Sao Paulo

Chloe Marie Loader
Aug 1, 2017
3 min read

Why have so many people migrated to Sao Paulo?

This started off as a small village, which grew rapidly due to an influx of migrants, from other parts of Brazil, but also other countries around the world. Sao Paulo was originally inhabited by the Portuguese in order to convert the locals to Catholicism (Minster, 2017). The city became the hub of coffee trade in the 19th Century, attracting migrants from 1860, from Italy, Germany, Greece, Japan and Korea. Into the 20th Century, the city grew in other industries as well as coffee, growing physically and financially at a rapid rate. Sao Paulo began to expand and connect to neighbouring cities, through railways and this encouraged economic migrants from within other areas of Brazil, as well as other countries. This has led to a very diverse city, but has also created problems with homelessness, as there are now over 12 million inhabitants, making it the largest city in Latin America.

Many Brazilian families are forced to leave their homes every day, as land and real estate are becoming more and more expensive. There are housing programs, such as My House, My Life, which creates jobs and access to services, etc., allowing the lower income families to access what would previously have only been available to the high-income population, although these housing programs are usually placed on the periphery of cities (Rizek and Dal’Bo, 2017).

Sao Paulo is full of pockets of homeless people, as well as large favelas. Any area of unwanted space, such as grass verges and beneath bridges – these nearly always contain a community of the homeless. This ranges from pavement dwellers who move on day by day and long-term communities, looking for shelter and resorting to begging. The homeless population has been growing at 2-3% per year (Brevins, 2016), with the latest figures showing 16,000 people live on the streets and an estimated up to 2 million live in favelas.

But what is the government doing to help this situation?

On Saturday 29th July, 100 families were evicted from beneath an overpass in Sao Paulo as part of the Mayor’s revitalisation project. Although these people have been placed in temporary shelters, many events like this simply result in the squatters moving to a different location. The article below explains the event and shows images of the destruction and poverty.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/ap/article-4742776/Police-Brazil-evict-homeless-families-overpass.html

This is not a new way for the government to treat the homeless, as there have been many incidents in the past, including the idea to take away homeless people’s belongings to try to force them off the streets, called ‘urban care taking’. Julio Lancellotti is a Catholic priest who supports street dwellers – he said that ‘taking away a street dweller’s blanket is shameful, unethical, immoral, that’s sheer torture’. In June 2016, this led to 6 homeless people dying from the cold weather (Cruz, 2016) as they are not given adequate support, and their means of keeping warm in the Brazilian winter is often taken away from them.

How can sustainable urban planning prevent this from happening?

Revitalisation and development programs need to think about the future, with long term solutions. This involves economic and social aspects, by proving schemes to allow homeless people to afford their own homes, such as payment plans or schemes like My House My Life. Connectivity is a key issue in social housing and shelter development, as putting people on the edges of a city can exclude them from key employment areas, discouraging them from wanting to participate. In a city with excellent infrastructure, this would be reduced, but the cost and hassle of transport would also need to be considered.