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Abstract

For most of the 1990s the city of São Paulo has witnessed a series of interventions of both private enterprise and municipal authorities in order to adjust it to the neoliberal urban ideal, trying to strengthen its role as a global city, main business center of South America. Private investments have been made to increase the offer of prime office buildings, creating a new urban centrality in the margins of Pinheiros river. The city government has associated with private enterprise through the legal device of operações urbanas (urban operations), doing major public works to improve the road system, removing favelas (slum quarters), helping to increase the return of private investments, causing the expulsion of low-income population, thus aggravating the problem of the socio-spatial segregation. At the same time, the reaction of social housing movements have promoted the invasion of several unoccupied buildings in the city center, searching to stress the problems of segregation, the lack of a social housing policy and the central area real estate vacancy. Some actions have been made, still as local projects, but with the possibility of extending for the whole center. The aim of this paper is to assess the production of the urban space in the city of São Paulo in the last decade, the role played by social agents in this process, its social consequences and forms for future action that searches a bigger social inclusion. The paper concludes that it is necessary to deepen the discussion about the property social function and the enforcement of a new urban policy that searches social inclusion, considering the promotion of social housing as a strategy to regenerate the city center.