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Because of São Paulo’s position as the main economic centre of both Brazil and Mercosul, the city tends to show faster reactions to shifts in both the home and the world economic conjunctures and policies than its smaller and less exposed companions in the country. In this sense, two distinct effects can be observed in its urban structure. On the one hand, it benefits from more investment both public (in infrastructure) and private (entreprises), boasts the highest proportion of the skilled labour, and has experienced sizeable expansion of advanced technology and world market-oriented urban activitit-oriented urban activities, as well as local branches of sophisticated international firms. On the other hand, it is also the locus of social antagonisms which become ever more glaring in view of its greater exposure as a ‘world city’. Social injustice, precarious urban infrastructure, unemployment and informality, urban violence and favela settlements are phenomena which will go away only if and when Brazilian society makes its bid for a transition from archaic elite society and its permanently hindered accumulation to a more egalitarian society allowing for a full development of its own productive forces –and providing its urban agglomerations with infrastructure at new quantitative and qualitative thresholds (>> Map 7). That is a challenge, however, not for São Paulo in isolation, but for the country, if not the Latin American continent, as a whole.

One of the crucial elements of the life of any metropolis is of course planned State intervention. The planning process in São Paulo has gone through some quite different stages in the last five decades or so. There was a first stage of no formal or explicit plan at all, but this was when -- in the early twenties -- the first large-scale urban transportation system was built by the Anglo-Canadian São Paulo Light and Power Co, which got the concession of the service of tramways from the Commons of the city. The building of this network al of this network allowed for the extension of the urbanized areas beyond the radius of about three kilometers, which the city had been hitherto confined to. Interestingly enough, the first urban plan worth this name, the Plano de Avenidas of Prestes Maia (an engineer who later became Mayor of São Paulo in the early 40’s), had the dubious merit of reversing the previous policy by placing the emphasis on private rather than public transport, and on the technique of the motor industry rather than the rail. This plan envisaged the canalization and rectification of the three main rivers and the building of a set of Avenidas, which at the time had the importance of the expressways of today. It also postponed the building of an Underground network, in a clear decision in favour of urban transport based on pneumatic, both private (cars) and public (buses).

In the sixties to mid-seventies, that was the time of development or integrated plans in Brazil. None of them was more comprehensive, large-scale and ambitious than the PUB- Plano Urbanistico Básico, elaborated in 1968 by a gigantic consortium Asplan/Daily/Montreal commissioned by a recently set up body, the Gegran (Executive Group for Greater São Paulo), which had the specific purpose of dealing with the spatial organization of the urban agglomeration which was now outgrowing the administrative limits of the City of São City of São Paulo. This is the birth of the São Paulo Metropolitan Region, even if its first name was Greater São Paulo, according to the fashion of the time.

The PUB envisaged 650km Metrô lines, 4000km of expressways, transformation the urban structure into a polinucleated one and generally to prepare the metropolis to reach 42 million people by year 2000… it was just the time of the start of the ‘Brazilian miracle’ (1967-74), and expectations about both what will happen and what can be done where running high.

Miracle or no miracle, however, the PUB was just too big for São Paulo and thus it remains little more today than a reminder of the heydays of urban planning, and in particular, of large-scale integrated plans in Brazil (for more than a decade, from the mid-60s to the mid-70s there was government support and finance for all medium and big cities to do their ‘master’ or ‘development’ plans). Of its proposals only two came to some – quite reduced – level of implementation: of the expressways, about 80km were built and the Metrô network went to the drawing board – with a dramatically reduced target of 65km of total length – and building effectively started a few years later (1972). But all the previsions of transformation of the urban structure came to nothing (of course, since no sizeable new infrastructure was built) – on the contrary, the town centre startedtown centre started its unplanned drift towards towards south-west and then south, seeking to go in the direction where investment was less scarce, and generally the urban sprawl went its unplanned way of before, spreading out and leaving large tracts of unused space in between, which were the nightmare of many urbanists for a generation. The building of the Underground went at such a slow pace (barely 2 km a year) that the gap between demand and the service offered kept widening rather than starting to narrow. When growth slowed down and there was a chance of closing the gap, building halted altogether in 1989 (it was not to start again before 1998 when it was finally resumed and a new comprehensive transportation plan elaborated, as will be outlined further below).

Nor was it only in São Paulo, of course, that the plans were not implemented. Upon the realization, or claim, that they very largely restricted to paper and never implemented, and also, significantly, the petering out of the ‘miracle’ (mid-70s), plans became ‘sectoral’, meaning that they referred to some specific aspect of the urban structure, such as sewage, water management, transports or urban renewal. That half-institutionalized Metropolitan Authority – it never became an elected body, such as the Greater London Council, for example – the Gegran was all but extinct a few years after its creation: it was renamed Emplasa and became a half-fornd became a half-forgotten body within the administrative structure of São Paulo State. Its swan’s song was the 1993 Plano Metropolitano de Desenvolvimento Integrado (Integrated Metropolitan Development Plan), which summaed up many ideas about the metropolis that were brewing within Emplasa for years – which includes a masterful Chapter on three Scenarios’ for São Paulo at different levels of optimism in relation to economic and social development in Brazil, but virtually no proposition at all, since it (Emplasa) had no attribution to do so. Because the other administrative structures, such as municipal boundaries, jurisdictions of regionally structured bodies like water and sewage authority (Sabesp), power supply (Eletropaulo) or telecommunications (Telesp) and so on, criss-cross each other over the metropolitan region, but none corresponds to the effective urban agglomeration, the ‘sectoral’ plans and l’ plans and projects, if and when they came into effect, remained largely isolated from each other and most frequently refer to only some part of the agglomeration.

In the early nineties again a new period started in planning under the aegis of neo-liberalism, which in practice means cutbacks on public expenditure and its counterpart, the selling out of public assets to private companies (whence ‘privatization’). Urban services are less easily privatized however, or more precisely, the drawbacks of doing so are more immediately felt than privatization of nationwide assets or structures. Thus mining (Vale do Rio Doce), steel plants (Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional) or in the State of São Paulo telecommunications (Telesp, sold in 1998 to Telefonica of Spain) and electric power distribution (Eletropaulo became Elektropaulo, sold to a multinational consortium of foreign firms), and some especially busy trunks of the interstate road network were ‘privatized’, but water and sewage supply or urban transportation were not – although there is permanent talk about it so that it may always remain an impending question. Generally speaking there is strong rhetoric about ‘diminishing the [inefficient] State’ which comes to reinforce the arsenal of excuses for non-investment in urban structures and services, which hitherto were centred on the classical argument of a laal argument of a lack of capacity of investment (making necessary to have recourse to foreign loans, as though that was not the dearest possible money).
 
 

Figure 7: A Metrô network for São Paulo- A Metrô network more to the scale of São Paulo such as the one pictured here was designed in the late 80's and then forgotten until 1999 when a comprehensive transportation project (PITU 2020) proposed a very similar plan.

In spite of such hostile environment, and after almost a decade of near-paralysis, the late nineties saw the re-birth, spurred perhaps by the calamitous state of most of the urban services, of some initiative on the part of various government bodies dealing with the São Paulo Metropolitan Region. Thus currently there are some significant projects at the metropolitan scale: prominent among these are a long overdue long term transport plan with an emphasis on rapid mass transport (Underground network: Figure above and >> Map 7), but including all modes of transport, a comprehensive initiative for water management tsive initiative for water management taking into account resource conservation, drainage and flood control, treatment of sewage, use of the protected area of the southern reservoirs for leisure and recreation and other compatible uses; a large scale initiative for the renovation of decayed central areas and restauration of historical buildings. These projects are briefly summed up below.

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