São Paulo: The appearance of the dual city

Summary from:
Luiz Recamán, ‘High-speed urbanization’ in: Elisabetta Andreoli, Adrian Forty (ed.), Brazil’s Modern Architecture, Phaidon Press Limited, London, 2004, p. 134-138.

Luiz Recamán has been an architect since 1983. Having gained a PhD in Philosophy, he now teaches Aesthetics at the São Carlos School of Engineering of the University of São Paulo (USP) and has published articles in various journals.

The process of segregation finds its origin in the abolishment of slavery, according to Luiz Recamán. The former slaves were of no use anymore to the landowners, and in there eyes also unsuited for paid employment. These people started to move to the city hoping to find work there. At the same moment however the Brazilian government actively encourage people in Europe to come to Brazil to do the jobs that has been done by the slaves. The black population had therefore no official role in society and also no place to live. Form this was the moment that the illegal settlement at the periphery of the city started to appear. Although these settlements were illegal, they were tolerated. Luiz Recamán sees this as the birth of the ‘dual society, in which pre-modern social relations, inherited from the colonial structure, were updated but not fundamentally changed, to fulfill new roles in modernization.’ Poor people from the periphery became the small service providers of the rich. The autoconstructed neighborhoods in the periphery never became official parts of the city and therefore lacked public services.
While at the moment the Brazils population as a whole is decreasing, the number of people who started to live in a favela grew. In São Paulo there was a growth of 4,6 percent - in the district of Guarulhos they grew with the enormous amount of 112 percent. The migration to the autoconstructed periphery during the 90s coincided with the implosion of the rental marked. ‘Between 1994 and 1998, the number of families living in favelas in the city of São Paulo grew with 47 percent. ‘The ‘Map of Social Exclusion’, which indicates differences in the quality of life in São Paulo’s districts, shows an emptying of the regulated, legal areas of the city towards the unregulated outskirts. Between 1991 and 1996 there was an increase of 470,000 inhabitants in the 53 districts where the quality of life was deemed to have worsened, while within the 37 districts where the quality of life had improved, there was a decrease of 260,000 inhabitants.
Luiz Recamán distinguishes two different dynamics that caused the contemporary spatial and social layout of the city: ‘economic gain and social segregation.’
In the centre of São Paulo there are at the moment a lot of empty buildings. The reason is that a lot of business, shopping, luxery housing culture and leisure has moved to the south-west of the city where the land is cheaper. Investment produces higher rates of return here than in the city center. [A consequence of this that the empty buildings in the center are squatted by the poor, a phenomenon that is called cortiços in Brazil. The precarious situation people live in are grinding; in many case families live in very small spaces, sharing sanitary facilities with a lot of people. These people pay a lot of rent and have no rights at all because the occupation is in many cases illegal. JvB]
‘At the same time, increasing violence, the result of a massive degree of social exclusion, pushes the wealthy inside their homes.’ Recamán sees the deterioration of the public spaces as a result of the overvaluation of the private sphere. Another aspect in this is that the private investors are not interested in public space.

[The other chapter can also be interesting: they are all written by Brazilian scholars.]