production and consumption of area: spaces of deindustrialization in the reprodution of the metropolis

Author(s)

Rafael Faleiros de Padua

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2012-03-01

Examining board members

Ana Fani Alessandri Carlos; Manoel Antonio Lopes Rodrigues Alves; Margarida Maria de Andrade; Sandra Lencioni; Angelo Szaniecki Perret Serpa

• Advisor: Ana Fani Alessandri Carlos

Abstract

In todays São Paulo, we can observe a pronounced expansion of real estate activity (led by developers, builders, brokers) to previously industrial areas of the city that have experienced, since the 1990s, far-reaching restructurings in their economic conditions with the decline in industrial activities. This trend is triggered by the lack of developable land in the most valuable areas of the city, which makes areas of deindustrialization attractive due to the existence of developable land plots and their proximity to valuable sections of the city and key thoroughfares. This study aims to understand changes in areas where urbanization has been deeply marked by industrialization from the 1950s on and that now are being converted into privileged locations by hegemonic agents involved in the production of space (the state and private developers). We have studied the real estate sectors expansion to Vila Leopoldina and Santo Amaro, two districts that have become targets for hegemonic agents of the production of space interested in developing new economic frontiers in São Paulo. Their hegemonic discourse attempts to promote the idea that, by building new residential developments, they are revitalizing the neighborhood, as if this area was unoccupied, as if there were neither inhabitants nor a social life tied with the inhabitants life in the area. We have put forward the hypothesis that this process has intensified the fragmentation and segregation of urban life, since it has given rise to new inequalities and asymmetries between the new and what has remained from a previous time. Our starting point is the socio-spatial practice. We have tried to look at how this process of change has affected residents lives in a complex interaction between changes in the landscape and changes in social relations. We have verified the dissolution of the neighborhoods habitual places of sociability due to the imposition of new rhythms with the appearance of large condominiums for upper-income social strata. What has emerged is a sociability based on high-end consumption in which daily life becomes restricted to indoor spaces (home, work, shopping mall, club, etc) spatially connected with the use of cars. These circumstances produce segregation not only because the traditional residents are displaced (either compulsorily or by rising property prices), but also because the old residents experience their place as foreign, because they cannot enjoy their traditional spaces. Most neighbors leave, new high-end stores open in small houses, traffic increases and new rhythms are imposed. All this loosens the neighbors ties and suppresses their concrete references, bringing about a rapid and profound transformation of the place, of its landscape and its meanings. The place loses any remaining unity it might still have and becomes integrated into the more general mechanisms of the reproduction of the metropolis. From the standpoint of the real estate sector, a new place is produced, wrapped up in an efficient ideological rhetoric (sustainability, quality of life, security) that obscures the actual contents of the social process and naturalizes segregation. These ideological apparatuses promote and justify a certain socio-spatial practice that becomes the norm. For some, this norm materializes in spaces of consumption, whereas for others it amounts to a deprivation of space. For the poor households and communities that remain in such places, these changes are experienced as the most profound segregation, especially in the permanent and ruthless threat of displacement. These people are either evicted or put under pressure to leave the area. But resistance springs up, thus bringing to our analysis a concrete illustration of the city as the place of the reproduction of life and demonstrating that the struggle to stay put can point to other struggles that, by moving beyond the demand for housing, suggest another city is possible. (AU)