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1 São Paulo today 
São Paulo is the biggest urban agglomeration in South America, with a population of 18 million people. It lies at 800m above sea level and at 60 km from the coast. The climate is more temperate than neighbouring (400km) Rio de Janeiro, which lies at the same latitude at the seashore. Its currently 200.000ha of urbanized land spread out from the original centre on a hill in a large octopus shape of about 70km along the East-West axis and 50km in the North-South direction. The main mass of urbanization is bordered by two artificial lakes (water reservoirs) and then a steep slope where the plateau falls to sea level in the South and a mountain range in the North, which leaves the bulk of not-so-much-needed-anymore room for expansion mainly towards east and west.
The urban form is radio-concentric with more radial than tangential structures. High income districts occupy traditionally the south-western sector (in blue on the sketch opposite). When the scale of the city became bigger, the city centre started drifting southwest, as though following the high income population. Acocording to the growing the scale of the city, the march towards southwest started to go by leaps and bounds, leaving widening gaps in between. The first leap, about three km long, occurred in the late fifties (São Paulo had 4 million people at the time) when banks, office buildings and smart shops and services occupied the central ridge and made the Avenida Paulista. Fifteen years later there was a second leap of five kilometers when office buildings, branch banking and the first Shopping Centre were set up on Av. Faria Lima. Nowadays there is a spread with offices headquarters further south yet to Av. Berrini some 15 km away from the old centre, so ‘town centre’ today would be something like a comet with a tail of broken stretches thinning out towards the south.
The south-western sector concentrates most of all economic activities except manufactures and most of the residents’ income. In this some 15 to 20 km long equal sided triangle infrastructure provision is better, quality of the environment is fair and accessibilty very reasonable. Originally residential settlements were built in low density detached houses but high rise appartment blocks are now built at rates twice as fast than housing and they already make up one third of the built stock in dwellings. The other sectors and the outer periphery are predominantly middle and worker class, and contain also the bulk of manufacturing industry settled along axes formed first by railways (throughout a century starting 1850) and later by roads (1950 onwards), according to the predominant transportation technique of the time. Here infrastructure levels and quality of the environment are poor and sometimes staggering. Worst yet are the favela settlements on generally public ‘invaded’ land which is a relatively new phenomenon in São Paulo (it started in the mid-seventies) but today favela dwellers make up about 15% of the urban population of the Metropolitan area – and that means some two and half million people. The roots of such extreme differences both in income and the quality of the environment go back to the origins of São Paulo and Brazilian society itself.
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