Important statement Caldeira makes is that in São Paulo the ‘public space no longer relates to the modern ideals of commonality and universality. Instead, it promotes separateness and the idea that social groups should live in homogeneous enclaves, isolated from those who are perceived as different. Consequently, the new pattern of spatial segregation grounds a new type of public sphere that accentuates class differences and strategies of separation.’
The concentrated city of early industrialization 1890-1940
During this period of time the rich and the poor originally lived together, however, to rich more and more started to move to more homogeneous areas such as Campos Elísios and Avenida Paulista. The main reason for this was the fear for epidemics, comparable with the fear for crime nowadays. There were all kind of initiatives to ‘open the city’ as Hausmann had done in Paris, to provide free circulation, wide streets, hygiene and social control. ‘The first laws on construction and zoning were passed in the mid-1910s, and the most important pieces of urban legislation and intervention come in the late 1920s. The execution of the so-called Plano Avenidas (plan of avenues) that started in the beginning of the 20th century was one of the first originators of spatial segregation: the prices of rents started to increase and the working classes were driven out of the center to the periphery. Another reason why the poor working class started to move to the periphery was because of the lack of affordable houses to rent. The rapid process of urbanization caused a high rents, a simple consequence of supply and demand. The government of Vargas tried to stop the rising rental prices by freezing the rents at the level of December 1941. Initially this had to last only for two years, however it was renewed unit 1964. ‘In São Paulo the immediate consequence was a tightening of the rental market, as fewer residence were build. This trend accelerated the departure of the working classes to the periphery, where the could find cheap (and irregular) land on which to build their own houses. (…) In the new arrangement, poor and rich lived apart: distance, economic growth, and political repression allowed a peculiar inattention to one another.’
Center-Periphery: The dispersed city
‘The new model of urbanization is usually called the center-periphery model, and it dominated São Paulo’s development since the 1940s. It has four principal characteristics.
1.) Lower population density: form 110 inhabitants per hectare to 53 in 1963.
2.) segregation of social classes: Rich live in legal, well-equipped neighborhoods, poor in autoconstructed, precarious, mostly illegal periphery.
3.) Home ownership became the general rule for both rich and poor.
4.) Transportation depends on roads, busses for the working classes and automobiles for the middle and upper classes.
The major cause of the rapid urbanization of the periphery was the launching of a public bus system at the end of the 1930s to make the area accessible for the working classes. Many of these bus systems were owned by private investors who also where selling the parcels in the periphery. ‘Speculators developed a multitude of illegal and irregular practices aimed at maximizing profits, from outright fraud to failure to provide basic urban services or minimum lot dimensions required by law.’ Another aspect is that many workers build their houses without registrating them, this results in an illegal construction on a legal parcel. The result is that now 65% of the population of the city lives in houses that are illegal. Autoconstruction has become the main form of working-class housing.
Caldeira continues to explain the immense vertical orientation of São Paulo, something that started especially after the 1960s when the apartment building became the main type of residence for the middle and upper classes. ‘Until the late 1950s, the construction of high-rise was relatively incontrolled by the city. From 1957 on, however, municipal laws aimed at controlling the expansion of construction in the city affected, in particular, the building of high-rises. The laws had two main effects.’ They excluded the poor from buying an apartment, and it directed the high-rise out of downtown, where the prices of the lots where cheaper. Another reason for the middle-class to move in these apartment buildings is because they were financed by the BNH and SFH, [see book for meaning, JvB] - systems that were originally meant to finance houses for the poor – were now only used to finance the apartment buildings of middle-classes.
Proximity and walls in the 1980s and 1990s
Caldeira see three basic factors for the tranquility between center and periphery in the way it emerged in the 70s. In the first place because the rich only encountered only a few central areas. Second, between the 50s and 70s there was the believe that economic growth would change the differences. And third, the repression of the military government that ‘banished political organization and public dissent.’ It was because of the reorganization of trade unions that the people in the periphery started to reorganize themselves; contrary to what the political elite expected. They thought that their house ownership would keep them outside the political arena, however, the opposite happened. They started to organize themselves in order to improve the quality of life in their neighborhoods.
On page 231 and 232 Caldeira gives one of the most important descriptions of the city saying:
‘São Paulo today is a more complex metropolitan region that cannot be mapped out by simple opposition of center-rich versus periphery-poor. It is no longer a city providing conditions for inattention to class differences, but rather a city of walls, with a population obsessed by security and social discrimination.’This process started in the 80s and 90s, a moment when the way of living of both rich and poor started to change. This had various reasons. In the first place there was a growing tendency among the rich to leave the center and settle in gated communities in the northwest and southern part of the city, where first only the poor lived. ‘At the same time autoconstruction on the periphery has become a less viable alternative for the working poor because of the impoverishment caused by the economic crisis of the 1980s, the improvements in the urban infrastructure in the periphery, and the legalization of land resulting from the pressure of social movements and action by local governments. In other words, while the incomes went down, the periphery improved and became more expensive.’ This is the moment when the cortiços started to appear, and when the favelas start to grow. The process of walling the city because of the increase of violent crime exacerbated the process of segregation and suspicion.
The improved situation of the periphery had enormous consequences for the quality of live. A good indicator is infant mortality: ‘it dropped from 50.62 per 1,000 live births in 1980 to 26.03 in 1991. In São Miguel Paulista, one of its poorest districts, where Jardim das Camélias is located, the infant mortality dropped from 134 in 1975 to 80.46 in 1980 and 27.29 in 1994.’
‘The social movements influenced the action of the local administration not only in creating public services and urban infrastructure but also in transforming the legal status of the periphery. One of the main demands of the social movements was the legalization of properties on the periphery. Social movements forced the municipal governments to offers amnesties to illegal developers, making it possible to regularize their lots and bring them into the formal property market. The Lehman Law in 1979 made it easier to prosecute real estate developers selling land without the infrastructure required by law.’ The negative aspect of this was that the prices of the lots started to rise because of two reasons: first the lots were legal now, which made them more valuable on the market. The second reason for the price-rice was because of the improved infrastructure. The consequence of this was that the poor people had to move to the fringes of the city and start to build new neighborhoods again. Another option is to move in a cortiços, with the advantage of living more close to the city center.
Something else happened to the market of apartment buildings. In 1986 the BNH ended and the inflation started to rise again. Without the BNH financing and the high inflation it was for the middle classes very difficult to buy one of these apartments. What happened with the production of appartement buildings is what ‘some analysts call an “elitization”’ of the apartment market. This changes after the successful control of the inflation after Plano Real, and the possibilities for lifelong financing. It is at this period of time that the closed condominium starts to become a popular place to live in for the middle and upper-classes.
In Morumbi you need a car for everything: to buy bread, to bring your children to school, to go to the supermarket. In many place there even no sidewalks. The rest of the infrastructure is also very bad. However, the inhabitants of Morumbi want to pay this price in order to feel save.
The reason why many closed condominiums start to appear in the originally poor southeastern border of this city is because the land is cheap over there, so investors can make their investments more profitable.
[I made a separated post about the gated communities in Santana do Parnaíba, because if found it that much bizarre that it needed a special post. To read more about it click here. JvB]
According to Caldeira the urban transformations as occurred in contemporary São Paulo are caused by several processes at the same time. She mentions them as follows: ‘the reversal in demographic growth; the economic recession, deindustrialization, and expansion of tertiary activities; the improverishment of the working classes; the displacement of part of the middle and upper classes from the center; and the widespread fear of crime (…).’ The GINI coefficient ‘increased from 0.516 in 1981 to 0.586 in 1991.’
Caldeira, T.P.R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, University of California Press, 2000, p. 213-255.
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