The re-urbanization of the city center of Manaus , Brazil - Facing the challenges of informal settlements

Illegal occupation of urban land in Brazil is a widespread phenomenon. Slum dwellers are excluded from the attributes of urban citizenship although they provide the labor force required by low productivity urban services needed by cities. Illegal settlements generate multiple problems for the rest of the city . Its solution is of key relevance to the city in general but also provide an opportunity for the social and economic advancement of slum dwellers. The programs required to attain these results are complex and difficult to implement underscoring the challenges countries will face to attain the Millennium Development Goals of reducing the population living in slums.

Museum of the City of São Paulo: A new paradigm of City Museums in the Era of Megalopolises

The City is a tomography of the present, indicating to the future, strata of past times. Nowadays city growth averages one million people every week; while back in 1950 there were eighty six cities with more than one million inhabitants, today they are four hundred all over the world. However the most significant effect of the urban process is, doubtless, the explosion of megacities. It took one century for the urban population – around three point four billion inhabitants – to surpass the number of people in the country, but United Nations projections indicate that by 2025, urban population will reach 61% of the total. Creating a new city museum in São Paulo requires that, in a first analysis, one should consider as geographic area of study some fifteen hundred square kilometres corresponding to the patrimonial intervention area. That is the area of the Municipality, politically divided into ninety six districts where eleven million people live, while approximately twenty million people live in the metropolitan area

Projecto de reabilitação do antigo Palacete da família Feu Guião

Esta dissertação trata da problemática da Reabilitação de edifícios. Abordando deste modo os prós e contras da prática da conservação ou reabilitação. De um modo geral, para além da população de uma cidade, os edifícios constituem a imagem da cidade, bem como conferem a sua identidade. Deste modo, os edifícios antigos salvaguardam o património histórico, preservando toda a sua identidade cultural, bem como as memórias. Com a história dos edifícios, é possível revelar a nossa identidade, a qual faz parte da nossa herança cultural. Deste modo, o antigo palácio da Família Feu Guião, faz parte de um dos exemplos mais notáveis da arquitectura existente no Bairro da Fonte Nova, tratando-se de um edifício dos finais do século XVIII, possui uma grande História não só pelas várias gerações que por ali passaram, como também pelas várias épocas de construção. No entanto, encontra-se em mau estado de conservação, necessitando urgentemente de uma intervenção de modo a salvaguardar toda a herança cultural. Assim, segundo uma estratégia global das acções de reabilitação, é elaborada uma proposta de intervenção de modo não só a preservar o edifício, bem como melhorar o seu desempenho.

The Experience of the Religious through Silent Moving Image and the Silence of Bill Viola's Passions

With the creationof the moving image at the end of the 19th century a new way of representing and expressing the Religious was born. The cinema industry rapidly understood that film has a powerful way to attract new audiences and transformed the explicit religious message into an implicit theological discourse of the fictional film. Today, the concept of "cinema" needs to be rethought and expanded, as well as the notion of "tTranscendental" since the strong reality effect of the film can allow a true religious experience for the spectator.