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Good night.
We’re back with today’s final debate
and we acknowledge the presence of Mrs. Eliane Parreira,
state secretary of Culture;
Branca Macaúbas, municipal assistant secretary
for urban regulation; Ângelo Oswaldo, mayor of Ouro Preto;
Ana Paula Chaves, assistant municipal secretary of urban planning;
Zuleika Torquetti, president of Fundação do Meio Ambiente,
representing the Environment secretary Adriano Magalhães;
Manuela Danur, superintendent for rural issues;
Cristiana Kumaira,
president of the Praça da Liberdade Cultural Circuit;
Oswaldo Borges, president of Codemig;
Teodomiro Diniz Camargo, vice-president of FIEMG,
the Federation of Industries in the State of Minas Gerais;
and professor Valéria Kemp,
headmistress of São João del-Rei Federal University.
We’ll now invite to the stage Gustavo Penna,
a graduate of UFMG’s School of Architecture.
He created, among lots of other works, the headquarters
for TV Bandeirantes both in Belo Horizonte and São Paulo,
the Centro de Feiras e Exposições de Minas Gerais,
and the new Mineirão stadium.
He’s also the creator of this building, Escola Guignard,
considered by Projeto magazine
one of the 30 most relevant architectural works in Brazil.
Also, a note from the organizers:
Gustavo was a supporter, encourager,
and friend from the first moment
we brought this idea for him and his team’s discussion,
so we in Arq.Futuro also thank him.
That’s what good ideas are for, right?
Also participating in this debate will be Fernando de Mello Franco,
curator for Urbem Institute, in São Paulo,
and partner at MMB,
as well as a former visiting professor at Harvard.
Fernando Moreira Salles is the president of CBMM.
Franklin Feder, president of mining company Alcoa.
And our mediator, André Corrêa do Lago.
Good night, everyone, thank you for being here,
it’s truly a pleasure
to be here with this exceptional group of people,
debating a theme that’s very important
not only for Minas,
but for Brazil in general.
I’ll allow myself a brief introduction,
because talking to them before
we realized the link between these issues
and the international discussion
about the evolution of development.
There are two big international treaties
that are in a way determining what the model
for development will be in the next years.
The main one is the negotiation for climate change,
which in spite of being perceived
as something that has made no advances
is a 20-year-old process,
and has allowed for science on the subject
to expand exponentially,
and brought knowledge for all countries,
all populations, about the impact of climate change
and what a challenge that is to overcome.
This was all due to a convention signed 20 years ago in Rio,
and that’s why every year there’s a meeting
and every year we move forward in a direction
that can have decisive impact
on countries’ economy and well-being.
The other big issue,
more connected to sustainability,
has centered all the debates
this year in Rio +20.
What are those big conferences?
In Rio+20 we basically established an agenda for the next 20, 30 years
of how we’re gonna get involved.
And three very clear absolute priorities.
The first one is eradicating poverty,
that became the number 1 priority in the world.
The second world priority is changing the unsustainable
consumption and production patterns.
And the third is using natural resources according
to future needs of a population that we know will stop
at 9 and 10 billion around 2050, and then decrease.
Why am I talking about these two issues?
Because they are two debates and discussions
that may seem philosophic but in reality are deciding
whether mining will continue in this country;
whether agriculture will expand in another country;
whether cities go on one direction or another.
I think this is very important
for a developing country such as Brazil,
because the position in this debate is extremely complex,
as there’s a tendency to transfer responsibilities
for developing countries.
So everyone is always talking about China, about Brazil,
about what we need to do,
when in reality developed countries
have managed to do great things at a high cost.
As you know, Gandhi already said
in 1945 that the UK
had to destroy half of the world’s natural resources
in order to develop.
So he asked: how many planets will India need?
This debate is absolutely essential,
because we are negotiating with the outside,
with the community of nations,
issues that have an impact on the everyday lives
of every citizen in the world.
So I wanted to provoke
some of you
about this issue.
And I warn you
that developing countries are very united in this debate,
trying to avoid not only getting all the responsibility
for what needs to be done in the future
but also making sure developed countries do what they still can,
so that responsibilities
are distributed in a more balanced way.
It’s a principle established in Rio,
very famous in international negotiations,
and that gives way to all kinds of messes,
but it’s formulated in a very simple and brilliant way:
the principle of common,
yet different, responsibilities.
Meaning everyone assumes responsibilities,
but they’re different.
The greatest battle in the world today
is to try and dissolve and diminish this principle,
on which all these discussions are based.
This is very much alive in the issue of sustainability.
What is sustainability?
A lot of people interpret it as an environmental issue.
It’s not an environmental issue.
A lot of people who didn’t like Rio+20
thought it was an environmental conference,
and as such it was a huge disappointment.
It’s not that. It’s about sustainability.
Environmental sustainability,
social sustainability,
and economic sustainability.
Things won’t get done if they don’t make economic sense.
They’re politically impossible if they don’t make social sense,
and if they’re not environmental
they’ll put us in an outdated kind of development.
So I wanted to provoke this:
in which way is this being experienced in the reality
of mining in Minas Gerais?
I don’t know who wants to start,
my oldest friend here is Fernando,
but since you’re to my right, Franklin.
Thank you, ambassador.
First of all, good night, everyone.
It’s really an honor for me to be here with you.
I thank Marisa and Tomas.
I need to confess a secret to you:
my wife got an invitation to this event.
It had nothing do to with me, she got it from another source.
She looked at it, called me, I was out of town, and said:
Franklin, you’re finally where you’ve always wanted to be:
with the architects.
If I hadn’t gone to FGV, done MBA
and all I think I would really wanna be an architect.
So to be here tonight really is an honor for me,
and I thank you, Marisa, for making it possible.
Let me state something, and it’s also provoking,
I speak on behalf of Alcoa:
the issue of sustainability in its three dimensions,
not only environmental responsibility
but social justice and economic success
is fundamentally an ethical issue.
And I say this as a provoking statement.
It’s really a matter of responsibility.
Mining companies use the earth’s natural resources,
there’s obviously vegetation suppression,
a number of impacts.
The immediate responsibility is to replace the planet,
that earth, in the condition we found it or better.
It’s basically an ethical issue and, obviously,
since the 1988 Constitution,
a legal obligation as well.
But before being a legal obligation
it’s an ethical and moral obligation.
Putting it like this,
the second thing, if I may, is:
there’s no silver bullet, as Americans say,
for the issue of mining and sustainability.
There’s no one answer.
Alcoa’s experience, and we do large scale mining
in Australia, Suriname, here in Brazil,
is that each place’s response in terms
of community commitment and environmental responsibility
depends on the community’s demands and local conditions.
In Australia we replant
an absolutely unique forest, in Australia’s west side,
on Darling Range, the jarrah forest,
and in such a good way
that it was recognized by the United Nations
in the 1990s as an example of environmental responsibility.
In Suriname Alcoa has been mining bauxite for almost 100 years.
We’ve had success cases and failures there,
but the mined area is fundamentally
used by the government
for relocation programs.
In Jamaica mined areas,
according to the population’s will,
are dedicated to the large scale production of green vegetables,
and here in Brazil I think there’s one example,
fundamentally, be it in Poços de Caldas
or more recently in the west of Pará,
in a town called Juruti,
we are dedicated to replanting native species.
What you have here is one example,
I think there are some more slides,
of an area that was mined
and that’s its current condition.
In Poços de Caldas we mined about 600 hectares,
and rehabilitated
and replanted about 400.
Of those 400
over 50 were transformed in an environmental park
which has been visited since its creation
by 100 thousand people,
for environmental education, trails, etc.
That was a demand from the Poços de Caldas community.
Anyway, I’ll say it again:
there’s no one single solution,
it depends on the conditions and the demands from the communities.
Thirdly, I would say:
those mined areas represent
a huge opportunity
in terms of business and of environmental
and social responsibility.
I’ll finish by saying,
because we’ll debate this during the next hour and a half,
if I can keep quiet, I’ll say first:
Alcoa isn’t an example of a perfect company
in terms of sustainability. It’s not.
We’ve made mistakes in a lot of places in the world.
But Alcoa does strive for perfection.
When we make mistakes we go back and then go forward
toward perfection in terms of environmental
and social responsibility,
and, obviously, along with economic success.
A long answer to a simple statement.
First I want to say,
since we’re also talking about architecture,
how happy Guignard would be
to see his little school
poorly put in the middle of the park
inaugurated by Juscelino Kubitschek
in such an appropriate space
built by Gustavo Penna
in tribute to Guignard’s important work,
during Juscelino Kubitschek’s
first term as mayor.
And now I want to raise some thinking points
that have to do with the context in which
we should discuss
the role of mining
and the paths we can take
to make it more
user friendly and ultimately
something which society can take back in conditions that,
if done carefully, can take place.
It’s important to do this
because over 1 million people
depend directly on their jobs
in mined areas in Brazil.
Do the math,
using whatever family factor you want,
but it’s very significant,
and therefore
we’re talking about an opportunity
that cannot and should not be discontinued,
at least not because of bad management
or erroneous information.
On the other hand
I think it’s a privilege to be able to discuss this
in Minas Gerais,
which has natural advantages
and a historical calling toward mining.
The problem is that, beyond our Minas Gerais,
the environmental issue is the most serious conflict
of our century.
Here and anywhere
there are too many dilemmas
and too little time.
The environmental issue,
as André says, is not just environmental,
it’s the issue of sustainability,
and sustainability
has to do with a lot more than just environment.
But developed countries
have been trying to transfer the responsibility
for tomorrow’s fate
to undeveloped countries
such as ours.
To countries that are trying to overcome the delay
in their social conditions
and they need
to find the space
to bravely discuss
the responsibilities
and who they belong to.
Who should pay the bill?
The ones who take down trees by putting fire on a little corner
of the forest in order to plant manioc
or the ones who sprayed ***
over the whole Southeast Asia,
eliminating forests that never again
became anything useful
in Vietnam and Cambodia,
countries that they hadn’t even declared war with?
And should the one who’s polluting today pay,
but not the one who polluted yesterday?
Is there a present value determining that today’s production
should be more expensive than the one that already happened?
Or is there an indulgency saying
that the 19th century industrial development
has pardon,
and that’s that?
After all, the dirt is there,
we’re just adding to that dirt,
but we weren’t responsible for it.
We weren’t even responsible as consumers.
Being in war,
can a nation justify
setting fire to oil wells?
Is it legitimate to poison
the water of billions of Lima citizens, in Peru,
like the Sendero Luminoso did?
War is war?
How does that go into history,
who takes responsibility for it?
Whatever the answers,
the fact is there’s not
an ethic of solidary responsibility
for the planet.
No one talks about it,
no one thinks about it,
and without some reflection about it
we can’t go anywhere.
We can’t solve the issue of mining,
the issue of public transportation,
the issue
of new means of travelling less irresponsibly
or changing our consumption habits,
which greatly determine this irresponsibility.
I talked about wars a little back,
but more dangerous than wars
are our beliefs,
those things in which we believe to the end
and in the sake of which
we’re capable of all kinds of barbarities.
We believe today that the most important is already done.
Environmental consciousness is something shared by the world,
kids come back from school saying they’ve learned
about environmental consciousness
and the plausible longevity of things.
And at the same time we believe science can do anything.
Someday someone will find a way to solve this problem.
It’s a form of stupidity
which in the 18th century was part of Enlightenment,
but it says a lot
about us that it still lives in our minds.
The third concept is that nations that prioritize job and income
will one day have the conditions,
resources, and political will
to fix the damage.
Will they?
Instead of that what we see
developing worldwide,
the only thing that is truly global,
is the religion of development.
Development justifies all barbarities,
all brutalities.
In order to obtain this prodigious,
iniquitous, unsustainable development we’ve had so far.
You’ll tell me: well, enough questions. What to do?
There’s very little about which we can clearly say:
this we can do.
But some things we can.
The first thing has to do with what I heard here:
you have to listen to the community.
If you can’t talk to the whole planet,
you have to at least talk to those
who are by your side,
who are directly favored or damaged
by whatever is done to their communities.
And in the territory of big companies
that need to compete worldwide,
and all of them do nowadays,
you can’t become a multinational
if your town isn’t proud of your presence.
That’s the start.
It’s not enough, but it’s a start.
So you need transparency
and an opening for the community to say
what they think can eventually
be done when they take back
that space.
Two, and this should maybe be number one:
take care of the water.
Water is the most serious of natural resources,
the one we’ll lack the most,
like those leaves that just fell.
Maybe that’ll make my speech shorter.
The systems for water purification
today are very effective.
We need to reuse and purify water
in every industrial process
and give it back to that industry,
so that we don’t keep going after clean water to soil.
And it is possible.
It’s possible to do it and give that water back
at least in the same conditions in which it was found.
Is it four after three?
Work conditions.
That might be my fetish.
Reducing accidents
and absenteeism
in order to invest in training
and having a trained, qualified,
and conscious work force
in the stations.
Most damage,
you know this,
comes from mere lack of attention,
and accidents with very severe consequences
are almost always
perfectly preventable.
So, good working conditions,
being able to keep people who need training
and who can responsibly make use
of the criteria and the conditions,
and have enough sensibility
to advert others who are working
of imminent risks and ask for more attention.
Coating process areas
to avoid contamination of the aquifer.
There’s a practical aspect
that needs to be taken into consideration.
Government and companies need to invest
in environmental technicians
who are able to supervise the code,
since the conditions aren’t the same
in Antarctica,
in Pantanal, in the semi-arid
or in the Atlantic Forest.
We’ll need to educate specialists
like a...
general physician,
prepared for all those differences.
It’s not easy to educate these people,
and we wouldn’t want feet doctors delivering babies
just because they’re the only doctors available on the scene.
And we’ll need those experts.
Each sector has its timetables,
its volumes,
its markets,
its international competition,
and social imperatives.
Lastly,
we need to have the courage to dream about the future.
If we wait for legislation to come
and force us it will be too late,
we won’t be able to do anything,
because we’re coming out of pre-historical times
of an environmental morale,
and we’re experiencing something like colonial nomadism.
Countries have polluted
enough where they were
and now want to pollute somewhere else.
Polluting activities have left first world
toward new areas
of the less developed world,
which will then continue to provide materials,
cheap work force,
and their skies and rivers to be polluted.
Meanwhile the others get to clean
the damage done to their own backyards.
But we need to be careful:
the principle seems to be
that each takes care of their own.
So be careful: don’t sign agreements that can establish
solidary responsibilities and obligations
like the ones the ambassador tried to propose in Rio+20.
Just don’t accept it.
If the price of meat has in it the cost
of methane gas
each head of cattle we slaughter
releases to the global warming,
that Sunday barbecue
won’t cost what it has been costing worldwide,
and it shouldn’t.
Someone has to pay the price
of consumption habits
we choose to pretend don’t exist.
Our economists have done exceptional work
creating price systems that don’t represent the true cost.
The true social cost, the true future cost
of our deep rooted
and exuberant consumer habits.
There are too many questions
and too little time.
But we need to start.
We need to dare go not only beyond,
but beneath the answers.
In the space occupied by our intuition,
by common sense,
in the space of evidence.
Vinicius de Morais would say:
to walk where there is a space.
That’s what we should expect from meetings and discussions
like these, which we should be able to have here
and which others have had before us
in Arq.Futuro.
How do we pay?
The price of the future we can only guess.
It’s paid with the courage to 1) name names;
2) face our tendency
to not commit
and to disregard.
The price of the future,
which needs to be paid,
is paid with solidarity and justice.
The ones who consume more
pay less today,
but will pay more tomorrow
if they have the least bit of conscience.
It would be the conflict of the future,
a new cold war,
the cold war of solidarity in the face of global warming.
A good war,
because it can start
with the multiplication of meetings
and reflections like the ones that can come up here.
Here and also there.
Marisa, Arq.Futuro,
team, what a beautiful initiative.
Thank you.
With the fall you were spared two pages
in which apparently I had nothing to say.
Fernando.
Good night everyone.
Once again thank you, Marisa,
for the invitation.
My cousin, Tomas.
I think the composition of this debate is great.
We are represented by the public sector,
the private sector,
as well as, let’s say, technicians,
and I think it’s an important composition for us to be able
to think about the issues which are being discussed here.
I wanted to maybe - not maybe, certainly –
direct my speech and my question
to the relation between mining,
construction of the landscape, construction of territory,
and urbanization,
which seems to be fundamental for us to think about the present.
Fernando Serapião writes today an article
for the newspaper O Estado de S.Paulo reminding us
that Ouro Preto, Sabará, Congonhas, São João del-Rei,
the Minas baroque, Aleijadinho are all fruit,
in a way, of the mining cycle, the gold cycle.
And in the moment when Brazil is living, in the past few years,
a strong growth in participation in the global economy
because of the commodities, whether agricultural,
mining,
or the future pre-salt program,
we can imagine that all these productive dynamics
will bring, if they hadn’t already,
a new cycle of transformation of the territory
and reconstruction of the landscape and urbanization.
I think it’s very important that we think about
this new urbanization cycle.
It doesn’t mean this new urbanization cycle
will be the urban explosion
we experienced in the last century,
especially in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. No.
Brazil is already essentially urban,
there’s a great percentage of people living in cities,
we won’t see a radical swelling,
but it’s very likely that this cycle can bring
about qualitative transformation, not quantitative,
or the urban territory.
This morning, unfortunately I came in late,
but we heard from many people
about Belo Horizonte’s Metropolitan Plan...
Which is late.
Which according to Fernando is late,
and which I was very pleased to see, it seemed,
from what little I could see, very competent,
but one of the slides showed an issue that caught my attention,
that we need systemic thinking.
I’m in full agreement with that statement.
We do need systemic thinking.
If data leads us to notice that generation of wealth
from mining doesn’t translate in generation of income
for the population immediate
related to the mined territory
that means wealth is going to other places,
it’s hard for us to think this wealth isn’t bringing
huge changes to Belo Horizonte, for instance,
where a lot of the support services for these activities are located.
Or even, why not, we know that ore has to leave Minas Gerais
and get into the global markets,
and that we need to build railways
that goes through several towns,
and depending on how Vale transports its
ore cities arise in the Rio Doce Valley,
or disappear, as recently.
It’s also impossible to imagine that all
of this doesn’t have dramatic repercussions,
both positive and negative, in Vitória.
My wife’s family is from Espírito Santo,
and I follow Vitória’s very significant growth,
whether because of iron ore,
whether because it’s one of the basis
for the exploration of Pre-Salt.
Just the same we can’t think that there are no repercussions
in São Paulo, the financial center were probably
all this production is being negotiated,
and it’s also hard to imagine there are no repercussions
at MIT or in Pittsburgh,
where there are possible research centers
developing innovative technology for mineral extraction
or its transformation and so on.
That is: even if apparently mining production
seems to be in the field,
up in the mountains or in a sediment basin
and have little to do with the city,
I, as an architect, don’t believe there’s
any productive activity
that doesn’t have some repercussion in the territory,
that doesn’t become territorialized,
the doesn’t create some sort of adherence,
even if in territories not immediately adjoined
to its production areas.
And we know,
literature has been affirming it more and more,
that very likely
our main instrument
for battling climate issues
is the city;
we are more and more convinced that the city
isn’t a source of problems,
but a solution to a lot of our problems;
and we know production
demands more and more, as I said, from the city,
from urbanization;
and we know the increase in quality of life,
the increase in urban life is directly reflected
in competitiveness, innovation, production.
We then start to see that this conflict,
which is legitimate, announced this morning,
might be looked at differently.
If the city is so important for production, and if production,
on the other hand, is so important for us
not only to build the city, with aluminum frames,
steel armors or whatever,
and also to generate jobs, obviously, wealth,
then maybe we can think of a pact here.
A pact where the government has to be a mediator, of course.
We’re not going through a period of lack of resources,
but we know the mechanisms of demand,
of controlling interventions in infrastructure,
in productive sectors, this demands compensatory measures.
Maybe we could think about how to channel
those existing resources to a territory
that can answer to both the production needs
and the needs of our banal,
daily lives.
From this point of view,
and knowing that the majority of this audience
is of architecture students,
and that this event is about
discussing architecture,
I think I see our time with a huge...
I wouldn’t say optimism,
but I graduated in the lost decade of 1980,
and never in my professional life
have I witnessed such a stimulating time.
And to answer to Rafael Viñoly
about who would like to design this infrastructure
that has to support the production
and support our lives, I would be first in line.
I would rather design all of that than my aunt’s beach house.
Definitely.
So we are coming across this new urbanization cycle
that offers the possibilities of you, us, architects,
to engage in a process
that is more than an architectural object,
a project of a country, a Country with a capital "C",
as I’ve never before experienced in my career.
I think, and I have to defend this, after all I am an architect,
that of course conflicts exist,
but no one starts these great projects,
whether it’s a hydroelectric plant or a mining extraction,
whatever, without a project.
A port needs a project, and behind every port there’s a city,
the project is getting more and more important,
and I understand projects, we, architects,
have a key role in configuring it essentially
as a field for negotiating conflicts which obviously do exist.
So I see our role, or the future of architecture,
in a pun with "Arq.Futuro", as this facilitator,
this mediator of pacts
which need to be built,
more than necessarily designing the built shape.
That too, evidently, every writer has to know grammar,
no doubt, that’s our end, but fundamentally maybe
the change in paradigm for architecture
in this whole process is to reconfigure it
for what I think it used to be, a field for negotiation.
That’s it for now.
Well, I also want to start by thanking Marisa and Tomas
for inviting me to participate
in this event with such special people.
I’d like to first salute Rafael Viñoly,
the greatest example
of how we can deal with these environmental issues,
the planet, with creativity and power.
Congratulations.
But I want to greet André,
Franklin, Fernando, and my colleague Fernando,
here at Guignard school, which Fernando
told me Guignard might have been very happy to be here and see.
I think he would be happy to see that we’re here discussing kindness
and softness toward the mountains he painted,
discussing a way to live in piece with the planet,
like he knew how to do.
This school starts with the top of a mountain,
because Guignard liked to paint the afar,
and he painted with great wisdom,
he painted little churches on top of mountains,
São João balloons...
This issue of kindness is key today,
going back to our discourse.
It’s a discourse that’s forgotten about kindness.
The discourse of cities and productivity
has lost the human dimension.
Every day you see that we are interpreters, as Fernando says.
We’re interpreters and we have to listen.
We have a very special time today to provoke
and propose ideas.
But what I find most interesting are two experiences I’ve lived.
This one, which is an iron and steel school
born out of a mountain of iron.
Transforming the ore that was here into something
to take art to other people.
I’m taking part in a work in Itabira,
which is also a school in a mined area,
where they’ve mined so much that society lost its references.
The school is giving knowledge back to that land.
I think we have to give back what we’ve mined
as knowledge in order to be able to do better each time.
We are the Minas Gerais state.
We were born like this.
And I’m a mineiro,
which [in Portuguese] is a miner’s profession.
A friend of mine says it’s the only one that rhymes with brasileiro.
So, we are mineiros from Minas Gerais, we live the mine.
Why can’t we live with mining in an elegant way, still?
Why are all our solutions so precarious?
Why was our landscape destroyed?
Why couldn’t we make this transition harmoniously?
I’ll cite here, it’s kind of mean,
but so appropriate for what I’ll say that I’ll cite Ângelo Oswaldo,
who is here, who says this:
gold mining gave us the baroque,
and iron mining gave us battle.
It’s weird, because, you see,
how can mining not generate intelligence in and of itself?
We’ll now have a demand for engineers all over Brazil.
These engineers will come from abroad,
because we’re not training them here.
We don’t have quality engineers here, in a large amount,
and thinking like Brazilians, which is necessary,
in order to face this coming demand.
So schools are welcome, we have to use the time
coming as time to prepare these people better,
not to prepare them as if the country doesn’t exist,
as if we’re rolling over the problem.
Our gaze goes out of Brazil, Brazil is garbage,
or old dirt will stay in the new country.
This is no place for dirt. We have to give the example
starting now, and that’s why Arq.Futuro is so interesting,
it’s putting together people who would never meet,
I’m meeting with two companies of global importance
talking to us about architecture,
that’s rare, we don’t usually see that.
So Arq.Futuro has this merit
of putting out an issue that would be in school benches,
architects are the bottom of the question,
they’re erroneously considered the art finisher in this process.
They have to be at the birth of the idea.
They’re the first to be called for discussion
because they put in issues of humanism and humanity,
global world views.
I think this is a great time for us to be here,
there are many architects discussing,
interested, and knowing what to propose.
I think as this meeting generates outspreads
and is repeated in other cities
and generates this kind of opportunity for debate
we’ll have something entering our hearts,
which hadn’t been awaken to the issue.
When I see a school like this
that was thankfully taken as a space for this event,
I hope... It’s somewhat abandoned, you see,
it needs care, because taking care of it
is taking care of the better dimensions, the senses,
taking back the dimension of the sensitive.
I liked this idea a lot, what Fernando said,
about the architect as a mediator.
This mediator idea is very important
for everyone to believe
that architects aren’t creators of the bizarre,
of complicating elements;
they’re the ones who can put demands into order,
which will be important for us to discuss,
to be able to talk about these issues
that lift the spirit.
That was it, we’ll talk more later.
Gustavo, thank you very much.
I think I’ll draw on something that was said by both architects,
going back a little, Frank,
to something you were saying,
how companies are taking these measures.
Fernando mentioned something
important and interesting,
about getting ahead of the legislation,
which is very important,
but a little of what the architects said,
which I think is very important,
is how the architect,
and that’s what most people here are interested in,
can enter this process not just at the end.
What Fernando was saying,
getting into the creation of infrastructure.
And it was funny, you mentioned an expression
at the end that reminded me
of what people say about environment.
You said: the architect as someone who complicates.
A lot of people also say the environment complicates things,
so you kind of have company there today,
which is very fortunate,
though the reason is unfortunate.
But anyway, how can the architect, architecture,
planning, come first into all of what you’re doing?
Well, first of all I need to really congratulate
the eloquence of my fellows here, really, congratulations.
I'll answer, but first I want to say this.
The issue, from my point of view,
this might be provoking,
the issue of social responsibility and social justice
when it comes to mining companies,
which I’m trying to speak on behalf of,
isn’t about financial resources, I believe.
It’s not today and it hasn’t been in the past.
If mining companies,
I liked that phrase,
created the battles,
it wasn’t because of lack of financial resources,
it was a matter, I would say,
not apologizing, of conscience,
ethics,
but it was also a matter of
lacking an organized civil society
and state power to demand that these resources
be used correctly.
The issue, again, is not about financial resource,
not in the case of bauxite
and certainly not in the case of iron ore.
Within this picture, to answer your question
about the role of the architect,
if you allow me, I think no doubt
mining has a serious impact on the urban. No doubt.
And Brazil today is 85% urban,
we’re all living the reflexes of the rise in demand
for commodities in Brazil to the world.
It’s an urban phenomenon,
and architects have a responsibility toward it.
But I would say architects also have a responsibility
and a role to play
in mined areas, in areas that were mined
and are being given back. So the reflex is not just in the urban space,
it’s in the... I think there are,
I don’t need to say it, among architects,
which you know better than me, amazing examples in the world
of the architect’s role in listening to the community
and doing excellent work in a mined area.
The Eden Project, in Cornwall,
is just one example of what can be done.
I want to exemplify,
and answer your question directly.
We’re mining bauxite in Poços de Caldas.
However, we’ve recently opened a new bauxite mine
in the west of Pará, in a town called Juruti.
There’s a reserve of about 1 billion tons
of high-quality bauxite.
That’s enough for about 100 years of mining.
But from the start of that project
our concern, and again I say we’re not perfect,
but from the start our concern was:
what will happen to Juruti once the bauxite reserves are depleted?
We work on three fronts, what we call a tripod.
We’ve created a council for sustainable development,
and there’s the architect’s role.
It’s a representation of Juruti’s society,
and Alcoa has only one role.
Government, organized civil society,
they all sit to talk
and line up the directions for the future.
The architect does have a part in this council.
The second part of the tripod
is building indicators,
because if there’s no measure we can’t ever know
whether or not we’re advancing.
We hired Fundação Getulio Vargas,
and we’re doing it for the second time,
to measure with pre-determined metrics, defined by the community,
if we’re evolving, if the town is evolving or not,
both in the urban and in the rural parts.
And the third set is building a sustainable development fund,
with Alcoa’s own capital,
to sponsor and serve as a venture capital fund
for investments that,
if they work,
will replace mining
once our activity in Juruti
wears out in 100 years.
So, the architect, from the start,
has the important role
of helping and contributing to the future
of that context once mining has ended.
There is an important role.
I’m an optimist,
despite all the challenges I’ve seen.
No doubt challenges are huge,
but working together with responsibility and ethics,
both us and architects have a fundamental role,
an important role, and we can move forward.
Thank you very much.
I think the expression used by Fernando,
that a company can only be a big multinational
if the town where it’s operating is proud of it
was a very good image, and you mentioned this issue
that has changed a lot
over the last 20 years,
which is the bottom-up issue,
I mean, things are being made from the bottom up,
not the other way around.
And in the last Arq.Futuro, where Fernando was present,
we had a very interesting example of mining in Chile,
where Alejandro Aravena showed all this consultation process
and its richness, and the surprisingly important role
of architecture in that,
because the architect is the one that can translate
what society is aspiring to
in order to solve problems evidently related to production.
If you allow just one more thing,
just to demonstrate the importance of an architect
in designing the space.
This bauxite mining project in Juruti is again,
not a perfect project, we wanna be perfect,
but it’s not perfect at all,
but the design itself, in terms of layout,
is made up of a pier on Amazonas River,
a 55-kilometer railway and a mining station
which is obviously 55 kilometers away from the river.
I believe the project is innovative,
or tries to be, in the sense that there’s no wall.
The typical model for a mining project was:
you find the reserve,
build a wall and fence around that deposit,
make an urban city for managers,
all inside the wall,
and explore that reserve till depletion.
What happens outside the wall is someone else’s problem.
In this Juruti project there’s no wall,
no Alcoan city inside Juruti,
the housing is beside the people who live there.
Again: there’s no wall, except in the case of equipment
that might present safety issues,
and the idea is to force us in Alcoa
to engage with the community every day.
We believe without a doubt that environmental departments
give us the licenses we need to operate
according to compliance,
but society is the one who is really give license every day,
and by designing this project as open,
contacting the community along the railway
and all through the project,
we force ourselves to earn the right to exist
and operate every day.
So that’s a practical example of how space designers
contribute for a mining that wants to be
responsible and sustainable.
Fernando, in 1985, I think it was,
I went to CMBB, in Araxá,
and was completely stunned by the quality of the architecture
in the housing for workers, directors,
and also the infrastructure for schools and all of that.
Do you think
this impact I had in my youth allows me to think this,
or can you say that good architecture
has had a positive influence on the company through the years?
No doubt it did.
CBMM is a company that competes worldwide
in a business that’s essentially technological,
and we started this,
inventing a new material and its uses,
with the work force
and the level of training
that the available local work force provided us with.
If we had invested in training,
all our investment
would probably be taken by the competition,
who with a few extra bucks
would have taken it away,
and we wouldn’t have been able to be brave enough
to try something new
and do something that others hadn’t been able to do.
You retain the work force
by giving them living conditions
that allow for families to live together.
As amazing as it seems,
that is still the essential root
of every being,
and they need a place to celebrate that pact
of love...
and the root for their purposes.
That’s why we searched for architects who,
it seemed,
could answer to the needs
and the living habits of those people.
It didn’t work idealizing
it for whatever reason
if you were afraid people didn’t wanna use it.
So architecture was determinant,
because...
it gave a huge freedom,
on the one hand,
to the candidates for these residences
to explain what they expected from these houses,
and on the other hand it was authoritarian,
because the ones who owned cars
had the car fetish, and wanted, for example,
to take their cars home to bed every night.
And we said no,
no cars allowed inside,
because we want a place where kids can play
on the street,
and where a kid goes to play ball on the street
and his mother won’t worry that he might be coming home
with two broken legs because someone was in a hurry that day.
So there was a bit of everything.
There was some democratic opening,
some...
enlightened authoritarianism...
But we definitely
created a way of living
with your neighbor
that those people hadn’t experience before.
And I think they liked it.
I think families liked it.
And the father or mother
left for work in the morning
not leaving behind the liability of anguish and worry,
because their kids are being...
The first children
needed a pre-school
to be able to equal
the other kids
in public school.
We did that, gave them a pre-school.
This allowed for women to also work,
since the school took care of kids for that time.
We then managed to raise household income in that complex,
and they were able to invest
in their kids for them to have a better education
than what the parents were able to.
And that’s the big hope,
that’s what creates bonds...
Do we do this out of generosity?
No, we do this because people in those conditions
are loyal, and they have productivity
that others can’t imagine.
You have Araxá workers competing
with extraordinarily sophisticated production systems
like the ones in Canada,
Germany, and Japan,
and they can excel on those conditions.
Something in this complex
must have gone right,
because technology is all domestic,
all the employee’s children have an opportunity,
if they do well in school,
to pursue careers,
even those that don’t necessarily interest us directly,
but they’re living with us
and seeing our engagement,
our responsibility toward the community.
This all starts with good architecture,
intelligent architecture that understands
what those people are and what they could be,
and how you have a space prepared for that.
I think no doubt architecture
is where it should be: in the beginning.
Fernando, I’ll ask you a question from Sergio,
the president of the Minas Institute of Architects,
he asks something very linked to what you said:
considering participative management as a key element
of contemporary development,
how can we train and involve society
in order for it to be prepared for the construction of demands
and shared management of strategic activities?
Since over 80% of the population occupies urban areas,
conflicts with mining areas will be increasingly frequent.
What is the change in model capable of reconciling
mining with the increase of the quality of urban life?
There are two questions, and both very complex.
Maybe I’ll start with the second one.
I think if we know how to do it
we can take great mutual advantage,
as Fernando was pointing out,
in building a process to promote and expand production
as well as enable access to work
and to urbanization as a tool for personal development
and progress.
I think that’s possible, that’s precisely the issue,
and I think André’s question is very good,
and so is Franklin’s answer, about how to put us in contact,
I’m talking to Alcoa and CBMM,
but how to put technical intelligence in contact
with production,
it seems it’s an exception to not have
or to barely have this contact,
and how do we also put government as a mediator
of this relationship. Evidently this is all based
in the people.
I think one of the first things we need to rethink,
and I spent last year, actually the last couple of years
working with Rotterdam’s Biennale,
which had as a theme "Making City Design and Politics."
Maybe one of the issues we need to redesign
is politics itself.
And I’m not a politician, I wouldn’t know the answer.
But we need to redesign politics somehow,
both in the more common sense of how we relate
and put these forces in the table for negotiation
but as a whole body of macro regulations,
how do we make these regulations actually enable
and support the building of alliances.
My professional experience
is that the participative issue
is key and at the same time we can’t romanticize it.
There’s a decision level that doesn’t go through
participation and discussion with the people.
I can’t argue with the people about technical issues,
whether the section of the draining tube will have
60 or 70 centimeters,
it’s not up for debate,
I can’t think urban systems one by one,
what do you want the street to be like in front of your house.
These are systems that can only be seen, systemically,
and are not up for debate.
But I think the architect’s issue today
is listening,
because it’s by listening,
and not just a negotiation process,
that we can maybe identify
key elements for the project.
Just to give a concrete example.
My office is making a project to re-urbanize
a stream in Paraisópolis,
the second largest favela in São Paulo,
with 60 or 70 thousand inhabitants,
and re-urbanizing this stream implies
to reoffer this water to the city,
it will be clean and the stream will be treated
so that is becomes a space for physical contact and leisure,
and at one time, in one of our public presentations for the community,
there came a group of women born in Paraisópolis,
who when little accompanied their mothers,
all washerwomen
who went to the numerous fountains in Paraisópolis
– which is right by Palácio dos Bandeirantes, in Morumbi –
to wash clothes for a living.
And around the streams all women’s social lives took place.
And those girls, were now old ladies who were talking to us,
learned all about the feminine universe, sexuality,
what to do with your husband, how to get married,
how to take care of a child, all in those sociable places.
And these women wanted to take back the Paraisópolis fountains,
in order to rebuild the memory and probably
the possibility of the social lives of women.
These are wonderful things,
to have this as an element for a project,
something we could never imagine,
because it’s totally out of our experience,
I’ve never washed clothes with my mother and such.
So, beyond the political issue
of participation I think there’s our capacity to identify possibilities
and what’s latent in the territory,
in the population and so on.
Fernando, you’ve raised a very important issue
I’ll explore with Gustavo.
You reminded us that the city isn’t a villain of climate,
just the opposite, the dense city
is the solution for us all to live in the planet.
But you, Gustavo, used absolutely wonderful words,
which I’ll repeat,
that we generally don’t hear when talking about architecture,
which is the word kindness, something wonderful,
and you paired it with elegance, harmony, all of that.
And after the example you gave,
the ladies at the fountains,
we can see how individuals matter,
how today we live in a society that hears individuals.
During our education period
we were infinitely more theoretical about individuals and all.
And the key issue for change in climate
is the change in production and consumption patterns.
Gustavo, how do you think an architect
can help with those two things, especially
with the change in consumption patterns in individuals?
How close do you feel to this agenda,
or do you think it’s something far away?
I think the best builder of citizenship is self-esteem.
If your people don’t like their place,
you’re seen here Fernando telling
a tale about them wanting to go back to the fountains
where they had self-esteem.
Let’s put in another case,
about Jaime Lerner,
who made Curitiba into a city with self-esteem.
Someone from Curitiba talks about the city with joy.
He says in São Paulo people say: São Paulo is doomed.
It’s like there’s something definite in people’s minds,
a feeling that there’s no way
and nothing for us to do for our city
because a city is just what this is.
They haven’t known anything better,
how can they want to change? Cities are crap.
And everyone thinks that.
To build self-esteem is to build
what we talked about here,
Fernando de Mello Campos said:
what can we can we do to hear,
what tool do we have to listen?
If we take the academic tool to the society,
I imagine how ashamed that washerwoman
would be to say something on stage.
I imagine how she could say that to you,
she was a brave woman to go there and face
a public hearing of that kind and expose the most intimate things.
I think if we’re not able to listen
and understand each case individually
there’s no way to employ a single solution to every situation,
if you do it you lose every one of them,
because peculiarity is what defines the quality of your action,
it’s when you listen well,
it’s when you go to the fountain,
what a beautiful metaphor,
to the water’s spring,
he went back to that spring
to define the structuring of a community.
I think it’s the capacity we have to listen
and propose something from this listening
which means giving consistency to our proposition,
and then generate self-esteem.
When you generate self-esteem,
which is the consequence of citizenship,
you have less work as a manager.
Because the whole community is more participative and sharing,
you hand certain actions for groups
and organized societies with much more ease,
and you also lead them to knowledge.
We’re urban illiterates,
there are people fighting for ridiculous environmental issues,
and not fighting
when things are directly interfering
with their daily lives.
So how do we transfer this? In an extremely competent way.
We also have other very powerful tools of communication
such as television, places like this,
books, understanding that primary school
is also a place of forming citizens, it starts there...
I always sort of go back to the issue of knowledge
and knowledge management,
which I think is the greatest
and biggest mistake of our contemporary society.
Fernando, there’s a specific question here for you,
I think you generated a huge interest,
it’s for you to explain the calling of the architect
to be a mediator.
How does that open up a field in architecture?
In a way our education,
the architecture’s education,
which we can also say is our miseducation,
is very much based on ego,
and the architect’s vanity is brutal,
I’m also super vain, I’m not talking about others,
I’m talking about myself.
We were raised like this,
our dream is to be on the cover of a magazine, etc.
I’m shocked to see how many colleagues photograph
a work before the user comes in,
because after he’s in you can’t take photos anymore.
It’s a contradiction,
when you give it a destination it loses value,
or has less value.
So working as a mediator presupposes positioning ourselves
somewhere else, which is really difficult,
because it’s about leaving a field
of prominence and visibility.
And it’s a hard passage,
I don’t think schools are teaching it,
and it’s a fundamental issue in educating the next generations,
because the production chain, the project, is changing,
and I think small offices such as mine are doomed
to have less and less market shares.
Well, that’s a long story,
and we have to reposition ourselves somehow.
It’s not just about the role of mediation,
I’d like to go back to the issue of infrastructure,
which Viñoly talked about and really caught my attention,
because in one of his projects one of the most wonderful things
is that aqueduct, I mean, we haven’t seen it,
but we can imagine how marvelous that Roman aqueduct must have been.
And infrastructure can be seen in two ways.
The first is infrastructure itself, as an engineering technical system,
aqueducts, highways, roads, etc.,
or even lighting, water, sewage and such,
these systems are often underground,
they’re invisible.
So it’s hard for an architect to design invisibility,
it is indeed very hard.
But there are those who defend infrastructure as something else,
thinking about it not as just a technical system,
an engineering system,
but as something not necessarily visible,
but that supports what’s to come.
And that changes things,
I think a more desirable and powerful role
for the architect is to design that infrastructure
which comes to support what’s to come.
For that we have to go through a lot of therapy, I think.
Yeah.
I don’t know about the architect’s vanity, self-esteem,
which you were talking about, is something else entirely.
When I say self-esteem I mean the population, of course.
The issue of the architect’s vanity, is this:
in a way,
when we put ourselves second in the process...
A friend of mine from Sete Lagoas likes to say this:
there’s the architecture of yes,
which, absolutely, is there, and Carlos Alberto’s cousin
is actually here; so there’s the architecture of yes,
which is the one that’s present, affirmative, takes up the space;
the architecture of no, which is completely indistinct,
you can’t even define where it is; and the architecture of maybe.
I think the idea of three positions is interesting
because it might be important that architecture be completely
out of sight, and sometimes it’s important
that it’s a point of reference in the city.
It creates comings and goings,
gives the city character and differentiates it from another.
Icons are put in the city and define it beyond topography,
river geology, they define the design of men,
men’s ability to symbolize through architecture.
There’s a book by Richard Sennett
called Flesh and Stone, which says just that.
Men’s production and what was built
in association with social movements.
Meaning there was a social movement,
and how was that translated to architecture,
public spaces?
So, I think it’s interesting
to see and to be in the better moments,
which I think are the maybe and the other one, the no.
I really like these three architectures.
Franklin, tell me something:
how does a huge multinational company
see Brazil as a space
to develop the most sustainable activities possible,
from the point view of legislation,
of consulting the people,
all the elements that exist today.
How is Brazil’s classification? Because depending on the area
Brazil scores extraordinarily well,
and on other areas less. How is that in mining,
in your perception, when you look at it
in an international context?
I’m kind of suspect to answer this question.
I’m an American citizen, we’ve talked about this,
but I’ve been living in Brazil practically my whole life.
Alcoa is a global company, but it’s an American company,
I’m trying to be objective,
but no doubt Brazil,
in the fronts you mentioned,
climate change, global warming,
forest preservation,
is a protagonist, it’s in the lead,
really, in front of the so-called developed industrialized countries.
You’ve talked about vanity.
Of course Americans and American leadership
have a hard time accepting
and opening up, putting this fact on the table,
but no doubt Brazil,
as seen by Alcoa’s leadership,
and I don’t need to be humble here,
they look at Brazil as a possibility
of using it as an example to the world
when it comes to community commitment,
again we talk about the social side,
community commitment, environmental responsibility,
and economic success.
I’m beside Fernando here, I’ve talked about Alcoa,
he hasn’t said anything about CBMM,
which is a world example,
and it has served as such for Alcoa,
I don’t know how many years ago,
and still serves today as an example
of a responsible and ethical company.
Just an example.
Fifty years ago my predecessors
learned from CBMM the importance of planting trees.
Ten years ago Alcoa created a plan to plant 1 million trees.
Now we have a plan,
and we have the metrics for it,
to plant 10 million trees all over the world,
in all the 43 countries where Alcoa operates.
Who did we learn from?
We learned from CBMM, we took their example,
we found it brilliant and took it to the rest of the world.
It’s an example of what Brazil has,
and no doubt Alcoa, looking at Brazil,
really respects its leadership
both in community commitment and environmental responsibility.
Is Brazil perfect? No.
But Brazil, in terms of searching and achieving, is getting there.
Thank you very much.
We’ll end shortly,
but do you have a burning desire to ask each other a question?
I’m the only one asking questions,
I feel like Fernando is longing to ask a question.
I have trouble with "burning".
No, I don’t think I have a question.
But if I did it would by burning.
It would be burning, that’s great!
I’d just like
to manifest again
how I feel discussions
like these are important.
The paths are still
very dangerous, poorly marked,
and we don’t have time to wait
for all the questions to fall in their place
in order to say:
this is the right path,
it would do in that case,
in those circumstances.
I don’t believe this will happen in time,
and I think we have to be brave
to assume what we need to do
in order for other generations,
or even for ours,
to be able to deal with the cost of the future
that some, or many,
because they didn’t know what to do,
chose not to face, not to take on.
So, efforts like
the one in Rio
can bring
poorly answered questions,
but that needs to happen,
or we’ll never dare to dream
a future that concerns us
and takes us into history
with less shame than we could possibly have.
Very well.
Before ending
I’d just like to say
that the first day of Arq.Futuro is ending,
and you’re all expected here tomorrow at 10am.
We’ll have Marco Casamonti, Carlos Alberto Maciel,
discussing "New Geographies and Environment Preservation,
Projects for Re-qualifying Impacted Spaces".
In the afternoon we’ll have a debate about
"Urban Preservation and Transformation,
Reusing Industrial Areas, and Cultural Projects",
with Shohei Shigematsu, Gustavo Penna again,
Flavio Carsadale,
and Karen Stein.
I’d like to say, to wrap it up,
that I’ve rarely seen a panel with four people of such interest,
such quality, it was such a pleasure to talk to you,
and I really do think Arq.Futuro is promoting the debates
we need to have,
and I want to congratulate the organizers for it,
and thank you all for being here.
Good night.