São Paulo: streets, neighborhoods, houses. City and urban cultures in the 20th century

• Grant number: 18/14542-3
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Duration: December 01, 2018 - November 30, 2020
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Architecture and Town Planning - Fundamentals of Architecture and Urbanism
• Principal Investigator: Ana Lucia Duarte Lanna
• Grantee: Ana Lucia Duarte Lanna
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo (FAU). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 19/03599-7 - São Paulo: Streets, neighborhoods, houses. City and urban cultures in the 20th century., BP.TT; 19/03689-6 - São Paulo: streets, neighborhoods, houses. The city and urban cultures in the 20th century, BP.TT; 19/03538-8 - São Paulo: streets, neighborhoods, houses: city and urban cultures in the 20th century, BP.TT

Abstract

The objective of this research project is to understand the multiple meanings and experiences of modernity that shaped the city of São Paulo, relating spatial and social processes in progress throughout the twentieth century. Like other contemporary metropolises, São Paulo is a figuration managed by practices and representations, areas of tensions and conflicts that give shape and function to space. Understood as material, social and mental production, the city must be analyzed based on their values, forms of use, materialities and representations elaborated by groups and social actors whose logics and solutions are diverse and result in multiple experiences that are not total reconstitutions. Taking into account fragmentation as an expression of social life and of the city itself, it is important to develop a plurality of urban experiences, to seek to establish links between social practices, symbolic concepts and material constitution of space. Neighborhoods, streets and houses are scales chosen to interweave in diverse temporal, spatial and social dimensions. Operating as a notion of boundaries and connections, the city is taken as a porous and polysemic social space averse to analytical peers of modernity and tradition; rural and urban; public and private; native and foreign. By destabilizing customary cuts, the project aims at an analysis of São Paulo and the built, lived and imagined space of the city. The streets chosen to be searched - Rua Treze de Maio in Bexiga; Augusta Street crossing Bela Cintra and the Gardens; and Rua Teodoro Sampaio in Pinheiros - are places of special visibility of these processes, from which will be articulated neighborhoods and houses. Our approach proposes a distancing from the traditional idea of case study, as an exemplary process, and from the notion of trajectory as a linear and chronological path. These streets, these neighborhoods will allow us to establish a plural and multifaceted reading of the city of São Paulo and its modernities. (AU)