LIVING IN THE CITY
The Ministry of Housing Land Planning and Environment through the Directorate of Housing (DINAVI) and the Faculty of Architecture, Design, and Urbanism (FADU) through the Housing Committee come together to organize a competition of proposals open to students, teachers, and professionals in general. The entries should develop project-ideas conceived as alternatives and innovations to the current ways of management, design, and construction of urban housing in Uruguay.
The context
The dynamics of the contemporary living present a strong challenge for understanding and approaching current problems of habitability. That results in high levels of complexity of the different ways the city is inhabited, which are the reflexion of profound changes and transformations in the cultural, social and economic patterns of the urban dweller.
The Urban-Habitational System is a complex organism and constitutes the physical support of those dynamics. To analyze, update and transform the parameters of analysis and the design of suitable tools to operate in such a system, is a great challenge for the performance of public policies. The architecture discipline and the city itself must adjust to these changes in order to be able to give the best possible answers to the needs of the current and future inhabitants.
Access to urban land is a key aspect for the development of public policies which aim to facilitate the access to housing and to a decent habitat to the public. Managing the urban land includes designing housing alternatives in places that have all the infrastructure and services: work, health, education, culture as well as citizen participation. In this sense, one of the guiding principles of the National Strategy for Access to Urban Land is that all inhabitants have the right to use and enjoy a city where adequate conditions of life and coexistence are assured.
This contest aims to be a contribution to thinking about the ways of "living in the city", whose perspective includes academic conceptualization, praxis in specific territorial areas and public policies.
