Ester Carro, 27, has just succeeded in turning hell into paradise. She transformed a dump, stuck between the houses of a favela in Sao Paulo, Brazil, into a marvelous garden, full of trees and flowers. She is not a magician: she is an architect-urban planner. She was born there, grew up in one of the countless little shacks that make up this outlaw neighborhood, built without an urban plan in a precarious pile of sheet metal and cinder blocks, and she explains that this dump has none. always been one. Before, this small plot of 200 square meters was an enclosure. A man had his cows and horses there. Until he falls ill, leaves with his animals and the enclosure is left empty.
But in this neighborhood where garbage trucks cannot pass, a first wild dump appeared, then another, and so on until it formed a real landfill. A toxic, dangerous pile, right in the middle of the houses. The town hall had promised to take care of it but the promise remained without effect. Four years ago, Ester Carro, who had just finished her studies in architecture, decided to make it her first experience in the field.
She organized a collection day with her neighbors, bringing down kilos of waste at the foot of the favela, where the dump trucks pass. An exercise that she repeated every week, until she saw the earth reappear, then the whole terrain, and began to transform it into a living space, an urban park.
All the inhabitants, parents and children each came to plant a flower, an aromatic plant, a tree shoot. We take care more easily of what we have built ourselves. The residents have therefore appropriated the garden, pampered it and maintained it. Today the flowers have developed, the banana trees have grown well, and this year the Easter egg hunt has been organized in the park. “Often, we waste too much time aiming for too big changes that are beyond usexplains Ester Carro to the magazine vogue who is doing his portrait this month, when you can start with what’s there, right in front of you.”