Bulding the city, urbanity and urban environmental heritage: the case of Bixiga, São Paulo.

Abstract

The so-called globalization and/or productive restructuration produces obsolesced and abandoned ports, industrial neighborhoods, railway margins and historical city centers. It happens due to factors such as new technologies of communication, the divorce between politics and power, as well as to weakened bonds and structures. The obsolescence produced by capitalism generates the need for regenerating well located urban fabrics, although quite often in a “spontaneous” way, that is, driven solely by the market, without mediation of a project. To be sustainable, the notion of urbanity must encompass the local development, its links to the social fabric and the possibility for encounters and exchanges among people in the public space. Local development, as a priority in new urban policies, may be understood in several ways. It connects to the economic dimension, being then measured by the accumulated local built environment, by jobs and income creation, by increased fiscal autonomy of local administrations and by diversification and improvement of economic activities which integrate marginalized populations. In social terms, it is linked to the inclusion of different cultural and social groups. It is possible to face the excluding effects of the new world order with programs and projects which make the most of each region’s specificities, starting from local populations demands. Cultural heritage must be dealt with as an urban environment matter. People’s appropriation of the public space produces urbanity; participation in identifying and protecting cultural heritage contributes in constructing the future of cities. How can we promote urbanity in this new context? What are the contemporary urban regulation instruments? How to formulate a sustainable cultural heritage protection policy? How to build the city from its heritage as a departing point? The proposal is to reestablish an agenda that brings the concept of Urban Environmental Heritage back to the front line.

The verticalization, an act of multiplying urban land, increases density, placing a larger amount of inhabitants enjoying advantageous urban locations can be done including urbanity. How to define a compact city? How to define urbanity? In the case of São Paulo, how do the instruments of the city’s new masterplan can enable the production of public spaces and the effective preservation of cultural heritage? Using the Bixiga neighborhood as a case study, this article raises questions regarding preservation policies and redeveloping historic neighborhoods, and proposes a new agenda for cultural preservation.