A busy avenue in São Paulo: result of the city’s enormous, unplanned growth

In the 1920s, Oswald de Andrade ironically described São Paulo’s vocation as “the natives’ enthusiasm for a ‘civilizing’ imperialism,” thus predicting that such enthusiasm would be the source of the city`s greatness and its problems. “In the 1990s, São Paulo was already the country’s economic hub and, as such, reacted faster than other regions in the country to accept and adapt to globalization,” says Sueli Schiffer, full professor at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning of the University of (FAU-USP). “On one hand, this condition resulted in a growing concentration of highly advanced technological and specialized activities, the benefits of which were massive investments in infrastructure in given areas and the emergence of a highly skilled work force,” she says. “But this rapid acceptance of globalization drove the relocation of the low-income population to the outskirts, thus increasing social segregation. In addition, the lack of jobs for the unskilled population, informal employment, violence and the number of slums also increased,” adds the researcher, who coordinated the research study Projetos urbanos e desenvolvimento local: financiamento e gestão [Urban projects and local development: financing and management].

The study is a continuation of the thematic project São Paulo: globalização da economia e estrutura urbana [São Paulo: globalization of the economy and urban structure], conducted by Sueli with the support of FAPESP (1998). During the globalization process, the researcher conducted a pioneering analysis of how Brazil was doing in terms of the relation between the new economic structure it had adopted and spatial organization. “In an unequal economy, spatial structure is affected and becomes unequal. Income increased in a concentrated manner in the city. At the same time, however, part of the city’s low-income population was driven to the outskirts, with no appropriate housing structure. This, in turn, resulted in a forced re-definition of urban priorities, in ever-increasing urban infrastructure problems, especially transportation and environment, the outcome of which is a situation of abject poverty and growing inequality, which generate significant urban violence,” she points out. The “natives’ enthusiasm” ultimately generated splendor and decadence.

“Urban planning in the 1950s and 1960s took place in an environment of enormous growth and significant migratory flows,  comprised of low-income populations migrating from rural regions. The lack of any kind of infra structure – even such basic utilities as water, electric power, sanitation, and public transportation – was the most pressing challenge for urban planning and management,” Sueli explains.

According to the researcher, control of production and spatial changes have always been the mechanisms employed by the country’s elite to ensure its internal dominance. The elite created segregated areas, some of which had all the urban amenities provided by the state, while other areas had no housing or public service structure. “This has been part of São Paulo’s urban setting since the nineteenth century, but globalization has taken all of this to much higher levels,” says Sueli. “The space was not organized on the basis of official planning to improve the life of the population. Urban space became a miscellany of modern business developments mixed with old housing, thus generating a confusing transportation flow and the general appearance of a ‘forced arrangement’ in spite of the high cost of the work involved in this endeavor,” she adds.

Shantytown in the neighborhood of Real Parque contrasts with the progress of the city and reveals the city’s lack of sufficient infrastructure

These events occurred because of São Paulo’s desire to be one of the so-called “global cities,” although the status of São Paulo is less important than that of global cities in developed countries. “These leading cities in peripheral countries, such as the cities of São Paulo, Singapore, or Hong Kong, achieve subordinate roles in this chain of international accumulation, the locus in which foreign capital is internalized in national territories. As these cities serve to concentrate economic activities for the global economy, they are disconnected from the reality of the domestic economy,” she says. It is no wonder that by 1997, 96.9% of the private foreign banks and 67.5% of the international companies were established in São Paulo, while 19% of the city’s population was living in slums and 16% was unemployed. “Since then, the objective of the government’s infrastructure plan was to have a minimally organized urban space to support production in line with the globalized pattern of Brazilian society,” Sueli adds. Even the tax incentives offered to attract foreign capital are so generous that they drain most of the city’s budget, which has been adversely affected for decades.

“The growth of  ‘global cities’ in peripheral countries has increased spatial segregation and pre-existing social exclusion because of the demand for a skilled labor force to deal with ‘global’ requirements. The drop in employment opportunities in the industrial sector has not been offset by new job opportunities in the service sector,” says the researcher. In a spatial context in which there is only room for ‘the best’, the ‘unskilled’ are ‘invited’ to move away from the city and to live in increasingly distant areas, either due to increasingly expensive housing or to the new required professional profile, geared only to holding positions requiring “fewer qualifications.” The researcher points out that the pre-conditions for the execution of possible urban projects in Brazil, especially in São Paulo, as well as the factors that drive the development of urban projects common to other countries, do not herald the possibility of urban planning in the short term in our country.

“Increasing social inclusion requires stronger state intervention, but the neoliberal philosophy of globalization does not preach this type of activity. For many years, the benefits achieved by the city were offset by social ills resulting from globalization’s collateral effects. Growing unemployment, poverty, informal jobs and violence have been increasingly transformed into the visible effects of new urban arrangements.” To flee from this reality, the elite has sought refuge in specific regions of the city. New business areas have sprung up and promoted the dispersion of the urban make-up. “This had already happened in the past, but in a different manner, such as the shift from the old downtown area to Paulista Avenue. Other such areas were later created, such as the neighborhoods around the Faria Lima, Carlos Berrini and Nova Faria Lima Avenues, where the focus is on dynamic, international activities. Each new area has involved heavy municipal investment, as these regions needed communication services, infrastructure and transportation, and new access ways, such as tunnels and avenues. These interventions affected the traditional urban arrangement. The interventions were executed very quickly, with no planning focused on the collective good. Whatever planning there was benefitted specific areas,” she says. Few resources were left to invest in housing and services for the lower income population.

São Paulo’s east side is an example of the forced migration to the city’s outskirts

“Globalization has resulted in forced migration to city outskirts, in more people living in the same household, slums, invasion of the lands surrounding water sources, such as the edge of the Billings Reservoir, a dramatic degradation of the quality of life, and insufficient infrastructure,” she analyzes. What is the current situation? “At first glance, São Paulo’s Metropolitan Region seems to have improved. Migration to São Paulo has come to a standstill, to such an extent that São Paulo is growing at a slower pace than the rest of the country. The proportion of poorer and less educated people in the local job market is declining. From 2003 to 2007, the growth of formal jobs went up by 4.5% a year and in 2012, for the first time, more than 50% of the labor force has a formal employment contract,” states sociologist Álvaro Comim, from the Center for Studies on the Metropolis (CEM). “The city has improved in terms of sophisticated services and the demand for skilled labor suggests that São Paulo is a “middle class” city. But the inflexion of inequality has a price: the poorer people, who do not fit these requirements, continue to be driven away from the city because the city cannot fit them in and does not want them,” he adds.

The global city has closed its gates to unskilled workers. “Traditional industries that employed unskilled labor are moving inland and now the city only has technology-intensive industries. We are exporting urban problems such as slums, dire poverty, etc. A few decades from now we will view São Paulo as an international city, but the city’s outskirts will be degraded,” says the researcher. “The rich are also segregating themselves within the city. With the exception of a few private areas where the rich can indulge in some kind of activity, São Paulo has become an unknown, violent place with which the elite has no connection and to which it has no commitment,” Sueli points out. In spite of the skyscrapers that could be part of any American or European city, São Paulo, which has become so globalized, it is placing its position at risk, precisely because of its enthusiasm to embrace the new configuration of the global economy to the detriment of the improvements demanded by the population.

“We have to wait for transformations in Brazilian society to occur to reverse these factors so that a more inclusive and equal spatial organization arises, in which urban renovation projects focused on obsolete or degraded areas play a role in urban restructuring and are compatible with the social and economic changes resulting from these transformations,” says the researcher.

Details of pillar at Jaú (SP) bus terminal, by João Vilanova Artigas

The main goal of the social network Arquigrafia Brazil is enlarging visual culture about architecture of Brazilian Internet users, so that they can experience the city from another point of view and become active in creating urban space transformation. It is a cooperative environment for visualizing, interpreting and sharing architecture digital images on the Internet. It was released in late April by a group of professors from the University of São Paulo (USP). The initiative also aims to contribute to the study, teaching, research and dissemination of the country’s architectural and urban culture, allowing teachers, students, industry professionals and general users to access digital photos and to provide feedback from their computers, tablets and smart phones.

The project intends to digitize and to allow public access to a collection consisting of 37,000 images belonging to the Department of Audiovisual Library at the School of Architecture and Urbanism (FAU), one of the most important of its kind in the country. The photos illustrating this report are part of this collection. The creators intend for the collection to expand through the inclusion of new images authored by Internet users themselves. The latter can freely insert their architecture and urban spaces photos on the site.

For its innovative features, Arquigrafia Brazil won the Applied Social and Human Technologies category at the USP Innovation Olympics in 2011. “Arquigrafia will follow Wikipedia’s collaborative model: anyone can include an image in it, comment or change the reference information of posted photos. The collection is created through network cooperation,” says architect and urbanist Artur Rozestraten, a professor at FAU/USP’s technology department and one of the coordinators of the project.

According to the architect, one of the innovations of the social network is to bring together in a single space an institutional collection (in this case, the FAU library) and a collection created by the users. “There are many institutional images banks throughout the world, such as the National Institute of Art History, Paris, or the Moreira Salles Institute, Brazil. However, those that mix institutional and personal collections are rare. We believe that the collection will gain a more comprehensive format when we integrate image sets from institutions with those of the online users,” says Rozestraten. The researcher shares the project coordination with professors Marco Aurélio Gerosa, from the Computer Science Department at the Mathematics and Statistics Institute (IME) and the person responsible for building the web platform, and Maria Laura Martinez, from the Journalism and Publishing Department at the School of Communication and Arts (ECA), who coordinates the design of the user-centered interaction.

History and Geography School (USP), by architect Eduardo Corona

Arquigrafia Brazil is based on free software, namely, the Groupware Workbench developed by IME together with the Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES) and the Pontifical Catholic University (PUC) of Rio de Janeiro. Hosted at IME’s Free Software Competence Center (CCSL), Groupware Workbench offers an array of construction tools for collaborative systems on the web.

The current version of the site (www.arquigrafia.org.br), released in late April, is still an experimental prototype with a first set of functions that is being tested by the users. “At this stage, the interested Internet users receive a password and provide us with feedback about system user friendliness and efficiency. Later, when the final version goes live, each user will be able to create an account on the site or use their existing social network accounts, such as Facebook, Twitter or Google, to access the system,” explains Gerosa.

By the end of this term, the network should be fully available to all users. Today, only invited guests are allowed to send images. Soon, a mobile application allowing access to the site on tablets and smart phones using the Android platform will be available. “As the images will have a geographic reference, the Internet users will be able to move within the city’s physical space interacting with the site’s digital archive,” says Gerosa. “For example, a person will be able to bookmark images on Arquigrafia of modernist buildings in downtown São Paulo on their cell phone and visit them.” The site will also allow high-definition downloading of the images that make up their respective collections.

The São Paulo architect and photographer Nelson Kon, owner of an extensive modern and contemporary Brazilian architecture image collection, has a positive view of the initiative of creating Arquigrafia, but points out an aspect that may affect the quality of the collection in the future. “In addition to FAU’s institutional library images, the collection will be built primarily by amateur material. It will be difficult to get professional photographers to disclose their architectural or city scape photos for commercial use for free,” he says.

All images on the site are presented with a factsheet containing the title, photographer’s name, date and location, and numerous other tags – keywords associated with the image that help cataloguing them. Examples of tags are terms such as “concrete,” “wood,” “façade,” “hotel,” “pool” and “garden,” among others. With the help of tags, the Internet user can search for images of interest on the site. “Once Arquigrafia Brazil is open to contributions from Internet users, they will insert their photos, identifying them and placing tags,” says Rozestraten. The users will be able to browse through images from different historical periods and various geographical contexts in Brazil.

Other important collaborative functionalities of the project are an area for internet users to post their comments on the images and another allowing them to interpret pictures visually, employing key concepts related to their plastic-spatial features. For the latter, using a tool on the screen, the user will be able to classify the image according to 12 binomials: horizontal or vertical, opaque or transparent, concave or convex, deep or shallow, projections or indentations, shiny or matte, monochromatic or colored, dark or light, octagonal or curved, perpendicular or inclined, regular or irregular, and simple or complex.

To promote the dissemination and use of images, Arquigrafia Brazil content is released under a Creative Commons license, a project that covers more than 40 countries and provides a simplified copyright management model. It enables authors and content creators such as musicians, filmmakers, writers, photographers, journalists and others, to make some applications of their work available for the society. “When you enter your photo in Arquigrafia, the Internet user needs to declare whether he/she is the author and if he/she allows modification and commercial use of the image,” says Gerosa. “As it is free software, all that the user needs to do is to change the source code to create collaborative systems with images of astronomy, sports, environment or any other field of knowledge,” he says.

Between 1933 and 2010, the annual total rainfall increased by 425 mm in the metropolitan region, according to data from USP

The land of drizzle has become the megalopolis of storms. Over the last 80 years the annual amount of rain that falls on the Metropolitan Region of São Paulo, where one in every ten Brazilians lives in an area equivalent to almost 1% of the national territory, has increased by 425 millimeters (mm), half of what it rains in a good part of the semi-arid part of Brazil. It has jumped from an annual average of almost 1,200 mm in the 1930s to something around 1,600 mm in 2000. Calculated on a linear basis it is as if every year it had rained 5.5 mm more than in the previous 12 months. The rainfall has not just intensified, it has changed its pattern. It is not simply raining a little more every day, an effect that would be hardly perceptible in practice and incapable of causing constant flooding in the region. The number of days with heavy or moderate rain has increased and this is causing storms in the winter too, a period that was normally dry. On the other hand, the number of days when there is only light rain (less than 5 mm) has reduced.

A pendulous regime of extremes has started dominating the rainfall cycle in the metropolitan region: when it rains, it generally rains a lot. But between the days of great humidity there might be long periods of drought. The Greater São Paulo area seems to be moving towards the worst of both worlds; alternating intense periods of excessive rain and a lack of rain all throughout the year. “Urbanization and the so-called heat island effect, in addition to atmospheric pollution, seem to play an important role in altering the rainfall pattern in São Paulo, especially in the already normally wet seasons, such as the spring and summer,” says Maria Assunção da Silva Dias, from the Institute of Astronomy, Geophysics and Atmospheric Sciences of the University of São Paulo (IAG-USP), author of an as-yet unpublished study on the topic. “In the drier months the influence of global climate change is responsible for 85% of the dynamics involved in the increase in extreme rainfall.” Although less clear, this same tendency towards an increase in the number of days with heavy rain was detected in the Metropolitan Region of Rio de Janeiro.

The new pluviometric pattern in São Paulo is not like a passing cold front. It’s here to stay, according to models produced by the Terrestrial System Science Center at the National Institute of Space Research (CCST-Inpe). The projections suggest that the current situation is a type of prologue of the future story. They signal that by the end of this century there is likely to be an increase in the number of days with rainfall over 10, 20, 30 and 50 mm, i.e. practically in all significant rainfall bands. There will be just a decrease in the number of days with very light rainfall and possibly an increase in the number of dry days. “The seasonality of the rains is also likely to change,” says José Marengo, head of the CCST, coordinator of a work on the rainfall projections in the metropolitan region that has not yet been published. “The number of storms outside the normally rainy season is likely to increase, the type of situation that catches the population by surprise.” Simulations take into account only the possible effects on the rainfall regime in the metropolitan region caused by the so-called global climate change, above all the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations that heat the air temperature. The weight that urbanization and air pollution may have on rains in Greater São Paulo has not been considered in the projections.

One of the great difficulties in making major studies that are capable of revealing climate fluctuations in the past and serving as a pointer for future projections is the absence of a series of long and reliable historical data, with daily information about the incidence of rain. Without them it is impossible to carry out a robust statistical analysis and have a clear view about how much it used to rain and how rainfall was distributed over the years and climatic seasons (spring, summer, autumn and winter). The specialists are unanimous in pointing out this deficiency in Brazil. The series with the best quality data about rainfall at a given point in the national territory is supplied by the meteorological station of the IAG, which is in the Parque do Estado [State Park] in Água Funda, in the south of the city of São Paulo. The records started in 1933, when the unit was inaugurated, and have continued until today.

Few patches of green in the metropolis of concrete and asphalt: if 25% of the territory of the Greater São Paulo area were covered by trees, the average temperature would fall by as much as 2.5ºC

Another factor gives the data supplied by the IAG’s meteorological station a unique character. The records were obtained in a major green area in the city São Paulo, the profile of which has not changed radically over almost 80 years, a rarity in a megalopolis that has few parks and gardens. In other words, although in the last century the city underwent a process of urbanization, with the soil being made impermeable, the natural conditions surrounding the station in the Parque do Estado have not changed radically. Therefore, it makes sense to compare the present data with those from the past since the local environment is more or less the same. “In the north of São Paulo, at the Santana Lookout Point, there is a meteorological station with measurements form the 1950s,” says Pedro Leite da Silva Dias, a researcher from IAG-USP and director of the National Laboratory of Scientific Computing (LNCC) in Rio de Janeiro, and also the author of a study on the evolution of rainfall in the metropolitan region. “But some decades ago there was just forest and today there’s a building right alongside the station.”

Due to the wealth of data supplied by the IAG’s station in the Parque do Estado, Assunção and her collaborators have been able to see more subtle details and trends in the rainfall regime over the last eight decades. Between 1935 and 1944 it rained on average more than 40 mm on around 30 days, with a great concentration of rainfall in the summer months, and on a lesser scale in the spring and autumn. During the period there were no records of episodes of rainfall of this intensity in the winter months. The situation began to change in the mid-1940s. Since then in every decade, there has been on average at least one rainstorm of this intensity in the winter. Between 2000 and 2009, there were about 70 days with storms over 40 mm. A similar tendency is repeated when the occurrence of daily rains over 60mm and 80mm is analyzed decade by decade.

Generally speaking, two main factors can be related to the alteration in the rainfall regime in the metropolitan region: global climate change, a large scale phenomenon, and the heat island effect, which is localized and typical of megacities. The two operate in conjunction. One boosts the effects of the other and in general it is difficult to draw a dividing line between the two. According to Marengo, most of the climate models indicate that there will be an increase in the amount of rain from the River Plate basin to the southeast of Brazil over the next few decades. Within this broader framework the specific question arises about the weather in large cities, especially the heat island effect which, by making extremely urbanized areas hotter, also functions like a magnet for rain.

A moister sea breeze
The surface temperature of the Atlantic ocean on the coast of São Paulo State rose by almost one degree between 1950 and 2010. It went from 21.5°C to 22.5°C. It may not seem much, but one of the consequences of this warming is to increase the rate of water evaporation from the ocean, which is fuel that makes the sea breeze even more loaded with moisture. This process has repercussions on the weather over the coastal range of hills (Serra do Mar) and on the plain where the metropolitan region is located.

Why does much of the rain that falls on the Greater São Paulo region occur between the middle and end of the afternoon, after 3 p.m. or 4 p.m.? This is when the sea breeze, which is hot and moist as it comes off the Santista Coastal Plain, stops rising over the hills and reaches the megalopolis. “The south area of the city is generally the first place in the capital that feels the effects of the breeze,” comments Maria Assunção. The internal structure of cities, with lots of tall buildings, alters the direction of the winds and may even cause the sea breeze to rise at certain points in the metropolitan region and favor the formation of local rain clouds. Urban pollution, above all aerosols, can both favor as well as inhibit the occurrence of storms over cities, depending on their quantity.

Studies carried out in the United States in the 1990s suggest that part of the increase in rainfall in some metropolitan regions, like Saint Louis, is due to its growing urbanization. In this area of the state of Missouri, where some 2.9 million people live, the rains have increased by between 5% and 25% over the last few decades. A study carried out last year in major cities in India concludes that changes in the rainfall regime in these urban concentrations derive more from natural fluctuations in the weather than from local phenomena.

Mitigation strategies
In the case of the São Paulo Metropolitan Region the work of USP encountered a strong correlation between its urbanization process and alterations in the rainfall regime. The episodes of extreme rains, of more than 40 mm, are increasing as the population of São Paulo and its neighboring cities grows and the territories of these municipalities become practically one huge urban sprawl, with little green, a lot of asphalt and full of sources of pollution and heat. From 1940 to 2010, the population of the metropolitan region increased ten-fold, from 2 million to 20 million inhabitants. The urban sprawl grew 12 times between 1930 and 2002, from 200 to 2,400 sq.km. The average annual temperature of São Paulo went up 3°C between 1933 and 2009, according to the records of the IAG’s station in the Parque do Estado, and the total rainfall increased by a third. “We used to study this process in a theoretical way before,” says Pedro Leite da Silva Dias. “Now we have more data, including digital sources.”

Mitigating the effect of heat islands may be a way of reducing episodes of extreme rain in urban centers. Physicist Edmilson Dias de Freitas, from the IAG-USP, has tested some measures in computer simulations to get an idea of their impact on the climate of the São Paulo Metropolitan Region. Painting the surfaces of houses and buildings white would not be an effective procedure. “The pollution of meteorological events quickly darkens the white in São Paulo,” says Freitas. “There’s no way of maintaining this.” The most effective measure would be to increase the city’s vegetation cover. According to the simulations, if 25% of the metropolitan region’s area were covered with trees, the average temperature could be reduced by between 1.5°C and 2.5°C. A more amenable climate would reduce the heat island effect and would perhaps not attract so much rain to the region. Green areas represent less than 10% of the Greater São Paulo area today.

Indirectly, if there more parks and fewer areas impermeable to rain in the biggest Brazilian metropolis, the most perverse effect of the storms would also be minimized: intense rain would produce fewer floods. Exposed soil absorbs more of the rain that falls on it. “São Paulo violates a basic principle of drainage: rainwater has to filter into the soil where it falls,” says civil engineer, Denise Duarte, a professor at the School of Architecture and Urbanism of USP, who collaborates with colleagues from the IAG. “Here, with a large part of the city impermeable, the water is simply channeled away.” The rain from one place is transferred to other places, which are generally located at low points in the urban sprawl.

The current figure of approximately 1,600 mm annually of rain recorded in the IAG’s station functions as a generic reference for the current rainfall regime in the metropolitan region. In an area that today extends over 8,000 sq.km. and includes the territories of 39 municipalities, the amount of rain really measured year by year in each meteorological station may vary a lot. Work by the CCST traces a type of geographic distribution of rainfall in the Greater São Paulo area from historical data, with the daily total rainfall being supplied by 94 meteorological stations of the Department of Waters and Energy (DAEE) in the State of São Paulo and the National Waters Agency (ANA). Data for a 25-year period, between 1973 and 1997, were used in the work.

In the wettest areas, which are generally dotted with hills and mountains, annual rainfall may reach 2,400 mm, an amount of rain similar to that of the Amazon rainforest. Such is the case with that part of the Greater São Paulo area that is crossed by the coastal range of hills, which affects the south of the capital and parts of cities like São Bernardo do Campo and Rio Grande da Serra, and also stretches of Santana do Parnaíba and Cajamar, in the west of the metropolitan region. In the less humid areas, like a large part of Mogi das Cruzes, the rainfall index may be around 1,300 mm a year. Between these two extremes there are various intermediary rainfall levels.

“This difference in rain levels extends throughout the year and in all climatic seasons,” says Guillermo Obregón, from the CCST, the main author of the study on the geographic distribution of rain in the metropolitan region. “In the wettest places orographic or relief rains predominate.” This mechanism makes the mass of hot and moist air rise until they collide with the topographic elevations, condense and generate frequent precipitation. Whether it’s because of its buildings and asphalt, or whether it is because of its mountainous areas, the Greater São Paulo region seems to be right in the path of the rains.

Scientific articles
1 Silva Dias, M.A.F. et al. Changes in extreme daily rainfall for São Paulo, Brazil. Climatic Change. In press. 2012.
2 Marengo, J. A. et al. The climate in future: projections of changes in rainfall extremes for the Metropolitan Area of São Paulo (Masp). Climate Research. In Press. 2012

More water in the Guanabara

The rainfall in the Metropolitan Region of Rio de Janeiro, the second biggest in the country with 12.5 million inhabitants, seems to exhibit tendencies similar to those of São Paulo. Although the Rio state capital does not have historical data relating to rainfall that is as long and reliable as that of the IAG-USP, two stations belonging to the National Institute of Meteorology (Inmet) installed in Rio de Janeiro supply reasonable quality data on at least four decades of rain.

According to the records obtained between 1967 and 2007 by the station on the Alto da Boa Vista, the amount of rain that falls on this district in the north of the capital on days when there are heavy storms has risen on average by 11.7 mm a year. The station is in the Tijuca National Park, one of the biggest urban forests on the planet. “There has been a tendency for the total rainfall in the metropolitan region to increase and the forest areas, like the Alto da Boa Vista, have become more humid,” says meteorologist Claudine Dereczynski from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), the main author of the study that has not yet been published.

The other Inmet station is located in Santa Cruz, a district with fewer green areas to the west of the city. In this region, the signs of intensification of the rains were discrete, according to the information collected between 1964 and 2009, and were not considered statistically significant. “In Rio, the weather data for the last two decades clearly signal an increase in the local temperature, but less clearly a rise in the amount of rain,” says Claudine. Simulations made by researchers from Inpe and UFRJ are projecting an increase in intensity and frequency both of days with heavy rain and well as those that are dry for the next few decades. Rainfall has a tendency to become less poorly distributed throughout the year and to be more heavily concentrated on some days.

The contrast between the Real Parque shantytown and the buildings on the Nova Faria Lima area, on the southside of São Paulo city

Brazil’s urban problems have become more complex in the last few decades and FAPESP, during the course of its 50 years, has financed the work of researchers who have revealed this transformation. If in the 1970s the studies diagnosed the outskirts of metropolises as territories that were heavily affected by waves of migration and were uniformly divorced from the presence of the State, current research indicates that they have become heterogeneous and have the benefits of public health and education services, although of uneven quality; however, the life of the inhabitants is jeopardized due to transport deficiencies and violence, to mention only two examples. Another change is the possibility of bringing together data on cities and using this, with the aid of IT resources, to generate new knowledge and applications for society. “The mass of data available today is gigantic and allows one to conduct far-reaching studies. Not very long ago, researchers had to restrict their research targets because of the difficulties of collating data,” explains Marta Arretche, a professor from the Department of Political Science of the School of Philosophy, Literature and Humanities (FFLCH) at the University of São Paulo (USP) and director of CEM (the Center of Metropolis Studies), one of the 11 Cepids (Centers of Research, Innovation and Dissemination) supported by FAPESP from 2000 to 2011.

One of the CEM vocations is to produce and disseminate geo-referenced data on the main Brazilian metropolises. “When we began, geo-processing wasn’t very developed in Brazil and the cartographic bases, rare,” says Eduardo Marques, a professor at the same USP department and director of the center from 2004 to 2009. “Public bodies produced data that were not available in the end. We bought databases, digitized and integrated others, used them in our research and put them on our site, free of charge.” The center also conducts commissioned studies and projects. When some government sphere needs a specific piece of work, CEM does the geo-processing with the available data, which are analyzed and cross referenced by the center’s researchers.

CEM is housed at Cebrap, the Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning, the institution that was responsible in the 1970s for fundamental urban sociology studies. One of theses was “São Paulo 1975:growth and poverty.” This was sponsored by the Ford Foundation and the Archdiocese of São Paulo. The book’s underlying thesis is that economic growth is not incompatible with the increase in social inequalities, but can amplify them. This turned the work into a benchmark reference of the dictatorship era. The sort of research conducted by CEM at present differs from what was done back then, comments Eduardo Marques. “In the 1970s, the metropolis was the locus for discussion on major themes on the research agenda, such as democracy, capitalism and dependency, but it wasn’t a target in and of itself. Today, it is the central focus of the research,” he states.

In the past, urban sociology studies tended to be essay-like, rather than empirical. The book Pesquisa e desenvolvimento [Research and development], from 1973, which describes FAPESP’s activities in its first decade, records the first financing provided by the Foundation for studies in this field. From 1962 to 1963, professors Azis Simão and Douglas Monteiro, from FFLCH/USP, got support for the study “Sociabilidade espontânea e organizada em um bairro da capital” [Spontaneous and organized sociability in a district of the capital]. The research was conducted in Vila Diva, on the east side of the city of São Paulo, where a questionnaire was applied to 178 homes. However, this was never published. “It was important because virtually no field research was done back them,” recalls Eva Alterman Blay, a retired professor from the FFLCH Department of Sociology, who worked as a volunteer and helped to apply the questionnaires. “The place was a long way away and hard to get to.”

Living at risk
Naturally, the critical mass formed in the 1960s was important for the establishment of the bases of the current studies. Lúcio Kowarick, a professor from the Department of Political Science of FFLCH and one of the authors of the study “São Paulo 1975: crescimento e pobreza” [São Paulo 1975: growth and poverty] recalls the first funding that he got from FAPESP, in 1966. He had left Brazil in 1964, fearful of political persecution from the dictatorship, and had moved to France, where he began his master’s degree with a French government scholarship. After two years, the grant became insufficient, so he sought out William Saad Hossne, then the scientific director of FAPESP. “I explained the situation and he asked me to write a letter explaining that I was in France for political reasons. He gave me a grant for the two remaining years and I was able to complete my master’s degree,” Kowarick recalls. He says that FAPESP was also important for him by enabling him to attend seminars abroad. In the early 2000s, Kowarick received a research grant that yielded the study “Viver em risco: moradia, desemprego e violência urbana na Grande São Paulo” [Living at risk: housing, unemployment and urban violence in the Greater São Paulo]. Based on the narratives of inhabitants of shantytowns, slums and clandestine housing developments, the study showed, among other evidence, that violence has become a strong contingency in the life of the inhabitants of the outskirts of the metropolis. The fear of violence limits the times at which people go out and imposes a code of silence. The research involved students who had received young investigator awards and master’s degree grants and resulted in a book that won the Jabuti Prize in 2009 in the Humanities category.

One of the FAPESP initiatives in the late 1990s was the Program of Research into Public Policies. This helped to push forward collaboration between the researchers of urban problems and the administrators of cities. Raquel Rolnik, a professor from the School of Architecture and Urbanism of USP, had two projects approved by this program and highlights their effects. “One of them involved the preparation of materials to train the city administrators to understand the Statute of Cities, which was passed in 2001,” he states. “The materials became known at the Statute Kit, with a game, a primer, a video and other materials being distributed to the city administrators,” he states. The content was based on research into the social, territorial and municipal realities of cities in São Paulo state. The group that Raquel coordinated also obtained FAPESP financing for a series of studies, which began in the 1990s and are now being updated. The mapped the evolution of São Paulo state municipalities from the point of view of their conditions of urbanization. An analysis of the 2010 Census, as compared to the 1980, 1991 and 2000 censuses, shows a complex situation. “The worst urbanization conditions don’t necessarily affect the poorer towns. Precariousness affects metropolitan fringes more, the outskirts of the places where the greatest wealth and the strongest struggle for urban land occurs, in an occupation process devoid of regulations that has continued to operate in the last few decades,” he states, mentioning the cities on the northern São Paulo State coast and of the Baixada Santista area and, in the case of the São Paulo Metropolitan Area, of its more recently occupied municipalities, such as Ferraz de Vasconcelos and Francisco Morato. “What we want to understand today is how the wealth produced by the city does or does not transform itself into better conditions of urbanization,” says Raquel.

FAPESP’s most robust and articulated investment, however, was the Center of Metropolis Studies ), supported by the foundation for 11 years. “During the course of its history, CEM matured, strengthened its ties with institutional partners and with society, and fine-tuned the focus of its research, becoming an internationally relevant institution,” says Hernan Chaimovich, the coordinator of the program of Cepids, to which CEM used to be connected. Marta Arretche, the center’s director, explains that the institution gave up its ambition to provide one great solution for the problems of the metropolis, because this task proved to be impossible. Instead, CEM started to select specific themes to which it might make a contribution. Among the organization’s most important studies, the Map of Social Vulnerability stands out. This resorted to Census data and geo-processing techniques to map poverty in the city of São Paulo. The main source of the cartographic map, released in 2004, was the Census of the year 2000. It produced a mosaic of the status of each one of the 13 thousand sectors of the city as established by IBGE, and managed to capture specific  situations of vulnerability in groups of 300 to 400 families in each census sector. “The map was important to show that income is a limited variable for determining poverty,” says Marta Arretche. “It became clear that access to public services and equipment, among several factors, may put two families with the same income in very different situations of vulnerability,” she states. Another relevant study was coordinated by political scientist Argelina Figueiredo, CEM’s first director. Surveys were conducted in São Paulo, Salvador and Rio de Janeiro with samples of 40% of the poorest population. “They showed that the poor generally do have access to healthcare and education, regardless of their income. Access to services is devoid of any criteria of favoritism,” says Marta Arretche.

Personal networks
Studies led by Eduardo Marques and Nadya Araújo Guimarães showed the role of social networks in terms of access to work and income. The networks define themselves as a set of people who know each other, such as friends, family, work colleagues or school mates, that an individual can turn to when looking for a job, going through difficult financial times or trying to close a business deal. The variety of types of networks, even among the poorest population, shows different situations. Vulnerability is greater when a person can only resort to a limited group of contacts, who are generally their family and neighbors, whose situation is very similar to that of the individual. One of the most important pieces of information in this line of research stemmed from comparing types of networks in the poor and the middle class. On average, the networks of the poor are smaller, less varied, more local and more centered in their neighborhood. The poorer the individual, the more his networks are in line with these features. However, the networks also vary within each group. This is the case of the networks of poor and of middle class adolescents, both of which comprise family members, family friends and, above all, schoolmates. The process of differentiation between them helps to exemplify the effect of the networks upon the individual`s path and upon the reproduction of social inequalities.

“In both the groups, they are large, varied and comprised of people with similarities,” says Eduardo Marques. However, when the individual becomes an adult, an abyss grows between the poor and the middle class. “The explanation lies in access to universities. Those who enter university have four, five or six years in which to build a network of people in the same profession. If the person is a physician, it will be network of physicians, which this person can turn to in the case of unemployment or if the person needs a business partner.” Those who have no access to university end up maintaining the same network they had and find it difficult to keep it up. “Imagine a cook in a bakery. His network consists of one or two work colleagues. If he becomes unemployed, he will take any job that turns up. If it is in another area, he will lose the original network and build another. The poor are forever throwing out parts of their network,” he says.

A recent study led by Marta Arretche shows a rarely explored feature of the widespread availability of education and healthcare services, the main providers of which are the municipal administrations. “This phenomenon is heavily influenced by the action of the federal administration. Constitutional rules oblige states and municipalities to spend 25% of their resources on education and 15% on healthcare, as well as maintaining municipal education and health councils. Furthermore, federal regulation affects the type of policy implemented by local and state administrations. If they do not maintain family health programs and community agent programs, they will not get federal funds. The margin for maneuvering of mayors is limited – they can decide, at most, whether they will invest more heavily in the downtown areas or in the outlying districts,” she states.