area 114 | São Paulo

The geographic position of the city of São Paulo has played a strategic role in aiding the penetration of the internal regions of the continent during the period of the Portuguese colonization, and it still acts as polarizing element in the organization of the road and railroad networks connecting the south-eastern and central-western regions of Brazil. The site has been chosen due to the geomorphologic characteristics of continental extension, as the presence of a gigantic mountain formation extending from the central areas all the way to the southern regions of the Brazilian coast separates the inland plateau from the plains along the coast. Moreover, the steep slopes form an almost continuous barrier reaching an altitude of about 2000, a condition which has resulted in the concentration of the most important cities along the coast. São Paulo was one of the first settlements created to facilitate the occupation of the plateau, in a point where the Serra do Mar only reaches a height of 800 metres, thus allowing crossing. The natives had already taken advantage of this fact, to create connections between the coast and the network of routes leading to the interior of the continent.
Among the settlements created in this area, precisely São Paulo vaunted conditions that made it the best starting point for the colonization of the interior regions. When they founded the city in 1554 on the high grounds of a triangular hill, the Jesuits took advantage of the experience of the Portuguese colonizers, who built their cities in locations suited to military defence. The steep slopes on two of the three sides of the hill descend to the north-west, towards the Anhangabaú riverbed, forming a narrow valley, and to the east towards the vast plain crossed by the river Tamanduateí, the main navigable access route between the city and the plateaus of the Serra do Mar. Not far from the northern tip of the triangle a third and more important watercourse, the Tietê river, which offers good conditions of navigability towards the interior areas of the continent, became the main route for colonial expeditions. We will now analyze two fundamental aspects of the history of São Paulo in the first centuries of the colonization. In the first place, the development of the city did not take place thanks to the presence of a local settlement which grew for intrinsic motives; it was a consequence of its role as point of convergence of the transit routes and flows aimed at the conquest and economic consolidation of the territory. A second aspect is of a cultural order, and concerns the racial mixing as Portuguese strategy for the colonization of Brazil3. The main players of the occupation of the territory of the state of São Paulo were mestizos, born from Portuguese colonizers and native women who, in spite of their intermediate position between the two cultures, participated in the project aimed at the consolidation of the power of the colonizers.
In addition to the successful conquest of the territory, thanks to which it became possible to extend the borders of the colony to the present-day borders of the country, the research for mineral deposits and the capture of natives to use as slaves represented the primary economic  objectives of that period. Paradoxically, the large-scale territorial expansion of the 16th and 17th centuries, along with the discovery of gold deposits in areas far from São Paulo and the opening of new, shorter routes for the flows associated with the gold trade, between the mining regions and the city of Rio de Janeiro, led to a period of depopulation and economic stagnation which was to last until the late 18th century.
São Paulo resumed growing towards the end of 1700 thanks to the agricultural activity, first with the cultivation of sugar cane and then with the more important crop, namely  coffee, which triggered a period of economic prosperity for the city and its province after the independence from Portugal in 1822. The expansion of the cultivated areas towards the interior was accompanied by the building of roads for a better exploitation of the part of production destined for exportation. In 1867 the first railway connected the towns of the plateau to the port of Santos, initiating the building of a network benefiting all the cultivated areas. Thanks to its position in the point of convergence of the flows of transit between the plateau and the coast, the city of São Paulo once again became the nerve centre of confluence of the communication routes, which now consisted of railroads. Among the activities launched in the urban area thanks to the wealth produced by coffee, the educational services played a particularly important role, with the foundation of the Law Faculty in 1827 and the Polytechnic in 1893. In addition to offering training courses in engineering and architecture, the Polytechnic developed, from the beginning, an activity of technological research aimed at freeing the country from the need to import such know-how from other nations. The Centre for Studies on the Resistance of Materials was founded in 1899; it made it possible to master the planning and construction of structures in reinforced concrete a few years after the Hennebique system was patented in France. Already in the Twenties the importation of steel structures from Europe for the construction of railway bridges began to be replaced by a local production of modules in reinforced concrete. Apart from the large infrastructural works, the engineers and architects of the Polytechnic distinguished themselves both in the modernization of civil constructions and in municipal management, contributing to lay the technological bases for the intense growth of a city which soon renounced its colonial traits in favour of a more European appearance and atmosphere. In the early 20th century the urbanization works were extended to the slopes of the triangular territory of the initial city, and the urban area was thus expanded with new streets and road bridges, and a system of electric trams replaced the old roads on the level strip in which the industries and the railways were installed.
The urban models of Josef Stüben and Eugene Hénard were adopted in 1929 by the architects Ulhôa Cintra and Prestes Maia in the so-called Plano de Avenidas to structure the urban growth within a system of radial and perimetric streets, with the unification of the historical centre and its expansion beyond the valley by means of a ringroad to which new radial streets and outer ringroads were to be added. During World War II the boosting of the industrial production, which had become necessary to replace formerly imported goods, contributed to assert the central role of São Paulo with respect to other regions in the country. The demographic growth accelerated due to migration from the north and north-east, then the poorest regions of Brazil, in addition to foreign immigration. In the late Forties, despite the public efforts and extensive road works, the implementation of the Plano de Avenidas failed to keep pace with the horizontal growth of the city. Precariousness and lack of infrastructures characterized the residential areas where new inhabitants found a home. Given the rapid expansion of the urban area, only the public transport system by bus succeeded in meeting the demand for mobility of the new districts. These generalized shortcomings triggered a movement of demand for housing and services, especially in the sectors of education and healthcare, which already in the early Fifties led to the construction of public schools and community structures on a large scale. A strategy of designing schools conceived as nuclei aimed at  instilling a community spirit in a population that had only recently familiarized with an urban lifestyle was thus launched.
With regard to the housing problem, the public initiatives were characterized by a slower pace and by the fact that it was impossible to meet the actual demand. The more sophisticated character of the central areas, where a type of markedly cosmopolitan urbanity was being created, stood in stark contrast to the poverty of the new neighbourhoods, thus revealing an inequality which was to characterize the process of industrialization and urbanization of the Brazilian society. And this in a city that featured, in the Fifties, the highest urban concentration of South America.
The speed of the expansion of the urban area did not decrease until the Sixties. The demand for dwellings nevertheless resulted in the occupation of the areas on the edges of potable water dams, near water veins and on unstable mountain areas. The urban sprawl crossed the borders of the municipality, absorbing the neighbouring cities to form a single, vast metropolitan region uniting no less than 39 municipalities. The road network, which retraced the ancient routes from the colonization period, made it possible to distribute the industrial production along corridors that, moving in different directions, connected the cities and the internal regions of the State. The urban model based on a high-density centre and rarefied outskirts thus became inadequate to explain the new urban structure. The Basic Town Plan (BTP) of 1968 was the first to be inspired by a metropolitan concept that included the neighbouring municipalities; it was a matter of an innovative approach because it not only abandoned the mononuclear model but also avoided its opposite, that is to say the multinuclear city conceived as a constellation of autonomous nuclei. The urban territory was to be organized as a network of centres connected by public transport and thoroughfares for fast traffic. Travelling across large distances thus became part of the metropolitan everyday reality, as it would reinforce the offer of jobs and housing in all the areas served by the mobility network. However, the infrastructures contemplated by this network were not created on the scale proposed by the BTP, while the demographic and physical growth surpassed every expectation. The freedom enjoyed by the workforce, in choosing jobs in every part of the metropolitan area, thus resulted in more and more time-consuming travels to and from work. In spite of all these limits, the urban structure of São Paulo has given rise to a metropolitan region with 19,6 million inhabitants distributed across an area of almost 8000 km2. Together with the adjacent metropolitan regions of Campinas to the north, with 2.7 million inhabitants, and Santos to the south-east, with 1.7 million inhabitants, in addition to other medium-sized cities in the state of São Paulo, it forms an economic basin in which a third of the Brazilian GDP is produced. This wealth coexists with areas of poverty induced by a strong spatial segregation, a peculiar characteristic of the society of São Paulo. But to define the latter as a city of contrasts would be an understatement. Such a vast urban phenomenon creates a productive energy that has no equal in the world, which is also expressed in the intense cultural and above all architectural production which has found expression in the course of its entire history.

Renato Anelli Professor at the Department of Architecture and Town Planning of the School of Engineering of São Carlos, University of São Paulo.