New Abstract

This thesis focuses on the global phenomenon of informal urban settlements set to define the urban landscape of the 21st century. Through the design of a football club as a catalyst for social change, it attempts to create cohesion between two seemingly distinct, yet increasingly intertwined, social classes; the inhabitants of the informal, and those of the more traditional formal city.

The massive influx of migrants to cities over the last century has placed tremendous strain on all levels of urban development. Nowhere has the vast urban migration been felt more than in the cities of developing nations, where administrations have simply been unable to keep up with the demands of new populations. Arriving in search of new opportunities, the new urbanites are often met with extremely difficult circumstances, preventing them from obtaining any kind of suitable housing. Informal urban and peri-urban development has become a common sight in nearly every third world city. Impoverished areas are formed throughout the urban realm, met with great resentment by members of the ‘formal city’. Consequently, social inequality has become the norm.

Through a series of case studies, together with field work conducted in Buenos Aires in the fall of 2009, the thesis argues for the power of sport as a unifier. The final design project takes the form of a football club, located on a fictional site based on Villa 31 in central Buenos Aires. Case studies on ‘social infrastructure’ projects in Caracas and Rio de Janeiro provide a series of design guidelines, both for the physical space and organizational aspects of the football club. The final design, based on the guidelines produced through case studies and field research, is presented as a series of short graphic stories, each describing a separate aspect of the architectural intervention while simultaneously adding an element of time to the traditional drawn representation of an architectural project. The short graphic stories are formatted to be published widely and distributed easily through existing media outlets. Conceived of as just one example of many, the football club project will itself become an incubator for the growth of ideas concerning the future urban sphere.