Participatory architecture and urbanism: a genesis

Abstract

This article, primarily memorialist, explores participatory project for Architecture and Urban Planning, methodology and value as process and art, collective and interdisciplinary creation. In the studied cases, made between the 1970s and the 1990s in São Paulo, Brazil and Cordoba, Argentina and in which authorities, communities, education and environment were associated, two strong ideas are connected - participation and collaboration -, filled with dialogical sense, aiming to guide the discussion of each of them on the subject, and on what connects, or can connect them. The production of places and landscapes, product and process of men’s action and creative activity, contains the alienation condition in which the production of every object within private property is subordinated. The dilemma “use value-exchange value” reveals the contradiction between art and commodity, as any product in the capitalist system of production, is separated from the artist who creates, becoming a commodity. Aiming to find gaps to overcome this contradiction, we understand that the relationship between art-politics-economy may create a possibility to overcome alienation. This would allow a creative activity, together with the inhabitants of places, opening doors to a democratic discussion about urban-landscape projects of these places, revealing potentialities.