A informalidade: sistema persistente de criação de territórios na cidade de São Paulo

Abstract

The informality: persistent creation of territories in the city of Sao Paulo. In Sao Paulo, the city’s informal settlements such as “camelôs”, slums and social movements pro-dwelling appear in the media as obstacles to the implementation of urban plans for rehabilitation of degraded areas of the city. But the hypothesis of this research follows the reverse of this idea and invests in the possibility that urbanism in Sao Paulo means precisely the tense dialogue between the formal and informal setting, that can be very interesting, considering informality as catalysts in the assimilation and the interaction between very different cultures assembled as a complex cultural mosaic. The theoretical references used in this work, though coming from different areas of knowledge, have in common the critical observation of decentralized systems of culture and thought in Latin America. With the help of theories we wish to verify how far we can say that informality in the uses of urban spaces can be considered a positive component in the production of culture in the city of Sao Paulo and how they structure the dialogical relations between formal and informal city. We want to highlight aspects of São Paulo that are considered marginal such as the heterogeneity of the streets, the incorporation of illegitimate uses of public spaces and the impossibility to determinate a dominant urban layout.