initiative, funded by a 2014 Princeton University Strategic Partnership Grant, seeks to invite faculty and students from various disciplines at the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI) and the School of Architecture of the University of São Paulo (FAU USP) to form a research network to elaborate an environmental approach to the design of fluvial infrastructure in urban and suburban areas of New York and São Paolo, Brazil.

The research network will work in parallel meeting twice a year for the next four years, alternating between Princeton and São Paulo.  The four meetings, organized as conferences/workshops including faculty and students, will focus on the precedents, context, and potentials of the Waterway Ring Project for São Paulo as Fluvial Metropolis, a recent project that proposes a far-reaching intervention: a 106 miles long waterway ring that seeks to radically re-organize the growth of South America's largest metropolis.  An initial meeting of the Princeton and USP research team members where the work plan was discussed took place in Princeton on November of 2013, funded by a Small Seed Grant from the Council for International Teaching and Research.

The São Paulo Metropolitan Waterway Ring Project is a network of rivers, reservoirs and an artificial canal.  This initiative started more than 20 years ago as a Master's research project, followed by a Ph.D. thesis by Alexandre Delijaicov ("São Paulo, metrópole fluvial: os rios e a arquitetura da cidade. Parques e portos fluviais urbanos: projeto da cidade-canal Billings-Taiaçupeba, Ano de Obtenção," 2005. Universidade de São Paulo, USP, Brasil).