Downtown São Paulo – Brazil

TRANSFORM ABANDONED BUILDING

Current figures indicate that the city of São Paulo has a quantitative housing deficit of 510,000 required households. At the same time, the city contains, among public and private owners, about 700 completely empty buildings, 94 of which are concentrated only in its central region. In view of this, factors such as the obligation to carry out reforms for structural adaptation of buildings over 50 years old, and the large increase in vacancy expected for office buildings downtown due to the rapid adaptations to teleworking by the pandemic, point to these buildings as a concrete possibility to solve a considerable amount of this deficit in a systematic way. In this way, the studio focuses on developing retrofit projects to transform abandoned or underutilized buildings of different typologies into social housing, by pilot projects with the possibility of effective realization. In addition to projects for spatial and infrastructural adaptation, the set of planned activities is aimed at creating scalability for the renovation of this type of buildings, based on the development of strategies for the involvement of private sector, at the same time elaborating a public housing policy that meets the income range yet to be served by the real estate market. To this end, this module will host activities with the involvement of professionals from various areas such as urban legislation, economics, real estate, social movements, and the academy with a local research and project team.