Living the informal city. Sustainable design education in risk areas

Should architects deal with informal city? How can they increase its resilience, also adopting sustainable criteria? May planners image resilient cities without evaluate their impact on local and global environment? The paper describes the results of an international workshop “Living in risk areas. Sustainable urban redevelopment” within a cooperation agreement between the University of Florence (Italy) and the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (Brazil). The goal of the workshop was to create a new generation of designers, conscious in environmental design, also in the informal city. The methodological approach adopted was focused on the on-site analysis of a favela in the city of Florianopolis in Brazil, in collaboration with local expert, academic researchers and public administrators, which have worked on habitability in the risk areas, in a broadest meaning: natural, anthropic and social. The working group analysed the environmental conditions of the urban context; the characteristics of settlement and its relations with the "formal" city; the building typology, construction technologies and materials; the social tissue, the livelihood economy of the inhabitants and their needs. The student's proposals are been specifically referred to the site's physical aspects and to the requirements determined by the cultural, social, and economic context, with a added value of a character of replicability in similar contexts.