CHAPA is a civic data project that participants use to democratize how urban data are collected and visualized, by providing tools and techniques that people may use to participate in urban governance and transformation. CHAPA was founded in 2015 by Kristine Stiphany in the context of a National Science Foundation SBE Postdoctoral Fellowship in São Paulo, Brazil, where methods from the LAHN were applied to a large scale household survey about the impacts of slum upgrading in two large informal settlements, with particular focus on how tenure varies spatially across formal social housing projects and informal, incremental dwelling units that accumulate as neighborhoods are successively upgraded. The project resulted in a comparative data visualization tool called ComuniDADOS, which was constructed by Nathan Brigmon and recognized with an American Planning Association Smart Cities Technology Division Award in 2018.
Project 1: The Distribution and Community Experience of Slum upgrading in São Paulo:
São Paulo’s upgrading projects
Since the 1980s São Paulo has been upgrading informal settlements, rather than eradicating them. Over the past ten years, housing policy has shifted away from upgrading, and toward the construction of low-income, peripheral mass housing projects. This study examines the impacts of upgrading’s past and uncertain future on residents of informal settlements. This project undertook a study of how slum upgrading projects were distributed across the city to understand their experience by residents in two of São Paulo’s largest informal settlements.
Project 2: Assessing informal rental in the Heliópolis favela
This project examined the rise of informal rental in settlements that have been successively upgraded. It uses the CHAPA study’s micro data to refine census data from 2000 and 2010.
Stiphany, K., Ward, P.M. and Moore, S.A. (2016). Methodology for Comparative Case Studies of Upgraded Settlements in São Paulo, Brazil.
Stiphany, K., Ward, P.M. and Moore, S.A. (2017). National Science Foundation Final Report (#1513395). Constructing Empirical Public Decision-Making: The Application of Situated Data to Development in Consolidated Informal Settlements.
Stiphany, K.M. and Ward, P. M. (2019). Autogestão in an Era of Mass Housing: Brazil’s Minha Casa Minha Vida Entidades Program. International Journal of Housing Policy, 19(3): 311– 336.
Stiphany, K. (2019). Latin American Urbanism After a Right to the City. Latin American Research Review, 53(4): 1072 – 1081.
Stiphany, K. (2019). Mutirão: The Architecture of Agency. Journal of Architectural Education, 73(2): 258 – 260.
Kristine Stiphany
Kristine Stiphany is an assistant professor of urbanism in the College of Architecture at Texas Tech University. She is the founder of the Chapa urban lab for civic data development (www.chapa.io), and her scholarship and activism focus on participatory technologies for social justice and design in urban built environments. Since her Fulbright fellowship at the University of São Paulo (2008), Kristine has specifically looked at the construction and governance of informal, incremental housing in Latin America and especially in São Paulo, Brazil. More recently she has also begun similar work along the U.S. – Mexico border. She is the project lead on a triad of comparative Latin American studios about housing resilience in Brazil, Ecuador, and Mexico, based at Texas Tech and in partnership with Universidade do Mackenzie (São Paulo) and Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador (Quito). Kristine has practiced as a planner and an architect for a number of U.S. – based and international projects.
