Radical Cities: urban life as we don't know it

This week, Recyclart is welcoming its last guest this season in the series on city and architecture, which is organised at the Brussel-Congres/Bruxelles-Congrès railway station. It is an extremely interesting international guest: the British journalist and architecture critic Justin McGuirk has been involved in design, architecture, and urban life his whole life, and has been pretty much everywhere in the world pursuing those interests. He recently wrote the well-received book Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture, which he will present in Brussels on Wednesday.

Radical Cities is the result of McGuirk’s journeys through cities and communities in Latin America. He visited architects, activists, progressive politicians, and “radical” communities who refuse to accept the failure of social forms in extreme circumstances (corruption, poverty, over-population) and who have given new dimensions to the concepts of architecture and urban development. His blog features the example of the Tupac Amaru movement in Argentina, whose 70,000 members provide their own social housing. They do everything themselves, building more cheaply and quickly than construction companies and building contractors, and using the surplus money to build facilities like swimming pools, sports fields, and parks, all tailored to the needs of the residents. Chile also has an alternative form of social housing with an architect who builds half houses and lets the owners do the rest according to their needs. Public architecture in Medellín is apparently also improving dramatically, while Rio is attempting to incorporate the favelas into the rest of the city.

RADICAL CITIES: JUSTIN MCGUIRK 25/6, 20.30, €3, STATION BRUSSEL-CONGRES/GARE DE BRUXELLES-CONGRÈS, Pachecolaan 38 boulevard Pachéco, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-502.57.34, www.recyclart.be