Notes on the Plan and Design in Slums

Abstract

The following text addresses the complex relationships between scientific and academic systematization and the epistemology of the plan and design, in areas where there is a precariousness of infrastructure facilities, such as favelas and irregular subdivisions in Brazilian cities. The idea, that the actions of plan and project demand an interaction between subjectivity and objectivity, which need to be contemplated in the scientific discourse of the academies. The reduction of the plan and project process to a bureaucratic procedure, which blocks the auto biographical expression, not only of the designer, but of his interlocutors, leads to a disconnect between knowledge and interest. This link is the very engine of the pre-figuration of the plan and design, in which the leveling between designer and plaintiff (client) generates an uncertain and contingent practice, where shared clarification aims at including everyone. This understanding of the project plan as the operational critique of the real, where the aspects of the operation are adapted to an attitude compromised by change. Finally, a project plan against hegemony, which changes the development inertia of Brazilian cities, where historically only a minority has been contemplated by urban infrastructure.