Rehabilitation of vacant buildings in the Center of Sao Paulo: ergonomic analysis in retrofit projects for social housing

• Grant number: 24/01239-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: May 01, 2025
• End date: April 30, 2027
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Architecture and Town Planning - Architecture and Urbanism Technology
• Principal Investigator: Roberta Consentino Kronka Mülfarth
• Grantee: Luciana de Faria Baptista
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo (FAU). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Over the past 30 years, the Center of Sao Paulo has been the target of many urban projects and initiatives that aim its requalification and revalorization. The reason behind that leads back to the 1960s, when the central region of the city started to go through an emptying process due to the rapid growth and valorization of the southwest axis of Sao Paulo, especially the Paulista Avenue region and later, the Brigadeiro Faria Lima Avenue area. Many companies left the central area and moved to developing regions, contributing to the emptying process of the Center, which later inevitably led to the exit of many of its dwellers. This process became more intense in the beginning of the 1990s, when the region started to be even more underutilized, causing a sense of unsafety to residents, workers and visitors. This abandonment caused the deterioration of many properties, since its owners stopped investing on them, and they became eventually idle or abandoned. Even though this emptying process has severely affected the Center of Sao Paulo, the region, however, still concentrates many formal jobs, while it also has a huge, implemented infrastructure that should be better used by the city dwellers and workers. Thus, to guarantee the area's revalorization, the best usage to the existent infrastructure and the creation of a multifunctional region, it is necessary to attract new residents to the area. One of the most effective ways to promote the Center's readdensation is to encourage retrofit projects for vacant buildings focused on social housing. Therefrom, it is proposed the main objective of the present research: to ergonomically analyze social housing units in order to identify certain characteristics in retrofit projects that were already built in that region but that still can be improved to guarantee a better quality of life for those people.