Created in 1996, Associação Escola da Cidade – Arquitetura e Urbanismo (AEC) is a non-profit entity that brings together professionals from different areas to, through the training of architects and urban planners capable of criticizing and transforming reality, contribute to the improvement of life conditions.

Associação Escola da Cidade emerged from the union of architects, intellectuals, artists and technicians committed to improving the Brazilian reality. This group, based on teaching experience, research (theoretical and applied), as well as professional and academic practice, has as its fundamental purpose the creation of a privileged space for freedom of reflection and proposition. This materializes in the form of a non-profit civil entity, with democratic and financially autonomous management, with a modern and non-bureaucratic operational structure, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary research, endowed with material means for the deep and comprehensive interrelationship between teaching , extension, research and professional practice in the areas of Architecture and Urbanism.

Organized in this way, the School is a bold experience in higher education in Architecture, constituting a new type of institution in civil society, that is, an institute for the investigation not only of urban, architectural and territory appropriation problems, but mainly of its possible and desired solutions. It is, in fact, an institute of proposition — as much as of analysis — where the members are owners and executors, proposers and propitiators. It constitutes an entity of the 3rd Sector, where the main economic interest is in the satisfaction of the best conditions for the development of teaching and research, being understood as a possible model to be applied in the other regions of the State of São Paulo and Brazil, providing other groups of educators and intellectuals with a new way of fulfilling their social, artistic and intellectual role.

The idea of ​​creating an association of professors to direct and set up a School of Architecture in Brazil is an old desire of Brazilian architects.

Then came the realization of that old desire, that is, to create a higher education school with the sole objective of achieving excellence in the quality of teaching, free from the idiosyncrasies of sponsoring entities, as a rule, guided by entrepreneurs, whose basic objective is to the profit.