Urban renewal of the Luz region in São Paulo: from the experience of espoliation under neoliberalism and financialization to the classe struggle

Abstract

The Luz region, in the center of São Paulo, has been the object of urban renewal plans since the 1970s, with a view to reversing socio-spatial degradation. Among these plans, those proposed in the 21st century converge in their ways of acting: spatial restructuring in the real estate and infrastructure
overlapping carried out through public-private partnerships, which centralize productive capital (real), unproductive capital (fictitious) and the State (laws, financing, public policies and monopoly on the use of violence). They guide the immediate constitution of the global financial real estate
complex. Despite the architectural and urbanistic strategies, with their differentiated formal conceptions, their “truth” is economic viability. In this sense, the “right to housing” appears and is realized as a “right to property”. Thus, property
constitutes the structure of this form of urbanization
and allows the privatization of social wealth through the arbitrary construction of the price of the real estate product, associated with indebtedness (public and private): a class domination and its proprietary fractions over production and the consumption of space, which, at the limit, indicates the survival of capital accumulation at the expense of the reproduction of life.