ancient cities

684 São Paulo, Brazil
both a significant part of the most modern productive
activities associated with globalized businesses
and a large poor population who tend to live in
widely segregated spaces, mostly deprived of the
benefits of urbanity and with low access to public
policies and services. More recently, although living
conditions have been improving, urban violence
and a broad sense of insecurity have become central
features of local sociability.
Those attributes are a product of a complex history,
and the city was a provincial and unimportant
center for centuries.
From Jesuit School to Modern City
The origins of the city date back to 1554, when
members of the Society of Jesus founded a Jesuit
school on a hill near the Anhangabaú River. Six
years later São Paulo received the status of Vila
and, in 1681, became the capital of the capitanía
of São Paulo, a subnational unit governed hereditarily
by appointees of the king of Portugal.
Because the soil was not suitable for agricultural
production, São Paulo was, for centuries, the point
of departure of the bandeiras—inland expeditions
in search of Indians to enslave, during the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, and in search of precious
metals and stones, during the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. In 1711 São Paulo became a
city, but in 1748 the capitanía was incorporated
into Rio de Janeiro. In 1765, the city returned to its
earlier status, as part of a strategy by the Portuguese
Crown to prevent the loss of territory to Spain,
which ruled over the rest of South America.
São Paulo grew very slowly throughout those
early centuries. With the Brazilian independence in
1822, the city became a provincial capital and five
years later a law school was founded there, turning
São Paulo into a relatively important intellectual
center. During the second half of that century, coffee
plantations became a highly profitable economic
activity in the interior of the state. Those regions
were connected to the Port of Santos by a railway
in the 1870s, providing an export corridor that
passed through the city. Unlike other Brazilian
plantations, coffee in São Paulo was based not on
slave labor but on immigrant labor, brought from
Europe and Japan in several waves of institutionalized
migration organized by the private producers
and financed by the government. That was the
reason why the local economy did not change
much after the abolition of slavery in 1888 and
the inauguration of the republic in 1889. By that
time, the city experienced its first period of intense
demographic growth, jumping from 30,000 inhabitants
in 1872 to nearly 240,000 in 1890, almost
85 percent of them of foreign origin. This ethnic
and cultural mixture remained—the foreign population
grew 13 times between 1890 and 1920—and
is still a central feature of the city today.
The new century brought large urban transformations
as well, including the development of
exclusive areas for the so-called coffee barons.
They were located near the old center and around
the newly developed Avenida Paulista, built in
1891, and later in highly exclusive neighborhoods
developed by a British company incorporating
Garden City design elements. At the same time,
the first skyscrapers were built in the historical
center. Not far from there, tenements were being
built in large scale to house the ever-growing
population of low-paid workers. Although foreign
companies contracted by the state government
covered part of the city with services such as
piped water, sewage, and electric tramways, a
large part of the population remained without
access, which caused the seasonal spread of infectious
diseases.
A new cycle of economic growth started in the
first decades of the twentieth century associated
with some early industrial activities benefiting from
a crisis of the coffee economy, as well as by the
forced isolation caused by World War I, which
contributed to industrialization through import
substitution. In fact, the contribution of the city of
São Paulo to the industrial added value of Brazil
jumped from 8.3 percent in 1907 to 21.5 percent in
1928. This was accompanied by rapid demographic
growth—the city reached 580,000 inhabitants in
1920—and by intense political conflicts, such as
the 1917 urban strikes associated with anarchist
labor movements, strongly repressed by the state.
The decades of 1920 and 1930 also witnessed
intense cultural transformations. Similarly to other
cities of the period, São Paulo housed an important
cultural vanguard that had the Semana de Arte
Moderna de 1922 (Week of Modern Art of 1922) as
one of its main manifestations. Brazilian modernism
was engaged in a rupture with the academicist art
expressions valued by the Brazilian elites and would