Tech in Slums: Transforming Vulnerability into Sustainable Urban Spaces

STEFANIA DIMITROV: Hello, everyone. First, let me thank you all for being here. It's a pleasure to welcome you today. My name is Stefania Dimitrov. I am an architect. And I'm in charge of the BIM and innovation department at a Brazilian company called Sondotecnica. And these are Heloisa Masuda, Cezar Barbalho, and Pedro Soethe who work with me, and are going to be my co-speakers.

I'm very happy to be able to share this project, Tech In Slums with you. Again, thank you for being here. We divide our presentation into two parts. First, we'll take a look at the meaning of ESG in slums. For that, we are using a real case in a specific area called Paraisopolis, the biggest slum in Sao Paulo city, Brazil. So we can explain the problems we are facing.

And then we'll show you the solution and benefits in addition to the challenges that would come up. Slums, which are known in Brazil as favelas, are areas marked by a lack of urban infrastructure, and are usually located on terrains often considered no man's land. Slums are no exception. It's a way of life in big cities.

Take a look at these numbers. It's important to mention that one quarter of the world's urban population lives in slums. So we need to know how to face this.

Now on to the environment, the region of Paraisopolis is located on steep terrain and streams. When the occupation began in the region, the streets were built respecting the contour lines in there. The neighbors of Paraisopolis built a lot of luxury homes. But in 1921, a new subdivision was drawn differently. The contour lines were not respected nor were the streams. Regular blocks with orthogonal streets were built which resulted in very steep streets and lots with very difficult access.

Because of that, sales are not a success. And the lots remained empty for many years, until poor people began to occupy the land and build their own houses irregularly. And that's how Paraisopolis started. As a result, the environment gave its answer. Landslides and floods are quite common in Paraisopolis. Here are some pictures, some pieces of news that illustrate that.

So the environment becomes a threat. Now, we would like to show you a little about social issues in Paraisopolis. On the left, is a photo that was taken by a helicopter in 2017 by the municipality of a residential neighborhood in Sao Paulo city. On the right is an official map which is done based on the photo to represent the neighborhood.

And this one was taken by the same helicopter with the same camera at the same flight height. Believe it or not, this isn't a black and white photo. It is Paraisopolis. Look how dense it is. And here is the official map also done based on the photo. All the inhabitants who live inside the blocks don't have an official address.

This is something very significant for them. To apply for a new job or to fill out a document, you are always asked your name, your ID, and your address. Your address is part of your identity. The lack of an official address is like not recognizing the existence of these inhabitants. It creates social invisibility.

Finally, let's take a look at governance issues in Paraisopolis. The dynamics of growth in slums is uncontrollable. The slums spread, and grow, and all of that happens very fast. When the municipality tries to intervene in this kind of area, they do the survey. For that, they use an airplane and draw the slum based on the air photo. Then they need to hire a design. After that, they need to analyze it. And when it's approved, the municipality needs to hire the construction. And finally when the constructor tries to start it, they realize that the slum has changed, and that the survey, the design all of them, could be obsolete.

In addition to all of this, the municipal administration can change. And then the whole cycle must start all over again. Besides, the constructor needs to involve the inhabitants in the intervention. But the material they have available to explain the intervention is too technical, making it difficult to understand. That's why we can call that obsolete governance

So the key issues in Paraisopolis are environmental threat, social invisibility, and obsolete governance. But we need to believe that it can be different. So let's now take a closer look at the problem we have in our hands. For that, I would like to turn to Heloisa.

HELOISA ALBERGE MASUDA: Thank you, Stefania. As you mentioned before, the problem today is that the stream is a threat to the community. The buildings take all the space. At some point, we can barely see the stream under the houses. Some of these houses can be called bridge houses because they are built on the top of the river. We can see in the picture that the houses occupy most of the land. So the soil has no permeability, increasing the flood problem.

The occupation has a very high density, even higher than the 30-floor floor buildings from the surroundings. Architects can imagine a different environment. This is Paraisopolis dream design which was developed by a Brazilian office called MMBB. Many Paraisopolis inhabitants who live in a risk area too close to the stream need to be relocated, so the infrastructure construction can be implemented.

It is important to emphasize that all people relocated will receive a home solution. According to Brazilian law, the state of the cities, they have guaranteed rights to housing. That means the residents can choose between receiving money for their places, the amount is indicated by an evaluation report. Or the other option is to live in a new house provided by municipality. As the new homes may take some time to be built, these families receive some money to pay rent. These arrangements are made by a team of social workers.

The next slide, this illustrates the situation before intervention. The stream is a threat. The community has flood problems that have caused a person's death, as we could see in the news Stefania showed us. It was recent. It was in 2021.

Next one, and now it is the design, the stream as a part of urban life and integrated with the community. The design option was to maintain some of the water visible. So it works as an important element of contact and integration with the stream.

The architectural project has a guideline that on heavy rain, the water will spread out into a large stream, while the excess water will overflow onto closed pumping below the street. The implementation of this project means that 11 of UN goals of sustainable cities and communities are being achieved. The environmental quality is achieved as the water should stop receiving sewage. So the stream water is going to be cleaned, improving health and well-being among the community.

The project also foresees the creation of a park to improve the quality of the environment and being a leisure space for the community. The new streets alongside the stream increases mobility, encouraging local trade. All of this contributes to reducing inequity and above all to reduce poverty.

So let's now take a closer look at the problem. They need to validate the intervention project to ensure the transformations of water resources from a threat to the inhabitants to a sustainable solution. This means the project must achieve ESG goals, in environment from a threat to sustainable, and social from invisibility to engagement, in governance from obsolete up-to-date.

And now the solution, Sondotecnica was hired to help municipality to intervene in Paraisopolis because of this land's growth dynamic. We needed to validate the design. And here's the solution we came up with. The solution to ensure the transformation of water resources needed three big actions.

First one, updated survey representing the denser current situation. It is urgent that a new method is created to produce a survey faster than the traditional one, to capture the dynamics of the slum. For that, we have used the solutions-- Recap, Civil 3D and Dynamo.

To validate design to ensure the design produced in 2010 remains valid despite this land's transformation. It is necessary to validate the hydrological study and the drainage design. For that we have used InfraWorks ICM.

Efficient communication with better material for the inhabitants. Inhabitants can be considered just a passive listener to the intervention. So it is essential that the material is easy for them to understand. They need to be engaged so that they can fight for better living conditions. Even if the municipal administration changes, they can be the drivers of the change. For that we have used InfraWorks.

At last but not least, we work with a big team and we need the tools to collaborate. Now, I would like to call Cezar to give you more details about the solution.

CEZAR BARBALHO: Thank you, Heloisa. Now we would like to show you how we would update the survey. We used the same idea that is usually applied in reverse engineering, which is scanning and reconstructing the real situation using a 3D model.

Based on aerial photos, the polygons of each house are created. This work is carried out in two stages, a preliminary one just in the office, interpreting the aerial photo. And later, we visit the area to confirm the limits of each house. This is the first step to start the as-is modeling.

In order to apply reverse engineering to achieve the goal of production, or as-is model, first, we scan this land using a drone, then we complement the surveying in the alleys that are obstructed by the roofs of the houses. This operation is carried out using a wide range of equipment like motorboats and terrestrial LiDAR scans. Here on the screen, you can see the resulting cloud points from these activities.

Since the Paraisopolis slum area has also some points of dense and tall vegetation, obtaining the elevation of the houses is a challenge sometimes. So we use [INAUDIBLE] to remove trees, vehicles, and other elements that could result in misinterpretation of the terrain data. So in the end, we convert the file from E57 to both a digital elevation model in GeoTIFF format, and to [INAUDIBLE] point cloud, to use it in both Revit, Civil 3D and InfraWorks.

This area of Paraisopolis' land has 7,000 polygons representing houses that needed to be translated to their correct elevation. So to produce the as-is model we need to place each polygon of each house in their correct Z quote. For that, we developed a process automation on Dynamo for Civil 3D to collect the elevation for each house rooftop from the point cloud data. This process that will take about one month to be done manually is completed in a matter of seconds.

The result of the as-is model is an update on the situation in this land capturing the growth dynamics of the region. The BIM modeling of the entire area is a process that can help identify what is really important to consider enabling a real understanding of the occupancy.

From there, following the decisions made from various analysis and methods, we proceeded to produce the BIM model for using in other ideas, like communicating with the local population. The model process proceeded from the original project plans on Civil 3D. Then a leisure area was selected to be modeled and further detailed in Revit. And then we federated it inside the InfraWorks model. This material has been made available both to the communications and validation teams.

Now, I'll hand over to Pedro to talk about the project validation process.

PEDRO SOETHE: Great. Thanks very much, Cezar. Now, we talk about another essential part of the process, the validation. To validate the proposal that was presented, we used InfoWorks ICM.

As you are at SIM, Heloisa is playing the great situation where we often cannot identify where the borders of the river that cross the community begin or end.

We use a simple workflow to recreate the boundary condition for the simulation. The first step of the process was to understand the context. And for this, we start to use an InfraWorks to obtain the surface. Secondly, we incorporate GIS data from the city database and from the vector raising of the housing, and combine it with InfraWorks, add surface into Civil 3D. After that we exported the surfaces in LandXML and GIS data in the shape files.

Third, we import all this data into InfoWorks ICM to draw all the boundary conditions and we add the rain data information. With the [INAUDIBLE] we create, we started modeling where they stood after floods. We imported a typical rainfall where the region was significantly affected, and run the simulation in InfoWorks. The results obtained showed that is correspondence to what happens in the location in a real situation.

Here in this video that shows the simulation of one hour of heavy rain and the impact that this has on the entire community. Even when the rains end, the water takes a while to drain.

InfoWorks ICM is a powerful tool for analysis. In this video, we can see the graphical results of the simulation of both the flood's speed and depth. We can navigate in the graph to obtain the results that we want to see during the period of the simulation. We also can synchronize the graph with a 2D view to see real time results in a numerical and graphical ways.

Another way to see the results is by rolling the animation and seeing all the process of the flood in this particular location. With that, we can have the real sensation after this one hour of the flood situation.

Another way to see the result, one final and great feature in InfoWorks, is the ability to see the online location. For example, here in this spot I wanted to see in a Google Street View how the area is. And after one click, the InfoWorks opened the Google Street View and now I can see the real location of this particular spot in my study.

After all these steps, we can export this maximum floods for better understanding visualization and communication in Civil 3D and InfraWorks. With that, you can clearly understand the impact of stormy rains like this, visualizing both in 2D and 3D, here in 2D in Civil 3D, and here in 3D in InfraWorks.

With this in mind, the project generated is to mitigate the problem and integrate the river into the community. Make the river part of the solution and not the problem.

With this same idea, we now reproduce the scenario with the proposed solution and InfoWorks ICM. Using this same rainfall information, we can see in the simulation that despite some points of the adaptation had we needed to take into consideration, there is no longer a systematic flood, how the flood is concentrated in a design system.

Here the animation shows how this is represented straightforward through the proposed solution, and your effectiveness. Even in the region with a small extent, it's just a little bit slight of water in size, and drains quickly. But it must be the object of investigation to mitigate this problem. In the same way, we can visualize the results obtained in InfoWorks within the most diverse Autodesk solution, such as Civil 3D, InfraWorks, and even Revit.

This shows that InfoWorks ICM is a powerful solution to help cities worldwide facing growing and ever-present flooding problems. Now, Heloisa will be talking about how we communicated this project. Thank you.

HELOISA ALBERGE MASUDA: Thank you, Pedro. Now let's talk about the last part of our solution, how we managed to transform the language of engineering into an accessible language for the residents.

This model represents the intervention phases, highlighting the units affected by the project. That means each phase received a different color to be represented. Phase one is green. Phase two is orange. Phase three is purple, and so on. With this, we can see how many families are impacted.

Using the BIM model, make it possible to accurately identify the houses that need to be removed. It helps people to understand when the houses will be removed and the work schedule. As we get a closer look, it is possible to understand the intervention and it is easier to engage the community. Many residents will have to leave because they are at a risk area.

This is not an easy task because many family lives in this place for many years, invested money to build their homes. Besides, they have links to the community, to their neighbors to work spaces nearby.

That's why it is so important to have a presentation material for the residents. This way they can have a better understanding on the intervention proposal and improvements that the project can bring to the entire community.

As we said before, the project intention is to maintain some of the water visible. So it works as an element of contact and integration with the stream. It also creates some leisure spaces for the community, such as in the park, playgrounds, bicycle paths, spaces for barbecue. All of these can be used by people to improve their quality of life.

The use of the space also tries to avoid new housing occupation, as empty spaces create a problem that new houses can be built on. So let's now recap. And for that, I would like to turn to Stefania.

STEFANIA DIMITROV: So just to recap, we started with our project in hand, carried out 10 years ago. So we needed to make sure it was suitable for the real situation. Due to the favelas' dynamic growth we had to update the survey. After that, we carried out the validation of the project. And finally, we created communication material for the inhabitants.

Finally, we'll go over benefits and challenges. Our challenge has actually turned into great benefits. We were able to use technology to ensure that the intervention designed long ago is still valid. Technology helps us to create user friendly material that fosters engagement and empowers those who are currently invisible.

So this case is proof that technology should be used to transform vulnerable environments into a sustainable city. We are here representing a very big and competent team. So for us, it was an enormous responsibility to do this well. I need to thank all these people who couldn't be here with us today but have supported us throughout the project. Thank you.