Global Reterritorialization

The end of the last decade was marked by the beginning of a new phase of the urban restructuring process, perceived through large-scale projects that intend the insertion of São Paulo in the system of global cities.

Urban development megaprojects are announced, financed by international capital, with the implantation of large architectural structures concentrating production, habitation, commerce and services, conditioning the occupation and the urban infrastructure of the entire region.

Vast urban enclaves, practically autonomous, directly linked to the corporate informational network systems, to the communication devices and international airports. The new urban geometry is marked by unstable and flexible territorialization, accenting the fragmentation of the central regions of the metropolis.

The city is definitively enrolled in the global real estate market, changing completely the production and financing mechanisms of functional and habitational constructions. The zoning, as well as the urban legislation that had followed, does not correspond anymore to this form of occupation, which exceeds all the considered limits.

The role of the public policies, the real estate sector and the financial sector is reviewed. The real estate sector makes an alliance with the international capital to propose interventions to the government, which will act according to these interests. It occurs a privatization of public spaces, of urban equipment and resources, once those megainterventions happens in a scale that demands to reorient the planned infrastructure for the city.

The implantation of these large urban redevelopment projects does not obey anymore the characteristic mechanisms of the previous processes of urban ‘rehabilitation’, based in small scale interventions, that intended to promote gradual transformations in the environment. The large dimensions and the investment volume of these new enterprises imply in that they have little relations with the existing occupation forms and activities in the areas.

Searching to establish a new standard of occupation, proper to the foreign capital intervention, they differ from the existing local urban organization. They tend to reconfigure entire regions, detaching themselves from the immediate urban environment, to rearticulate them with the international network of cities. Its scale is not anymore local, metropolitan, but global.