Periodic Reporting for period 1 - WBB (Women Building Brazil: a history of architecture from the perspective of self-building sites.)
Berichtszeitraum: 2024-09-01 bis 2026-08-31
Women Building Brazil (WBB) sought to underscore women’s contributions to Brazilian built environment, focusing on contexts of self-building. Its main objective was to ethically address the neglect of both women and informal building practices in architectural and construction history, especially in the global South. This neglect was initially identified as a result of the patriarchal and colonial roots of architecture as a formal profession and discipline. The project thus argued for the expansion of our disciplinary scope to investigate diverse contexts through a gendered perspective, employing a novel method that combined oral history with disruptive archival research methods, and community-based participatory practices, guided by feminist and decolonial principles. Research took place in three diverse communities: quilombos (afro-Brazilian maroon communities), indigenous territories and informal urban settlements. These territories were chosen with the intention of bringing range to the definitions of self-built architectures, and to the analysis of diverse socio-technical and spatial transformations, not only in terms of building techniques, but especially in terms of varied socio-spatial arrangements. The main scientific objectives of the project were divided into three general actions: (1) recover; (2) analyse; (3) acknowledge women’s longstanding construction know-how. Two objectives (recover & analyse) relied in data collection for: (A) the characterization of women’s involvement in different contexts of self-built architectures historically and today; (B) the analysis of how specific socio-technical and spatial dynamics interfere in their participation; and (C) the understanding of how any observed loss of construction know-how affects women’s autonomy to make decisions about their built-environment. The last objective (acknowledge) employed community-based participatory research to (D) address women’s exclusion along a probable loss of know-how.
Research was carried in the three proposed territories in Brazil where self-building remains a prevalent custom: quilombos (afro-Brazilian maroon communities), indigenous territories and informal urban settlements. In general, WBB successfully tackled the identified double historical gap by gathering personal stories and documentation on women builders, showing that in each investigated context, women’s involvement in self-construction is historically relevant. In contexts of so-called vernacular architecture (which in the project was referred to as earthen architecture, although inclusive of other natural materials), their contributions were substantial. Yet, the research also identified that women's longstanding involvement in earthen architecture has been affected by the introduction of new building technologies and materials for different, overlapping reasons. While most interviewed women learnt how to build with natural materials since childhood, those building with industrialised/modern materials were mostly linked to recent initiatives promoting their collective learning. Nevertheless, the results confirm women's perennial participation in self-building sites. All in all, WBB contributed with and reinforced the need for new methodological approaches to a growing field of construction history and showed how a gendered analysis can greatly contribute to the broader discipline of architectural history. The project maintained a commitment to open science through its research methodology, ensuing constant dissemination of its results amongst the involved communities. Most importantly, WBB actively sought ways of empowering women in construction, giving them voice and reaffirming the relevance of their know-how.
Recognising the importance of orality to these building cultures and following feminist and decolonial principles in order to make space for diverse voices and experiences in the archives, one of the main expected outcomes of the project was the creation of an oral history repository. To that end, oral history interviews were carried out with eighteen women builders in the chosen territories. Seven women were interviewed in the Quilombo Mata dos Crioulos; six in the Xakriabá Indigenous Land, and five n the urban informal settlements of Belo Horizonte. This oral history repository is intended to be made publicly available, and likewise returned to the involved communities, continuing discussions on how safeguarding women's know-how might be relevant and advantageous for them.