Santa Marta Urban Grammar: Unraveling the spontaneous occupation of Brazilian informal settlements

Abstract

The World experiences a significant growth in population coupled with fast urbanization processes particularly in the Southern hemisphere, which puts an enormous pressure on cities, giving rise to numerous social, infrastructural, ecological, and urban problems. In this context, the formal sector is often unable to provide adequate housing for this growing population who resorts to self-help processes that lead to informal settlements. This paper focuses on the development of an analytical shape grammar for Santa Marta, the iconic settlement used as a critical case study, whose rules describe the generation of the self-constructed urban fabric. The methodology includes an analysis of the built shape and the physical urban relations. The resulting model is a shape grammar that recreates the urban fabric of Santa Marta. Future work includes the evaluation of the settlement’s urban space and the corresponding transformation of the analytic grammar to generate a synthetic grammar for planning new housing settlements.

World Studio: a pedagogical experience using shape grammars and parametric approaches to design in the context of informal settlements

“…Our teaching methodology, adapted from Duarte and Beirão (2011), aim at providing students with a computational background for urban design, included six phases: i) briefing -lectures, readings, and practical assignments on Pattern Language (Alexander et al, 1977) and Shape Grammars (Stiny, 1980;Duarte, 2005;Duarte & Beirão, 2011;Verniz & Duarte, 2020), as well as workshops on Rhino and Grasshopper; ii) analysis -the identification of the main features of the intervention area and a reflection on the potential of the territory to sustain a vibrant and socially integrated urban community -that ended with a visit to the site and the city; iii) strategy -the formulation of structured responses to site conditions, including the existing urban fabric (formal and informal) and the constitution of a vision to serve as the basis for the development of the proposed urban plans; iv) conceptual design -the production of flexible urban plans following the proposed methodology, which included shape grammars and Grasshopper programming; v) intermediate design -the development and refinement of the urban plans proposed in iv, and; vi) detailed design -the presentation of the final plans, their rules, the explanation of how one could apply these rules, and a catalog of possible design configurations. Figure 1 summarizes the teaching approach and its phases.…”

“…On the other hand, computational and parametric resources have increasingly been adopted to develop novel approaches to urban planning and design (Lima et al 2019). Verniz and Duarte (2020), for instance, have shown that such resources can be used to identify and reinterpret built patterns in informal settlements and to improve urban quality without losing their essential features -spatial diversity and cultural adequacy, to name a few.…”

“…However, previous works, such as those of Mayall and Hall (2005), Parish and Muller (2001), Duarte et al (2007), and Duarte and Beirão (2011), for instance, have shown a growing interest in implementing shape grammars to deal with urban design problems. More recently, Verniz and Duarte's (2020) propose an analytical shape grammar for Santa Marta, an iconic informal settlement in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Woodbury (2010) states that parametric modeling means to define the parameters for a complete or relevant specification of a model, requiring skills like data flow management, abstract thinking, mathematical logic manipulation, and algorithmic reasoning.…”

A shape grammar for the spontaneous occupation settled in fishing villages: The case of Garopaba, Brazil

“…According to Economou,11 this grammar makes it possible to describe the style or type of the design, including, therefore, a rule-based system method. 12,13 Moreover, shape grammar was selected as the methodology to decode the analysis of the village's occupation since it allows to represent shapes and rules visually 14 and to merge complementary features of the same typology in an ordered set of rules. 15 The results consisted of a shape grammar that recreates the formal patterns and the structure, decoding the composition arrangements of the villages, which makes it possible to construct new instances of the style, applying them in contemporary urban planning and architectural design, in order to preserve and revitalize the existing fishing settlements.…”

Morphogenesis of Emerging Settlements: Mapping Incremental Urbanism

“…Generative codes have also been explored further in the context of traditional settlements [56][57][58][59]. There is also emerging research using a shape grammar approach to explore self-organisation in informal settlements [60,61]. Much can be learnt from how incremental transformations work in emerging settlements as they have often been materialised through generative processes of adaptation and selforganisation.…”