Belo Horizonte, to create a beautiful horizon for the inhabitants of the favela Pedreira Prado Lopes

Abstract

This book contains a research, made during my graduation at the faculty of Architecture on the university of Delft. This graduation is done in the Explorelab, a research driven graduation-laboratory for exploration of fascinations in the profession of building sciences, in a broad sense. Subject Slums are noncities in big cities. They are illegal. The slums represents the worst of urban poverty and inequality. Almost 1 billion people, or 32 per cent of the world’s urban population, live in slums, the majority of them in the developing world. Moreover, the locus of global poverty is moving to the cities, a process now recognized as the ‘urbanization of poverty’. Without concerted action on the part of municipal authorities, national governments, civil society actors and the international community, the number of slum dwellers is likely to increase in most developing countries. And if no serious action is taken, the number of slum dwellers worldwide is projected to rise over the next 30 years to about 2 billion (UN-Habitat 2003). Project In the period in which I have worked for the organization (YWAM) I have met some good friends. Their goal is to help people in one of the most dangerous slums in Belo Horizonte, Pedreira Prado Lopes. Therefore, they really need a center where they can help them towards a transformation in the spiritual, physical, emotional, intellectual, social and economic areas of their lives. This plan inspired me to develop a graduation project in which this fascination and architecture is combined. To design and realize a communitycenter for this vulnerable target group, is trying to give a positive impact to the negativity of a slum. I don’t have the illusion to save the world, but trying to make lives better. I would like to help by giving the people a building which have the focus on the wishes of the users: the favelados. It was a great pleasure to work on this research and hopefully you will enjoy reading it. Structure This research starts with a short introduction (chapter 1) about the problems of urbanization and the consequences on slum-developing. In chapter 2 the research-question will be launched, which will be the structure of this research. In chapter 3 the field of research (the slum Pedreira Prado Lopes) will be analyzed, which gives a good reflection on the problems of this slum. Chapter 4 is a theoretical chapter, which gives theoretical answers on the research question. In chapter 5, these solutions will be applied in the slum, where a clear answer will be made on how the treat the slum in the hole context of the city. Chapter 6 is a conclusion on the discussed chapters before.