ancient cities

686 São Paulo, Brazil
But although the 1980s were politically strong,
the economy was characterized by high inflation,
high public debt and low economic growth. In fact,
the period represented a large crisis in the import
substitution model. After several failures, an economic
plan—known as Plano Real—managed to
control inflation in 1994. At the same time, the federal
government substantially opened the Brazilian
economy, leading to an important economic restructuring.
As a result, wages decreased and unemployment,
precarious jobs, and informality increased.
São Paulo’s share in the national industrial economy
was reduced from 35.9 percent in 1990 to 25.7
percent in 2005, while tertiary positions became
more relevant. Several studies, however, showed
that if an area of 150 kilometers from the city is
considered, the deconcentration almost disappears,
in what the literature called concentrated deconcentration.
The relative rise of service activities, however,
was substantial, although the city still houses
a significant Fordist economy. Since 2003, the
already restructured local economy has returned to
growth, based on secondary and tertiary activities,
consolidating a new kind of centrality that combines
old and new activities and enlarges its hinterland
to a substantial part of South America. As part
of this process, the city has received a new wave of
international migrants, this time from Peru and
Bolivia, who have come to work mainly in sweatshops
in the garment district of the city.
As a result of the degrading labor market conditions,
poverty increased substantially in São Paulo
in the late 1990s, combining traditional forms of
deprivation with new types of poverty associated
with the lower levels of the globalized service
economy. At the same time, however, social indicators
and the access to public services improved
in most areas of the city. In fact, basic services and
social services—especially health and education—
were almost universalized, although still with low
quality. Urban violence, and different types of
crime, grew. In the periferias, this urban experience,
with its combination of daily contact with
violence and hopes for a better future, led to the
rise of vibrant cultural expressions, mainly in graffiti
and music, including hip hop and rap. These
expressions have been paralleled by the dissemination
of representations of the periferias and the
shantytowns in popular culture and in cultural
production more generally, such as in the movies
and in the literature, in a recent social discovery of
those spaces by society.
However, the sense of insecurity has become
widespread, leading to the appearance of gated
communities, even in lower-middle-class developments.
In some regions, urban developers have
created wealthy enclaves inside specific periferias.
This process, also experienced by other cities in the
world, restricted public space and created situations
in which social distance and spatial proximity
coexist, forging a spatial metaphor of Brazilian
social inequalities. Although large gated communities
are still localized phenomena, the sense of
insecurity has changed buildings and public spaces
all over the city through the spread of fences, gates,
and surveillance equipment.
In spatial terms, the periferias and the shantytowns
have become increasingly heterogeneous
socially and territorially. Nevertheless, regardless of
the improvements in public policies and in social
heterogeneity, the center of the metropolis remains
highly exclusive, and so does the spatial concentration
of opportunities and amenities. The structure
of macro-segregation, therefore, remains almost
untouched and appears to be the most resilient and
durable of the high social inequalities that characterize
São Paulo, opposing well-located and -equipped
spaces that house increasingly sophisticated service
activities and high-income social groups, to very
distant and relatively isolated peripheries, inhabited
by the large majority of the population.
Observed at a distance, this historical trajectory
turned São Paulo from a small and provincial center
to the largest metropolis in South America, the home
of vibrant cultural movements and economic activities
that influence the whole region. Marked by
segregation and social inequalities in both social and
spatial terms, the city has retained and reproduced in
new and more complex ways its exclusionary character,
regardless of the important improvements
achieved in the past decades. This large-scale combination
of cosmopolitan and modern facets with old
and new poverties, understood both socially and
spatially, is what makes São Paulo one of the possible
urban futures for many other cities.
Eduardo Marques
See also Buenos Aires, Argentina; Crime; Divided Cities;
Favela; Gated Community