São Paulo in the Twenty-First Century

Spaces, Heterogeneities, Inequalities

Eduardo Cesar Leão Marques, Eduardo Cesar Leão Marques

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317222965
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología urbana

This book analyzes in detail the main social, economic and special transformation of the city of São Paulo. In the last 30 years, São Paulo has become a more heterogeneous and less unequal city. Contrary to some expectations, the recent economic transformations did not produce social polarization, and the localized processes of spaces production (and the plural is increasingly important) are more and more key to define their respective growth patterns, social conditions, forms of housing production, service availability and urban precariousness. In other dimensions, however, inequalities remain present and strong and certain disadvantaged areas have changed little and are still marked by strong social inequalities. The metropolis remains heavily segregated in terms of race and class, in a clear hierarchical structure.

The book shows that it is necessary to escape from dual and polarity interpretations. This did not lead to the complete disappearance of a crudely radial and concentric structure (not only due to geographic path dependence), but superposes other elements over it, leading to more complexes and continuous patterns. A general summary of these elements could perhaps be stated as pointing to greater social/spatial heterogeneity, accompanied by smaller, but reconfigured inequalities.

1 São Paulo Histories, Institutions and Legacies

Eduardo Cesar Leão Marques

This chapter presents the main institutional and political features of Brazil that have worked to shape the city of São Paulo, narrating the historical formation of the most important characteristics of this metropolis. The chapter’s main objective is to help situate the foreign reader in relation to São Paulo’s most important elements. In so doing, the chapter analytically reconstructs the interpretation of Brazilian cities prevalent until the 1980s and that still informs international debates about Latin American cities. The transformations of the last 20 years discussed in the following chapters have worked precisely to change the city described through this interpretation.

We can begin with some general geographical features of the metropolis. The metropolitan region of São Paulo is composed of 39 municipalities distributed across a total area of 7,947.28 km² of which 2,209.00 km² is urbanized. The most important municipality is São Paulo, which is the capital of the state (with the same name). Occupation unfolded along the basins of two large rivers, the Tietê, which runs from east to west, and the Pinheiros, which runs from south to north (see Figure 2 in the introduction). The latter flows from two large artificial lakes constructed at the beginning of the 20th century to provide water to the city. In the middle of this region lies the historical center, located near the hill that marks the site of the first settlement in the 16th century. This is surrounded by the so-called expanded center, delimited to the north and the west by the two main rivers and to the east and the south by large avenues. This region included most of the urban fabric until the 1940s and circumscribed the areas occupied by the São Paulo elite until the 1960s. A third region of interest is the important sub-centrality formed by the ABC Paulista, situated to the southeast, where the majority of the region’s industrial activities are located, in addition to the municipalities of Guarulhos in the northeast and Osasco to the west. Urbanization sprawled across this vast urban fabric throughout the history of the city, with intense precariousness and social vulnerability to the north and in the East Zone as well as to the south around the lakes.

This chapter is divided into four sections, each organized chronologically. The first section discusses the main legacies from the colonial period to the so-called First Republic, ending in the late 1920s. The second section starts with the discussion of the impact of modernization processes promoted after 1930 and centered on state formation and industrialization in Brazil, with profound impacts on the city during the period of intense metropolitanization that began after the 1940s. The third section discusses the local and national transformations that occurred during the military dictatorship from 1964 until the mid-1980s with the consolidation of urbanization by metropolitanization and peripheralization. The fourth and final section covers the more recent process of democratization. As the following chapters focus on the economic, social and spatial transformations occurring in the metropolis since the return to democracy, the final section of this chapter turns its attention to policies and politics, both national and in São Paulo.

From Colonial Legacies to the First Republic in the 1920s

São Paulo is one of the most important metropolises in the world at the beginning of the 21st century, but for centuries it remained a small and unimportant village. The city was officially founded by Jesuit priests in 1554 with the creation of a small school for the evangelization of the region’s Amerindian populations. In 1560 the population of a nearby village was transferred to the site of the Jesuit school since it presented better defensive conditions. This was the start of the occupation. The city, however, would remain peripheral and unassuming over the following centuries, reflecting the project of territorial occupation pursued by the Portuguese crown, as discussed in the introduction: The largest cities were located along the coast and functioned as administrative centers and exportation ports connecting Brazil with Portugal (Oliveira 1982). Until the end of the 1700s, São Paulo was no more than a regional commercial center and the departure point for the Bandeiras, expeditions to the interior of the state and into the state of Minas Gerais in search of Indians to enslave, as well as for gold and precious stones—mostly diamonds and emeralds (Bruno 1991). The Portuguese king’s arrival in 1808 and Brazil’s declaration of independence in 1822 had little effect on the status of São Paulo, which continued to be a small, peripheral village throughout the bulk of the 19th century.

As in other Brazilian cities, living conditions were precarious, and the presence of the state in terms of the provision of services and policies was negligible. By the second half of the 19th century, however, urban services in Brazilian cities had started to become organized, largely in response to the chronic presence or epidemic outbreaks of typhoid fever, yellow fever, malaria, cholera and a host of other diseases (Andrade 1986, Costa 1989). Although the creation of these services paralleled their implementation in the major cities of the Global North, regulatory constraints on construction and occupation were far less common in Brazil. In São Paulo, the first substantial urban regulation had to wait for the Sanitary Code issued in 1886 (Ribeiro 1993), and there was almost no public control over building work or urban design. Private land itself did not exist before 1850, with all land prior to that date technically belonging to the king (Marx 1989). The poor for the most part lived in precarious tenements or in the periurban settlements found in all Brazilian cities. This situation did not change with the abolition of slavery in 1888 nor with the inauguration of the republic in 1889. The end of the empire in fact left social inequalities intact, with poor social groups having little or no access to rights, policies or services (Carvalho 2001).

Since state capacities were effectively absent, the predominant strategy employed by the local elites to provide services was to appoint experts to produce studies and hire private companies to build infrastructures or set up and run services. In the large majority of cases, small, private Brazilian companies were hired, though foreign private companies would frequently acquire these later. This was the case of sewage services in Rio de Janeiro in 1863 (Marques 1995) and water supply in 1857; sewage services in 1865 in Recife; sewage in Florianópolis in 1910 (Ramos 1986); water, sewage and drainage in Santos in 1880 (Andrade 1992); water in São Paulo in 1877 (Bueno 1993), horse-drawn trams in 1872 in São Paulo (Segatto 1989) followed by Rio de Janeiro in 1862 (Abreu 1987) and gas street lighting in Rio de Janeiro in 1854 (Abreu 1987) to cite just some examples. The most famous episodes in the history of private control over urban services occurred in São Paulo, beginning with the inauguration of electric trams in 1899 by the Canadian-owned firm Light and Power. This company would eventually monopolize the provision of almost all the infrastructural services in the city, becoming known popularly as the “octopus” due to its widespread presence during the first decades of the 20th century (Carone & Dér 1989, Segatto 1989).

By the end of the 19th century, São Paulo had become an important commercial and economic center, mainly due to the flourishing of coffee plantations in the interior of the state from 1870 onward. Although the coffee economy was scattered throughout the interior of the state, São Paulo was the hub of an intense flow of workers and products along railway networks financed by the “coffee barons” (Sorocabana and São Paulo Railway) and built to connect their plantations to the global market via São Paulo and Santos, the city port located some 100 kilometers away on the coast. These plantations used immigrant labor brought to Brazil through institutional agreements with foreign governments, especially from Italy and Japan. Indeed, while the municipality of São Paulo had just 2,459 foreign inhabitants in 1872, this figure reached around 207,000 by 1920—36 percent of the population—which explains the importance of immigrant culture in the city even today.¹ At the same time, the absence of slave labor in the coffee economy also explains the lower black population in São Paulo when compared to cities like Rio de Janeiro, Salvador and Belo Horizonte.

By the end of the 19th century São Paulo had acquired several new neighborhoods, built to host the city mansions of the rural elites, such as Campos Elísios (1878), Higienópolis (1895) and Paulista Avenue (1891), located to the west and south of the historical center (Toledo 2004). This created new needs in terms of urban services and planning, leading to the development of new public agencies (Simões 1991) as well as generating a construction market for Brazilian engineers and companies (Silva 1994).

São Paulo grew in importance and size, reaching 240,000 inhabitants by 1900.² A significant proportion of the state’s agricultural surplus was reinvested in urban activities. By the first decades of the new century, this had led to the development of industrial sectors engaged in traditional industries, including textiles, furniture and construction materials (Cano 1990). This first wave of import substitution was strongly reinforced by World War I and the Great Depression, which reduced the availability of imported products (Rangel 1987).

The first decades of the new century were also marked by important urban reforms, aiming to replace the colonial urban fabric with a more functional and infrastructured urban design, which at the same time would Europeanize the country’s most important cities. To carry through these transformations, local governments hired foreign urban planners to redesign the central areas of the cities of São Paulo (Antoine Bouvard), Rio de Janeiro (Alfred Agache) and Recife (Abreu 1987, Leme 1999, SMU 2008, Zancheti 1991). Several public works were constructed in this effort to “embellish” the cities, including the construction of iconic public buildings such as the opera houses (locally called municipal theaters) in Rio de Janeiro (1909) and São Paulo (1911) and even in Manaus (1896), deep within the Amazon rainforest, in the latter case financed by rubber plantation barons.

In São Paulo, the central area of the city—what is now the historical center—was transformed at the turn of the century by several public works. The construction of a bridge over the Anhangabaú valley in 1892 connected the two sides of the valley (and the two main sectors of the historical center). This was later complemented by the Santa Efigência Viaduct, an iron bridge imported from Belgium in 1913. Both sides of the valley were transformed by a new garden, the opera house, several private constructions (such as the Palacetes Prates, built between 1908 and 1912) and later the city’s first skyscraper: the Martinelli, built in 1929 (with the impressive height of 12 floors). Modern commercial activities also appeared, such as the first department store, the British-owned Mappin, opened in 1913.

At the same time, though, the burgeoning industrial working classes and the poor, many of them international migrants, were living in very precarious conditions. They produced important social mobilizations in the 1920s, mainly propelled by anarchist associations and immigrant leaders (Fausto 1983), inaugurated by the 1917 strikes, the first large-scale labor confrontations in Brazilian history. A few of these workers lived in company housing projects (Rago 1985), but the large majority inhabited tenements with very poor sanitary and housing conditions, known as the cortiços (Kowarick & Ant 1988). Still existing today, these are collectively occupied houses, originally old colonial houses, where each family occupies a single room, with the collective use of bathrooms, kitchens and laundry areas. The majority of these tenements were located in the industrial quarters of the city, east of the historical center. The city already had a clear pattern of segregation, albeit with small distances considering the small area covered by the city at the time. The poor social groups lived in company housing projects and precarious tenements to the east, while wealthier social groups inhabited private developments to the west and south.

The 1930s: Industrialization, State Capacities and Social Policies

When we consider economic modernization and federal regulation in Brazil, however, the 1930s are the real landmark. This decade represented a period of intense construction of the state apparatus, the formation of a national labor market and the development of a capitalist economy with a strong state presence. The process began with the 1930 revolution, when Getúlio Vargas seized power, interrupting a decades-long period of control of national policies by rural (and local) oligarchies. The Vargas government implemented a wide-ranging project of conservative modernization, centering around the construction of state capacities and an import substitution strategy that led Brazil to its second industrial revolution. This project involved a nationalist ideology that set the “construction of the nation” as its goal: The advance of territorial occupation into the interior and the west would be combined with substantial political and economic centralization. The political regime was based on an authoritarian form of corporatism, inspired by Italian fascism, and introduced a broad system of labor and capital organizations kept under close government control (Nunes 1997, Sikkink 1993). São Paulo was among the most important opponents of this national project (even rising in arms against the regime in 1932) since the Paulista elites faced a loss of power and the coffee economy was declining in importance. However, in the long run, São Paulo would be one of the cities to most benefit from the changes, considering the surge in industrialization that placed São Paulo as its epicenter over the following decades.

This was also the moment when the first national social policies were established in Brazil. The first national pension system was created, run by new state agencies called Pension and Retirement Institutes (IAP) and organized according to economic sectors (industrial, banking, ports and civil servants). These were also the conditions that enabled the first national health policies, social assistance policies (in association with the Catholic Church) and housing and sanitation policies, beginning in 1937.

In all these cases, the state granted rights to some social sectors based on their centrality in the economic development strategies, a regime that Santos (1979) called regulated citizenship. This left the vast majority of the population (e.g., rural laborers, informal urban workers and domestic employees) completely unprotected. This system has important parallels with what Esping-Andersen (1990) classified as the corporatist or conservative type of welfare state: rights granted by the state in authoritarian political structures, based on the person’s occupation; intense presence of the family and the church in welfare; and benefits concentrated on the male role as breadwinner (Draibe 1989). This led to an unequal, incomplete and highly fragmented social protection system, similar to what happened in southern European countries (Mingione 2005). Although this system helped reduce poverty, it also reproduced and in some cases reinforced the social and racial inequalities that had become characteristic of Brazilian society.

In the case of São Paulo, the decades between the 1930s and the military coup of 1964 were marked by the construction of two opposite and complementary characteristics of the metropolis, starting a process that would be consolidated in the decades to come as the era of metropolitanization and peripheralization. On one hand, the central areas of the city continued to be equipped and serviced in what would later be called the expanded center. Several urban plans were produced, in particular the Avenues Plan, designed by Ulhoa Cintra and Prestes Maia in 1930. This sought to prepare the city’s infrastructure for the new transportation technology based on the individual automobile (Leme 1999, Toledo 1996). Private constructors built new, large-scale housing developments for the elites in central regions of the city and in the neighborhoods located in the first ring around it, west and south of the historical center. The most important of these firms was the Companhia City, a British company that created several garden city neighborhoods, starting in 1915 with Jardim América, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Heterogeneities and Inequalities in a Southern Metropolis
• 1 São Paulo Histories, Institutions and Legacies
• Part I Economic Processes and Social Structure
• Part II Demographic Dynamics and Segregation
• Part III Processes of Space Production
• Contributors
• Index