Urban segregation in Sao Paulo

Résumé du document

Since the 1950s, the majority of Latino-American cities have experienced a demographical growth and a major extension of their urban area. Some writers had even talked about the “monstrous cities”. In about half a century, from 1950s to 1990s, the demography of the cities boomed from 13 million inhabitants to 60 million. Following the recession of the 1980s, the city, that was the polarized center of all the economical activity of the country, suffered from the effect of the financial crises, and the repercussions affected mostly the vulnerable population. They also led to aggravation of housing problems. Soon after, the housing logics of Latin American cities distinguished itself from the logic followed by other world cities by social spatial segregation.

In fact, with the onset of globalization, urban segregation became a recurrent issue in Latin American literature, and more generally, in international publications. The picture of favela standing at the feet of luxury buildings has become an iconic view of Latin American's cities for the rest of the world, and this kind of pictures such as the one represented in picture 1, commonly symbolizes those cities in scholar manuals of geography as well.

Sao Paulo, as many other cities predominantly in Brazil and Mexico, is a good illustration of the topic. Ever since its establishment in the 16th century, Sao Paulo experienced major transformations, notably with the development of the coffee industry, and is now involved as the main business hub in Latin America. Despite all of these successes, urban development has raced ahead of urban planning and the city has turned into a highly segregated place in spatial terms, with a radial-concentric urban structure, rich population concentrated in the center and poor located in peripheral areas.

We may therefore wonder why this world city still faces the same problems of inequality as other developing cities. Based on three main articles and many social and urban indicators, we will initially define segregation in Sao Paulo in order to assess and analyze it. Then, we will focus on the main socio-economic problems that might explain segregations, and compare different literature on the subject. Finally, we will examine its evolution, the consequences of the lack of urban and social policies before discussing a few solutions.

Segregation should be understood as the gathering of a particular group in a given area – race, ethnicity, income. Brazilian urban sociology originally mistook the theme of segregation for the concepts of poverty, inequality and the lack of access to the basic public services. Residential segregation is therefore not a major theme in the Brazilian social debate, nor is it used as a basis for public policies.

First of all, this misunderstanding in comparing poverty and segregation can be explained by a certain evolution of both concepts.

Extraits

[...] It is in this context of simplification anchored in the fear of crime that the heterogeneous peripheries of Sao Paolo started to be called favelas, a process that obscures their significant urban and social improvements. This is also represented in movies such as City of God, Planet of slums, where poverty, favelas, blackness and violent crime coincide. The slum is represented as the symbol of the worst. Picture social inequalities in Sao Paulo In fact, social exclusion and spatial segregation constituted the reverse of the process of economic growth, industrialization and acceleration of urbanization. The poor were ejected to the periphery whereas the rich lived in luxurious districts well provided. [...]

[...] The distance between the rich center and the peripheries prevents both the combination of different social classes and the opportunity for the poor to change their fate by finding a better work in the center. We might consider this view of segregation as the failure of Liberalism. Therefore, the immutable hierarchy of classes concentrates poor people with poor people and rich people with rich people which might explain the development of violence, crime and hatred between the two worlds. In order to understand this separation, let's have a look at its evolution. Since the 1970s, a neat separation started to forge by processes affecting both the center and the periphery. [...]

[...] But Violence is also spatial. Neighborhoods in the peripheries had a murder rate of 110 per 100,000 people compared to less than 15% in the city central districts. Even though the rates signals a kind of amelioration in the last decade it decreased to 12.1 per people in 2007 fear and talk of crime also organized the urban landscape and public space, generating new forms of spatial segregation and social discrimination. The most emblematic form of this discrimination is the different kinds of fortified enclaves. [...]

[...] Decentralization also incited governments to take into account the housing problems of the peripheries. Nowadays, the Brazilian population strongly believes in President Lula, coming from the Labour party, to help population out of this precarious way of life. Haroldo da Gama Torres, Renata Mirandola Bichir, Residential Segregation in São Paulo: Consequences for Urban Policies IBGE, Demographic Censuses of 1991 and 2000. Residential segregation index (dissimilarity) by income and education. Scale of survey areas of São Paulo's urbanized region and 2000. IBGE, Demographic Censuses of 1991 and 2000. Darcy Ribeiro, O povo brasileiro. [...]

[...] Mobility can be improved not only by investments in rapid and efficient transport systems, but also by a better distribution of economic and social activities in urban spaces. Doing so would reduce the distance required for travel. To conclude, we can say that the segregation process, common to many cities in Latin America, is the result of the reparation of unequal property tax, inherited of the colonization period. The city of Sao Paulo also knows a segregation process originally founded on racial basis. [...]