Dispossession and Sociospatial Control in the corporate centrality frontier: Santo Amaro as the southern frontier of São Paulos Southwest Vector

• Grant number: 23/12689-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate (Direct)
• Start date: January 01, 2025
• End date: July 31, 2027
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Geography - Human Geography
• Principal Investigator: César Ricardo Simoni Santos
• Grantee: Gabriella Duarte Dantas de Biaggi
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Since the last decades of the 20th century, there has been a complexification of center-periphery relations in Latin American metropolises, which involves the production of new corporate centralities located outside their historic centers. Intraurban frontiers have been transformed and multiplied through processes of dispossession permeated by economic strategies developed in the real estate business, and the forms of segregation historically constituted in these metropolises have been updated and reworked in the context of the so-called "security turn". By looking into a dynamic frontier zone in the south of São Paulo's Southwest Vector - a spatial axis that concentrates the main business hubs of the metropolis - this research seeks to contribute to the understanding of the links between the reproduction of space and sociospatial control in the mobilization of frontiers between central and peripheral urban areas. This project is the development of a Master's Degree research carried out between 2020 and 2023, in which we identified and characterized the aforementioned frontier, located in the district of Santo Amaro. In the new stage of the research, we propose to improve its theoretical basis, informed by a heterodox articulation of perspectives and authors, with which we seek to establish better treatment conditions for a multifaceted reality, which involves issues pertinent to the debates on race, violence, technique, politics and economics, brought together in contemporary processes of production of urban space. Regarding the empirical dimension, in addition to developing an analysis of previously produced and collected data, an important guiding thread is the investigation into the role of private "security" in the dynamics of expansion and containment that shape the southern frontier of the Southwest Vector.