Semiosis of the Minhocão

fifty years searching for a place in the center of São Paulo

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the shifting meanings attributed to the Elevado João Goulart (Minhocão), located in downtown São Paulo, drawing on a selection of Folha de S.Paulo news reports from three key moments: its inauguration (1971), an intermediate period (1996), and its fiftieth anniversary (2021). Grounded in discursive and tensive semiotics and articulated with the works of Marc Augé, Michel Lussault, and Bruno Latour, we argue that this urban dispositive —structurally unchanged — undergoes profound semiotic transformations: from a euphorically imagined non-place of late car-centered modernity, it becomes an anti-place associated with degradation, violence, and territorial loss, and is later reinscribed as a “hip” hyper-place centered on leisure, retrofit, and the production of symbolic goods. We propose a correlation between Latour’s categories of globalization-plus/globalization-minus and localization-plus/localization-minus and the figures of non-place, anti-place, hyper-place, and place, arranged within a tensive quadrant. Finally, we demonstrate how the newspaper begins to suggest the Minhocão as a space of diversified coexistence through a form of “proleptic reasoning,” anticipating a potential plural sense of belonging that is contested within the urban text. This study contributes to understanding how media discourses territorialize urban, environmental, and class ideologies in the Anthropocene.