City of Walls: Summary Chapter 7. FORTIFIED ENCLAVES: BUILDING UP WALLS AND CREATING A NEW PRIVATE ORDER

Brazil is not the only country with a lot of condominiums, in the USA it is also a quit common phenomenon. Nevertheless, there are some differences. In the USA the condominiums are not so often gated compared to Brazil, only twenty percent of them. In São Paulo the condominium are still more urban than suburban. [A tendency that is probably changing right know. I don’t have hard proof for it but when I see all these parcels on google earth it is plausible that the suburban condominium becomes more popular. I have to look at it. JvB] Another aspect that is different from the USA is that the houses are not patterned because the elite sees patterned houses as something for the working class. The house is a expression of you personality and needs a ‘individualized appearance.’ ‘Condominiums are never called “communities,” and they are never advertised as a type of housing that could enhance the value of doing things together. In fact, residents seem to resent deeply this idea of community.’
The famous condominium Alphaville ‘covered an urbanized area of 13 square kilometer and had a fixed population of around twenty thousand inhabitants. Its office center housed 360 enterprises, and commercial area had 600 enterprises. On average, 75,000 non residents passed through it daily. In 1989, 55.4 percent of the tax revenues of the city of Barueri came from Alphaville. Security is one of the main elements in its advertising and an obsession of all involved with it. Each residential area, office center, and commercial center hires its own security force to maintain internal order, and there is a common security force to take care of the public spaces (the avenues and even the highway connecting to São Paulo).
The condominiums provide all possible services you can image, like nannies, hairdresser, gardening, libraries, shops, ect. These services are done by poor people who often live in favelas close by. ‘The upper class fear contact and contamination by the poor, but they conitinue to depend on their low-class servants.
A lot of problems inside the condominium are caused by the children of the people who live there. They vandalize collective equipment, use drugs and drive without license. Especially the car accidents are a problem. Between March 1989 and January 1991, the police registered 646 car accidents occurred inside the residential areas, that is, inside the walls and on the private streets to which only residents and their visitors have access. The majority of accidents were caused by teenagers, the majority of victims were either children or teenagers playing in the streets (only one of the people who died was over eighteen).’
The problems with children in Alphaville is thought to be solved by ‘more love and attention, stronger families, and more controle. (…) To discuss the question in terms of public order or public responsibility is unheard-of. [This reminds me of what Hannah Arendt argues about the household and the political. JvB]
Teresa Caldeira sees the privatization of the public space as a new phenomenon. Brazilian society has always been unequal but the creation of private islands has grown stronger. Very interesting is that see things that the retreat of the elite from the public sphere is actually a retreat form the process of democratization. The reason for this is because the working classes, ‘through their social movements, were for the first time participating effectively in political life. There is a parallel to make with the US where the ‘flight to the suburbs in the 1960s and 1970s and to gated communities in the 1990s may be related to the expansion of citizenship rights of the black population and the incorporation into American society of an increased number of immigrants. In Europe, the increase of racism and of new patterns of segregation seem to be similarly associated with the expansion of citizenship rights to immigrants.
By giving a lot of examples of advertisement Caldeira shows that the concept of the condominium and the feeling of being unsafe is really something that is exploited by the real estate market.
People living in a closed and secured place do not see this as a negative thing. They also see their way of living as a form of ‘freedom’. [I think this is a very strange contradictory thing. JvB] ‘Interestingly, the people (…) never use arguments of privacy, individuality, or intimacy to justify their preferences. Morumbi residents seem to fear the spread of evil more than they value individualism.’ However, for the people who live in houses in Moóca this seems to be different. ‘The transformation of the house in a prison adds to the feeling of restriction and loss associated with the economic crisis and anguish about the social decay. The closed door is a strong metaphor.
But, the walls, fences, bars have also another function: “aesthetics of security”, as Caldeira calls it. The elements of security have become symbols of status. Security has also become part of the design of the house. ‘By the early 1990s the new “architecture of security” was making its way into the newspaper articles. This architecture creates explicit means of keeping away undesirables, especially the homeless.’

Caldeira, T.P.R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, University of California Press, 2000, p. 256-296.

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.]

Stereotyping Brazil

The Dutch quality newspaper Trouw reported two messages about Brazil last Saterday. The first one was titled: ”also the garbage man should just drive through the favela”, about the lacking of public services in São Paulo’s favelas, the other one reported that Rio de Janeiro is the happiest city in the world, according to research done by business magazine Forbes.
Interesting is that both reports are about stereotyping in different way: in the case of the favela about segregation between the favela and the rest of the city. These neighborhoods are stigmatized my the media, says sociologist and UN-reporter Raquel Rolnik. ‘In the favela happen a thousand things. But the reports about these neighborhoods are always about the violence. Because of this the impression emerges that it is correct to eliminate everybody.’ Police violence is a big problem in Brazil.
The other report, about Rio de Janeiro as the most happy city in the world, is also based on meaningless stereotypes. The main reason why people consider Rio as the most happy city is because of its carnaval: ‘it’s a classic image people have of Rio, and it’s an image of happiness’, says Simon Anholt, researcher for the fourth biggest market research company: GfK Custom Research North America. In this message no single word about violence, favelas, street people. Maybe you just forget about all these aspects if you sell statics for potential consumers. And if you have to sell newspapers: good news is no news.

City of Walls: Summary Chapter 6. SAO PAULO, THREE PATTERNS OF SPATIAL SEGREGATION

Caldeira distinguishes three different types of urban segregation: 1. -1940, ‘different social groups packed into a small urban area and segregated by type of housing. 2. 1940-1980, segregation by ‘great distances: the middle and upper classes concentrated in central and well-equipped neighborhoods and the poor exiled into the hinterland. 3. Since 1980, poor and rich are living closer again in terms of distance, however, now they ‘are separated by walls and technologies of security, and they tend not to circulate or interact in common areas. Caldeira see the fortification of the city as a threat for the modern city, undermining the principles of the modern city such as free circulation and openness.
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.

Mike Davis: The fundamental reorganization of metropolitan space

Mike Davis has in his book Planet of Slums (2006) a passage that summerises the problematics I want to work with. He writes:

‘It is important to grasp that we are dealing here with a fundamental reorganization of metropolitan space, involving a drastic diminution of the intersections between the lives of the rich and the poor, which transcends traditional social segregation and urban fragmentation. Some Brazilian writers have recently talked about “the return to the medieval city,” but the implications of the middle-class secession [Dutch: afscheiding, JvB] from public space – as well as from any vestige [Dutch: spoor, JvB] of a shared civic life with the poor – are more radical. Rodgers, following Anthony Giddes, conceptualizes the core process as a “disembedding” of elite activities from local territorial contexts, a quasi-utopian attempt to disengage from a suffocating matrix of poverty and social violence.’[1]

Davis refers here to an article by Dennis Rodgers called “Disembedding” the City: Crime, Insecurity and Spatial Organization in Managua. This article, about Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua can be used as a comparable situation with São Paulo.

Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, Verso, 2006, p119.