Making the Modern City: Expert Planners and City Residents in post-WWII Sao Paulo

• In Event: Urban Tensions: Bottom up Pressures and Top Down Planning in Latin America

Abstract

This paper explores urban planning in post-WWII Sao Paulo from two distinct yet interrelated perspectives. On the one hand, it examines how a small group of urban professionals (primarily engineers and architects) adopted planning ideas and practices from abroad – including those associated with Europe and the United States – to consolidate their position as “expert” planners and to remake the city along modern lines. Although these urban professionals perceived planning as purely technical and apolitical, a closer analysis reveals that the discourse and decisions of these professionals tended to privilege their class interests while simultaneously pushing migrants and the urban poor towards São Paulo’s peripheries where living conditions were often dreadful. On the other hand, the paper examines how São Paulo’s urban poor living along the peripheries responded to the technocratic and racialized approach to city planning sponsored by elite urban professionals. I argue that popular struggles for neighborhood improvements constrained the vision of the modern city sponsored by urban professionals and brought about a new brand of urbanism that was more egalitarian and attentive to the social and political demands of the urban poor.

Author

• Marcio E Siwi, New York University