Browsing 2016 - 4th WPSC "Global crisis, planning & challenges to spatial justice in the North and in the South", Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Јuly 3-8th by Author "Alca Barbosa Zola, Jordana"
The urban sprawl pattern in Sao Paulo was based on the allotment of scattered nuclei, more or less distant from the centre, connected to scarce axes where the modal infrastructures and urban services were concentrated. The growth of these nuclei generated extensive urban fabrics, predominantly residential and precariously urbanized, characterized till today by the shortage of public facilities and open spaces. In these fabrics, urban infrastructure was partially settled over public land, while the remaining properties were occupied in an informal and fragmented manner, subjected to their owners’ individual resources. This process was specially harmful in Sao Paulo’s portion of urban sites characterized by the river plains of its originally meandering main rivers, because the transformation of the wet physical environment into urban settlement – and then later industrial settlement – was made individually, through uncontrolled landfills in parceled plots, causing a series of environmental and urban issues related to the changed hydrological regimes, flooding points, soil contamination, discontinuities in the urban fabric and land irregularities. The urbanization works of Tiete’s floodplain, inside Sao Paulo’s municipal borders and launched at the end of the 19th century, could be seen as an exception in this course, because the rectification of a large stretch of Tiete River (1938 to 1968), together with urban land structuring, should have enabled the occupation of the new sanitized areas, which comprised 3300 hectares.