Railway Workers’ Housing in the State of São Paulo: Typologies, Hierarchies, and Contemporary Preservation Challenges

Abstract

Housing built for railway workers constitutes a structural component of São Paulo’s industrial-railway heritage by articulating home, work, and surveillance across different territorial contexts. This article analyzes the role of these buildings in the operation of São Paulo’s railways from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, with an emphasis on rural housing colonies in small and medium-sized towns that belonged to the former Estrada de Ferro Araraquara (EFA), the study’s empirical core. The aim is to understand how the formal configuration, site layout, and internal organization of this set express corporate policies of accommodation and control, as well as the ambiguities of its social persistence in the present. The methodology combines architectural and photographic survey, analysis of design documents preserved in archival collections, and a review of the literature on railway villages, mobilizing these materials to identify construction patterns, functional rationalities, and contemporary uses. The inventory highlights the typological diversity of the surveyed examples, their insertion within railway complexes, and the uneven processes of transformation and preservation currently underway. As a contribution, the article shifts the focus from studies traditionally centered on passenger buildings and urban villages owned by major companies, and incorporates EFA housing examples located in rural areas and in little-examined stretches, bringing them into debates on labor memory and preservation policies. The results thus indicate that the continued presence of these dwellings in the territory challenges hierarchical, fragmented heritage readings centered on formal exceptionalism, requiring approaches capable of recognizing their historical, social, and conflictual dimensions in the present.