AgroSewing

Rio de Janeiro does not sum up to its beautiful beaches and landscape and perfect weather conditions, but it also includes the people that have been residing here in spite of all this. An enormous part of this population lives in the North Zone of the city, where the reality is very different from that that we wonder. In this part of the city there is a lack of public spaces, urban infrastructure, and accessibility to FOOD. Therefore in this project, it is identified by disgust a possibility to revert the normal as we know it and live it. The object of study is a terrain, which belongs to the electricity company of “Light”, that crosses this suburban area of the city carrying high tension electricity to the whole of the Rio de Janeiro metropole. It is a “green line” that cuts through the densely occupied fabric of five municipalities and 34 neighborhoods and has an area of 250 hectares. Historically, close to the neighborhood of “Madureira”, the practice of urban agriculture has existed for sometime, and more than 4.000 families lived by selling the produce they grew there. The monthly income would vary from 700R$ to 2.000R$, depending on which kinds of vegetables, fruits and herbs were sold. These families occupied informally the borders of this terrain, in the condition that they would contain the expansion of informal housing. However, in the past 5 years, due to the lack of space for leisure in this part of town and to a new technology that permits the electricity towers to be compacted, a project was conceived for this space: -Parque Madureira-. As though this project has been very successful for the population of close by neighborhoods, the families that once lived there have been removed, and the practice of urban agriculture extinguished. The proposal of the project presented is to create different scenarios, depending on the opportunities presented by the surrounding environment, that conceive this space as, not only leisure, but also as a productive landscape, including the historical practice of urban agricultural production. All of these scenarios come together in the end and form a closed loop of an operating system that produces, packages, distributes, sells food and manages sustainably water, energy and waste. The project also foresees a social housing program that comes along with a plot of land on the terrain. Depending on which kind of agriculture is intended for that space and how much of an income that represents, the footage is decided. Finally, connecting to the past and attaining to the principals of a healthy, locally connected and collaborative urban society, a new normal is conceived.