Centralidade urbana: configuração espacial e condições socioeconômicas na cidade de São Paulo, Brasil

Abstract

This paper explores São Paulo, the largest city in South America. The growth of the city has been characterized by a shift of the urban centre towards the southwest. This had deleterious consequences on the historic centre, which experienced a deterioration of its built environment and an increase in socio-economic deprivation. This paper examines how the transformed morphology of twenty-first century São Paulo affected its socio-economic distribution and demographic diversity. It employs theoretical and methodological space syntax approach, which is a set of techniques and theory that investigates relationships between spatial layout and socio-economic phenomena. The analysis found that the morphology of São Paulo presents a ‘patchwork’ of offset grids, which are morphologically differentiated by their scaled relationship to the larger urban structure. Socioeconomic consequences of this fragmentation have been to increase the differentiation of social classes consistent with their accessibility to concentrations of activity taking place at different scales.