Santa Teresa: una poética de lo excéntricamente central

Abstract

Santa Teresa is a tourist district endowed with a unique poetic, resulting from the superposition of a long, tense and rich historical process of occupation on a beautiful and high geographic territory, from where spectacular panoramic views are discovered, and revealing the socioeconomic contradictions of a divided society, where formality and informality, exclusion and violence, wealth and poverty draw visible and invisible, permeable and impervious borders. This occupation began in 1565. It accelerated from the 19th century onwards with various foreign migratory waves and the implementation of the tramway in 1872. Also, with the formation of favelas, which reach their current dimensions with the intense internal migratory processes, attracted by industrialization in the 20th century. So long a process, in such a rugged topographic context, it has produced a great typological and stylistic variety, with numerous and varied examples of architectural works and urban and landscape compositions, that are combined in a poetic of delicate eclecticism and cozy spaces on a small scale and in sharp contrast to the background of the landscape. We describe this geography and narrate this history, looking for a certain phenomenological perspective on this urban poetics.