Education

CSI São Paulo: Parallel World’s workshop

São Paolo is the world’s fourth largest metropolis – much of it slums. A series of workshops for students and professionals hopes to develop multi-disciplinary solutions capable of curing the city’s ills and improving other cities of tomorrow.

The student organizers of the City Space Investigations (CSI) are looking for students and interested professionals to join a two-week workshop in São Paulo, Brazil. The City Space Investigations are attempts to push workshop experiences to a new level by embracing participatory approaches, trans-disciplinarity and ICT-based frameworks. During the two-week on-site workshop, students and professionals from the Netherlands and Brazil will work together on a specific area in São Paulo. This will enable them to learn more about informal production of cities. Lectures and seminars from diverse angles − academia, government, architects, developers, grassroots and NGOs − plus the sharp focus on on-site excursions, fieldwork and local impressions, should guarantee an integral experience. The workshops will aim to sensitise participants to issues linked to ongoing urbanization processes in the 21st century, like global inequality, spaces of consumption, social dissolution and bottom-up emergencies.
The question that will be addressed is: what can we – as designers, artists, engineers, sociologists, anthropologists and planners – contribute to a better living environment in the cities of tomorrow? The ultimate aim is to stimulate discussion and generate final products that reflect the workshop ideology, which is to say being flexible in frame, disciplines and scales. The CSI São Paulo initiative will follow the line of a classic threefold workshop: preparation period, on-site workshop, and a minimal phase of post-production. The workshop is open to all interested students and professionals in all disciplines who are eager to explore how their knowledge could contribute to a better living environment in a city marked by the harsh contrast of rich and poor.

The CSI São Paulo: Parallel World’s workshop series runs from April 5-18, 2009. Participants must register before January 15th. For more info visit the website www.urbandetectives.com or e-mail info@urbandetectives.com

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