Snag Your Copy Ciudades Radicales: Un Viaje A La Arquitectura Latinoamericana Fashioned By Justin McGuirk Issued As Manuscript

really enjoyed this unusual book, I gave me a new pictue of Latin America, The author is hopeful but does not ignore the enormous problems the cities south of the border face.
There is a chapter on Caracas, another on Bogota, and even one whole chapter on a single building in Caracas, astorey unfinished skyscraper which has been occupied by squatters for nearly a decade.
And it doesn't have an elevator, Most of the chapter on Bogota focuses on the colorful mayor, Antanas Mockus, who is described as looking like an Amish businessman and has done some very innovative things such as replace policman at busy traffic interesctions with mimes, and encourage people to save water by making a video of himself taking a shower.
If you are interested in the changes taking place south of the border this is an important book to read.
Definitely not light reading, but it gave me a cool intro to urban studies that I was looking for plus made me want to go back to Bogota!! v interesting case studies, to be sure, but almost a year after having read it, i have a hard time recalling the main takeaways.
it might be my memory, tho He presents some interesting ideas none of which are his own but the absolutely condescending tone he uses to describe the people he meets especially indigenous people is absolutely insufferable.
He also lacks so much context, his writing had a strong Ive been here for like a week and Im gonna act like I know more about this place than the people who live here.


The topic is so fascinating but he wasnt the right guy for this I guess, the tone especially bothered me as someone who is Latin American.
I found this book informative and easy to read, although I didn't read the chapters in order, He draws a lot of information from experts and locals from each case study, and provides some political and cultural context for each case, which are clearly just summaries of the history that has shaped each of the cities he talks about.
In general, I thought it was a good book that touches on different aspects of informal settlements, mostly on housing, and can help spark interest in specific topics that readers can continue reading or researching about.
What if architects, displaced citizens, and public housing authorities behaved like Jack Reacher That is, what if they were bumchucking, swiftwitted vigilantes hellbent on rattling the massive Latin American housing crisis caused by inequality, misguided utopianism, and political corruption and incompetence Find out for yourself and read Radical Cities.
This is a firm recommendation and props to my pal Steve who got me this book as a Christmas gift.
Ciudades Radicales es un viaje de mochila y también un reportaje una mirada desde el exterior sobre lo que ocurre con las y los pobres en las ciudades latinoamericanas.
El autor recorrió el sur global americano desde Tijuana, el ecuador político, hasta las ciudades miseria de Buenos Aires, documentado las ciudades no invisibles como las de Calvino sino todo lo contrario que se construyen fuera del mercado global del suelo, en la informalidad y la solidaridad de quienes poseen poco o nada.


Esta obra no debe ser un vehículo para romantizar la pobreza urbana en América Latina, sino para poner el foco sobre dos ideas centrales:el desastre urbano que están causando los gobiernos neoliberales yque otros urbanismos cuyas bases estén en las personas y no en el capital es posible.


Cada ciudad radical en su particularidad es un ejemplo de resistencia, de cooperación y de producción social del hábitat, tres cosas que las autoridades suelen desconocer y menospreciar.
Para estudiantes de urbanismo, planeación y arquitectura, esta es una obra fundamental para entender a ojo de águila el panorama urbano América Latina.
La prosa de McGuirk es amena y sus entrevistas con gente local aportan vistazos desde el interior de estas utopías.
Much gets written about the massurbanisation happening in China and Africa, but Latin America is often strangely overlooked, even though it went through almost identical patterns half a century ago, and in some countries has overof the population living in cities.
In the process it experimented with many different approaches, often swinging rapidly backandforth between housing as a basic human right for the government to provide, and the sometimesideological, sometimesmerelypragmatic, ideal that people by which, of course, we mean the poor, should build their own houses.


In more recent times, cities such as Medellín in Colombia have been internationally recognised as places that have been completely transformed in this case, from the murder capital of the world largely through architecture, and the region is full of architectureasactivism projects.


And so McGuirk, previously editor of international architecture magazine, Icon, sets off on a tour of Latin America to find out how much the reality lives up to the hype.
The short answer: It doesn't, but it's still impressive anyway,

The book takes an extended look at numerous approaches to citybuilding in the loosest sense: from the very basic level of providing housing PREVI in Perú, and the Quinta Monroy "build people halfahouse and let them build the rest" approach in Chilé through the gentrification of the favelas in Rio and the effects of the city building out for the Olympics and the World Cup the transformation of public spaces such as Medellín's library parks the crucial importance of transport infrastructure in cities where being poor can add two hours to how long it takes to get to work or a hospital what happens whenpeople take over an abandonedstorey corporate skyscraper as a squat with no elevators or when megacities get big enough to span national boundaries to Antanas Mockus attempts to transform Bogotá primarily through transforming the people themselves.


These all make for fascinating stories, and the author does a good job of avoiding oversimplification  understanding, and reiterating constantly, that there are no easy answers to many of the questions that these projects are attempting to deal with or themselves raise, and that its often unclear to what extent any of these can be successfully replicated elsewhere.


The travelogueinterview style of writing can drag and grate at times particularly when he goes fullblown architecture nerd, wandering Peruvian social housing projects playing spotthearchitect: “Thats clearly a Stirling, but is that a van Eyck or an Alexander”, and the book presupposes a quite high level of understanding of architectural topics, assuming that the reader needs no further explanation for the continual references to Le Corbusier, Brutalism, etc.
This makes the book a difficult read at times, particularly in the early chapters, which is particularly disappointing, as theres no real reason why this should be so.
The book will be interesting and useful to many nonarchitects, and providing a simpler entrypoint to some of the concepts would have made it much more accessible.
Thankfully I found the subject matter compelling enough to plough on through the worst parts, The areas I had known something about previously have had much too little written about them in English, so this is a very welcome addition, even with these flaws.


I was also slightly surprised to find only a single passing remark to Porto Alegres nowwidelycopied approach of Participatory Budgeting, and none at all to initiatives like Belo Horizontes “Peoples Restaurants”, or São Paulo banning all public advertising as noise pollution.
But theres room for many books on all these topics and hopefully there are indeed many more to come.


Advance review copy provided through edelweiss "While architects have been focusing on spectacular buildings they could export to China and Dubai, the real gains were to be made on a diffenrent plane entirely, at the level of infraestructure, networks and politics.
Designing a good building becomes a rather academic exercise when the entire system that allows that building to materialise is geared towards increasing social inequality.
New social and political frameworks also need designing, "
And that's exactly what this book is trying to describe, Design an architecture are moving beyond the sculpture building,
I'm from Colombia and I'm doing postgraduate studies on urban design, A teacher told us that he was happy to have a group of students working in goverment as he thought that anyone can actually design decently, but the tools that allow for better designs that can help to reduce inequalities are yet to be imagined, as the ones we have today are ususally inefficient or there to serve corruption.
Justin's journey across Latin America is intriguing and insightful, He explored different solutions to the housing crisis across Latin America, where he went looking for urban innovation through architecture.
Gran lectura para conocer más sobre cómo crecen las ciudades y que soluciones se implementaron en Latinoamérica con y sin éxito para enfrentar el déficit habitacional.
Prosa muy dinámica y entretenida y buenas fotos a color, very nice architecture study book, looks at argentina, rio and 'the' favela, caracas, and has chapter on torre david in caracas, a pirated living space, bogota, medillin, and tiajuana a disaster.

medellin is of particular interest in that there is simultaneously an on going human rights disaster and some institutional action for better housing, libraries, transportation cable cars becuase really, there are no streets as such, also lima, the first chapter, looks at some very 'old' urban renewal and how that has morphed into unique and livable housing over the decades.

a bit dry writing but pair this with something like witold's sitelinkHow Architecture Works: A Humanist's Toolkit and sitelinkMakeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities and you'll be smartest on the block about slums and their genesis and transformations very good and also very interesting!! the emphasis of the book was on how to make cities more equitable for the poor.
lots of good examples of how architects and planners, and engineers, etc can't jut create things in vacuum, and need to work with the community in order to incite social change.
lots of good lessons to be learned, and all examples were from south american cities as opposed to europe, which people tend to focus more on when thinking about sustainability and urban design

This is a really excellent, enjoyable and accessible book examining a series of case studies of urban and architectural development throughout Latin America.
I was expecting this to be a more academic text, but McGuirk's tone is conversational and easy to follow, as well as precise and meaningful when it branches in to critical analysis.

The are two main arguments that I get from this text,Instead of demarcating between "formal" and "informal" cities, with the latter being seen as temporary and problematic phases of urbanity that will ideally lead to formalization, we have to consider informal cities as possessing their own possibilities.
Informal cities demonstrate alternative forms of social, economic, and political organization rather than inherently "bad" ones,Architectural development is not an end in itself, Its political value is in the way that alternative forms of urban and architectural development deploy certain organizations, politics, and communities in new configurations and by "alternative" and "new configurations" I mean against the grain of neoliberal development.
These are not particularly novel observations as I'm sure McGuirk would acknowledge, The excellence of this book is the way that these messages are intertwined with really solid and fascinating firsthand accounts of these spaces and interviews with the leaders and the communities that make these "radical cities" possible.
McGuirk is more of an observer letting people who were directly involved in these developments a platform to narrate their own ideas and experiences.

Este libro es un mustread para cualquiera que tenga el mínimo interés en política social y desarrollo con enfoque en América Latina.
Básicamente hace un recuento y análisis de diversas experiencias de desarrollo y transformación urbana a lo largo y ancho del continente, en sus diferentes manifestaciones: cultura cívica/ciudadana, vivienda social, transporte urbano y otras obras de infraestructura como parques, bibliotecas y demás, así como de personajes claves en estos, entre ellos el antiguo alcalde de Bogotá y candidato presidencial Antanas Mockus, a quien le dedica un capítulo completo.
Da un poco de envidia leer como las ciudades y sus alcaldes deberían funcionar en realidad,

También abarca nuevas formas en que los arquitectos, ingenieros, políticos y demás han cambiado la forma de ver a los barrios, ya no como amenazas externas a la ciudad sino como parte integral de esta, y aprendiendo de como la gente resuelve sus propios problemas para en base a estas experiencias crear políticas publicas y soluciones

de infraestructura que de verdad resuelven problemas, por ejemplo los teleféricos en Caracas, las casas construidas a mitad para que sus habitantes las terminen en Chile, la otorgamiento de títulos de propiedad colectiva a organizaciones de residentes en lugar de títulos individuales a personas, lo cual motiva a organizar mejor la tierra y la construcción.


En fin, el libro es sumamente interesante y fácil de leer, y se aprende muchísimo.
Recomendado totalmente. .