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.
Recent Project (NSF#15123395): The participatory evaluation of ‘slum upgrading’ in São Paulo
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.
Recent Publication: The rise of informal rental housing in São Paulo
This project examined the rise of informal rental in settlements that have been successively upgraded. It uses the CHAPA study’s micro data to show how rental housing varies spatially within and between the large consolidated informal settlements of Jardim São Francisco and Heliópolis.
Stiphany K. (In Press). Vivienda de alquiler informal en São Paulo: una realidad ignorada. (Informal rental housing in São Paulo: An ignored reality). In Vivienda en Arriendo en América Latina. Felipe Link, Adriana Toró (eds.) Centro de Estudos de Conflicto y Cohesión Social – COES; Instituto de Estudios Urbanos e Territorial UC – IEUT UC.
Stiphany K., P.M. Ward and L.P. Perez (2022). Informal Settlement Upgrading and the Rise of Rental in São Paulo, Brazil. Journal of Planning Education and Research.
Stiphany, K. (2021). Infrastructural Insurgency: Constructing situated data at Brazil’s urban periphery. Special Issue: PlanNext Next Generation Planning Journal. Planning Theories from the Global South (Special Issue Editors: Vanessa Watson, Chandrima Mukhopadhyay, and Feras Hammami). 10.24306/plnxt/75
Stiphany, K. (2019a) Mutirão: The Architecture of Agency. Journal of Architectural Education, 73(2): 258 – 260.
Stiphany, K. (2019b). Latin American Urbanism After a Right to the City. Latin American Research Review, 53(4): 1072 – 1081.
Stiphany K. and P.M. Ward (2019). Autogestão in an Era of Mass Housing: Brazil’s Minha Casa Minha Vida Entidades (MCMV-E) Program. International Journal of Housing Policy, 19(3): 311 – 336.
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. (2015). Aligning Disconnected Frames in Action: The Case of São Paulo’s Zeladoria Ambiental Environmental Caretakers. In Steven A. Moore (ed.) Pragmatic Sustainability. New York: Routledge, 191 – 206.
Kristine Stiphany
Kristine Stiphany is an assistant professor of in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University at Buffalo / State University of New York. She is the founder of the Chapa Civic Data lab for situated data development, and her scholarship centers on housing, participatory technologies, and urban design, with a focus on informal built environments in Latin America and especially in São Paulo, Brazil. She is the project lead on comparative Latin American studios about housing resilience in Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, and along the U.S. – Mexico border, based at Texas Tech University (2018 – 2021) and SUNY (2022 – ), in partnership with Universidade do Mackenzie (São Paulo), Universidade Federal do Ceará (Fortaleza); and Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador (Quito). Kristine has practiced as a planner and an architect for several U.S. – based and international projects, and has published research on changing planning paradigms in Brazil, the uneven development of ‘slum upgrading’, informal rental housing patterns and types, and the participatory post occupancy evaluation of informal housing in Urban Studies, Journal of Planning Education and Research, and International Journal of Housing Policy, among others.
