A6 Meeting: Public Presentation

Interview at CEASA

An interview with Amurim, a "carregador ambulante" or freelance carrier. He transports goods from trucks or loading docks to the market building and from the market building to the buyer's truck. I caught him at the end of the work day and he gave me his thoughts on how to improve the CEASA.


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Mercado Publico in Porto Alegre

The Mercado Publico in Porto Alegre is one of the best known in Brazil, particularly for its revitalization in the 1980s. It is still considered the best place to purchase fish in the country and is the anchor to one of the busiest public squares in the city. Around it, overflow produce sellers have set up shop near the bus stops and paved plazas. The market is my favorite place in Porto Alegre, reminiscent of the city's origins as a port and trade post while incorporating the gaucho lifestyle and modern downtown atmosphere. It is colorful, alive, and infinitely rich in photographic potential.



A block from the market is a building that has been abandoned since it was under construction. It is over 15 stories tall and in the heart of downtown but was never completed so it has been taken over by squatters. They have installed windows, power, television antennas, clotheslines, stores, and all the spontaneous parts of most favelas inside the building's skeleton. Here are a few pictures:

Images of Aceguá

Aceguá is the city I intend on using as my project site. It has lived off its position on the Brazilian-Uruguay border and has recently been granted a free trade zone. I was surprised to find that the city had not changed much since the first time I passed through three years ago. I was also surprised to find an elaborate, albeit meager, contraband operation dealing Brazilian produce into Uruguay. My cameras called attention to the popcorn vendor, who happened to be a look-out, and he eventually interrogated me about my presence there. I played the dumb tourist, but still left rather fast with all my incriminating photage.

On the way back to Bagé, we passed through a German colony between the two cities called Colonia Nova. It was established as a cooperative in the 1950s by German immigrants producing dairy goods. I will post more information on the co-op later.

Images of Santana do Livramento and Rivera

Pictures from the border city of Santana do Livramento, Brazil, and Rivera, Uruguay. Essentially the city has developed along its border driven by a free trade zone. The dividing avenue is a site for informal shops and a variety of goods, generally aimed at the lower class. The streets off that avenue house several duty free shops aimed at the middle and upper classes.

Program Sketches

My search for a program is narrowing down, as might have been evident in my rant on the public market of Bage. The idea of a workers villa, or co-op, still is on the top of the priorities. The development of the village patterns around a raison d'etre is what I must develop more in depth.

Follow-up on "What I can learn from Wal-Mart..."

On September 23, 2008, I posted "What I Can Learn from Wal-Mart, Carrefour, and other giants", commenting on the financial potential of the lower class consumption power and the shift in target groups for business in a world becoming increasingly driven by all classes and the developing world.
In the offset of the downward spiral of the global recession of this year, I postulated that companies like Wal-Mart and Carrefour are strategically organized to thrive in hard times because of their target market.

On November 13, 2008, my postulation was reinforced by Wal-Mart's third quarter earnings, with the company profits rising 10% while other companies sank. Here is an article from the AP on the matter.

"Wal-Mart's quarterly profit rises 10 percent"
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27696162/

The Tragic Story of the Public Market of Bagé

In searching for a program, I looked into the historic patterns of development in Latin America, particularly in the Pampas of Rio Grande do Sul.
The Laws of the Indies established a skeleton for town development in Spanish colonized areas from the 16th to 18th century. Its most notable point was a regular block grid grown from a central open space enclosed by a church, a governmental building, and a public market in most complete cases. The nuclear nature of the cities' souls in these regions are still very evident today and provide many cities with beautiful characteristic and vital spaces.
In the case of Bagé, I am personally affected by the history of these spaces. The city developed around two main public squares - the colonial square flanked by the onion-domed cathedral, and the newer square originally flanked by the public market built in 1862 (as pictured below). My grandfather moved from Brummana, Lebanon, to Bagé in 1935 and opened a textile shop in one of the doors of the public market. Eventually he moved his store to the north side of the square out of the market. In 1953, the city, under Mayor Carlos Kluwe, decided to demolish the market citing the need for the city to grow and the lack of funds for the municipal government. In the place of the market were built a hotel and an office building, while a third building was never fully finished, rebar and all still exposed. The last vestige of the market is the street corner clock, pitifully dominated by a 1960s hotel building.

Mercado Publico de Bagé, circa 1948








Site of the Mercado Publico, 2007

What I can learn from Carrefour, Wal-Mart, and other giants

Everyone hates giant hypermarkets. Middle upper class and upper class hate giant hypermarkets. They hate hypermarkets that aren't Target. They hate hypermarkets because they destroy the local businesses, the small mom-and-pop shops that are left without means to fairly compete. Yet, there are plenty of business lessons to be learned from these dark empires - lessons that can be translated into good.

There is something to be said about two of the largest businesses in the world consistently making profits while left and right there are investment companies breaking down when their sole raison d’être is to find means of making money. If their customers were well-off individual investors with surplus money and the companies themselves were investors with their collective surplus one would think it would be much easier to muster a profit with all that exra transitional money instead of selling low-priced goods to the lower and middle classes 99 cents at a time.

Observing the trend in the past ten years between the DOW Jones, Wal-Mart (top), AIG (bottom), there seems to be a lopsided success on Wal-Mart's side when compared to the general market without any predictions of a devastating crash.





Its strange to think so much time and effort goes into market research in so many businesses. They worry that recessions and economic fluctuations will create variations in the sizes of their markets and their consumption power. These markets are often soccer moms, teenagers, retiring baby boomers, and so on. How are these market researchers so narrow minded to miss the largest and most consistent market in the world - the lower half. Sociologists emphasize the fact that the poorer half of the world is consistently lacking in every possible aspect of life quality. They are too often considered non-productive and non-consuming heads in an unresolvable misery. This stance dismisses the basic belief that people are created equally and hold unlimited potential to grow as contributors to society. The poor do not need charity, they need access. They do not need free material goods, they need a means to produce and purchase those goods themselves. Wal-Mart and Carrefour provide the access and low prices to the upper crust of the poorer half, those who have reached the point of making purchases of minimal luxury. Their market base will not disappear anytime soon. If anything it will only grow throughout developing areas. It is no coincidence that Carrefour's largest market after its home in France is Brazil. The lower class is a consistent and powerful share of the market. They are increasingly more demanding and more economically decisive as they become more empowered. Therefore, they are also a safe and stable consumer basesince they are the most accurate followers of the "invisible hand" of Keynesian economic theory. Their money is almost entirely rooted in production as opposed to the middlemen of service that consume profits from the transaction of money, money that is more availavle in good times than bad. The labor intensive lower class is still the base of the economy and will always consume.

There is so little confidence in the blue collar worker, the informal businessmen, the "uneducated", yet they are the most adaptive and innovative class in our societies. Rarely will we see a laid-off accountant stoop down to work at the supermarket or sell hot dogs on a corner. They have financial fat to burn and will burn it beyond their means, into debt and terrible business decisions. They have too much pride.

The unspecialized worker will find a job somewhere somehow. He will find a way to survive - he has no time for pride, which shamefully leaves him at the hands of exploitation. He must be empowered to create his own way of life from scratch, to blossom into a small-scale businessman with his footprint on his land and his society. This is the point at which architects and developers participate in a business model that will benefit both sides. The investors shift their loaning strategy to a much smaller scale where the consumer is the resident or owner of the new modest dwelling and will only be considered productive once their way of life is established with the minimal infrastructure provided by the builder. They do not have any credit until they have already received the loan and building and will repay their debt once their business picks up. Architects are responsible for creating the most efficient and appropriate dwellings for the individuals and their growing communities. Ideally the architect is the banker, their surplus from larger projects in richer areas can fuel the banking of the small projects. The architect can more than ethically charge interest for the loan, charge for the design, and profit from the exposure in a developing area as a sensitive and competent designer and builder. An investment model along these lines is a viable proposal for the future of development and urbanization in the developing world as well as poorer areas of the developed world. It is not a new model by any means, if anything it is reverting to the principles of the construction business with a conscious and competent designer as its central catalyst.