Paula Freire Santoro

FAPESP Week France 2019 | Paula Santoro

Published November 25, 2019 - Agência FAPESP. Entanglements between urban development and popular territories in Sao Paulo, Brazil. This investigation intends to contribute to the construction of a framework to approach contemporary restructuring processes in Metropolitan Sao Paulo based on a trans- and multiscalar perspective. This perspective aims to identify in the territory, the entanglements that relate the present stage of accumulation - lead or not by the financial logic, praxis and metrics adopted by players in and outside the State; and the symbolic reconfiguration of the role of players in and outside of the State. The central hypothesis is that we are facing new regimes of territorial control and production which reconfigure the city and are constituted of: (i) a new regime of accumulation marked by the advance of financial capital; (ii) new processes of production, planning, control and management lead by a increasing incorporation of private players and the financial sector; (iii) new means of production, funding and management of low income housing which imply in new sociabilities trespassed by conflict, appropriations, negotiations and dispossession (displacements); and (iv) new political injunctions which involve, amongst others, processes of insurgency and emplacement derived by the agency of the subjects. The Central, Northern and Eastern parts of metropolitan Sao Paulo, each one in three different scales, are taken as linkage that articulate elements and points of observation and connection.