São Paulo

With over twenty million inhabitants, the São Paulo metropolitan region covers 900 square kilometers of urbanized area through thirty-nine municipalities, but its reach goes far beyond its boundaries. Its tentacles are present in distant locations in Brazil, in the continent, and in the whole world. São Paulo’s size and vastness comprise heterogeneous territories and social groups. It is a city connected to both real and virtual worlds of trade; it is an economic power, as well as a cradle for social movements and for Brazilian political leadership. But it is also a divided city crimped by both visible and invisible walls that rip its social fabric into ghettos, fortresses, and slums and besiege its public spaces. To be in the city is to be permanently exposed to its contradictory image of greatness, opulence, and poverty, with carts and armored SUVs, mansions and shacks, shopping malls and street vendors, and fancy food trucks and traditional popcorn sellers. At first glance, São Paulo looks like a fragmented city that does not seem to have originated from any kind of order. The city is in fact a child of chaos, of the wildest and ungoverned competition among individual projects aiming for social rise or simply survival, a product of the dreams of many generations of migrants and immigrants that came to the city seeking opportunities far from home. Urban plans and policy decisions have guided the city’s expansion over time, from the network of trains and trams in the 19th and early 20th centuries to the car-oriented grid of expressways from the 1940s to the present day. The bibliography on São Paulo is vast and has been produced by historians, geographers, architects, sociologists, and political scientists, among other disciplines, but is available mostly in Portuguese. In this selection, an effort was made to choose texts in English (when available), but also to cover essential readings from different disciplines, books or articles that have influenced generations of scholars, studies and authors that are considered classic works, being frequently cited, or, in a very few cases, are opening new paths and visions for the city today. The bibliography is organized by topics, starting with the city’s general and economic history, moving on to the political economy of its process of urbanization, and then covering specific themes.