The future of cities lies in Bangalore, Cape Town, and São Paulo

BarcelonaThirty-seven percent of homes in São Paulo are inhabited by single mothers. This figure reflects the emergence of new family forms, rental housing, and new economic and social models, according to Brazilian anthropologist Teresa Caldeira, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. "The 37% is an average. In the suburbs, the figure is even higher," explains Caldeira. at the CCCB, where she serves as curator of the research project An urban interregnum, along with Edgar Pieterse, founder and director of the African Centre for Cities in Cape Town, and urban planner Gautam Bhan, a researcher at the Indian Institute for Urban Settlements.

All three agree that the categories of "work, gender, family, and home," as Bhan says, have become obsolete for describing today's world. New ones must be devised, also to overcome Western theoretical models that don't fit the reality of Latin America, Asia, and Africa. "For a long time, in Latin America, the dominant way of thinking in the social sciences was Marxism. And if we start from that perspective to look at what's happening today, we'll only describe it as a lack, or as something we've lost," Caldeira explains. "Or they'll be nostalgic descriptions that won't offer us any insight and won't lead to any interpretation. We're fighting against this."

Each of these experts has chosen a few architects, photographers, and theorists to work together at the CCCB for three years. They will meet again in a year within Barcelona, ​​​​the world capital of architecture, without the pressure of having to specify the fruits of all this research, which could be an exhibition. "The CCCB has an extraordinary track record in the study and research of European cities," says CCCB director Judit Carrera. "We have the European Prize for Urban Public Space, which is our benchmark in the debate and reflection around the European city. And we feel that, after twenty-five years of this award, the crisis and transformations of cities, also in Europe, are immense, such as climate change, the housing crisis, technological changes."

Now Carrera has decided to expand the institution's intellectual framework to "rethink how we understand our own cities." "The world is much more interconnected, and we are also in a post-colonial moment. Therefore, we must reconnect our history with that of these other places. Our cities are much more diverse. In El Raval, 75% of the population was born abroad, so we must find new ways to confront the new urban reality," Carrera emphasizes.

The accelerated changes in the cities of the Global South

In some of the cities studied, changes are happening very quickly, and not all of them are easy to detect. "Everyone talks about how digital and technological work has changed the nature of labor markets with platforms and app-based work. The digital aspect has driven this shift. But there were other changes that we thought weren't so easy to detect," says Gautam Bhan. "We consider these changes as possible forms of new formations, cities in the Global South. And some of these changes have to do with new ways of living, co-living, and working. And each of these areas filters into the other."

For Edgar Pieterse, it's about digging deeper into finding a vocabulary to talk about these countries. "The urban transition in the Global South has been happening for the last 30 or 40 years, but in academia, most of the theory still comes from the Global North," Pieterse warns. "There's been a lot of intense debate over the last 20 or 30 years about what a Global South approach to urbanism means. And, to be honest, it's been a rediscovering of informality as a major intellectual project, and that's completely insufficient to grasp its complexity."