Teresa Caldeira and São Paulo: Growth, Inequality and Equity

The growth of São Paulo and its inequality are the subject of the anthropologist Teresa Caldeira, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has spent four decades explaining how South America's largest metropolis went from two million inhabitants in 1950 to more than twenty in its metropolitan region, and how that growth produced a city split between protected enclaves and self-built peripheries. Her main work, City of Walls (2000), and her article on peripheral urbanization (2017) form a complete reading of São Paulo as a laboratory of urban inequality and of the struggle for equity.

Centre and periphery: the autoconstruction that built São Paulo

Caldeira first reconstructs the centre-periphery pattern that dominated from the 1940s to the 1980s. Millions of migrants from the Brazilian Northeast arrived to work in industry and, without public housing or credit, bought cheap plots in irregular subdivisions on the periphery and built their houses with their own hands over decades. That autoconstruction, which Caldeira has studied with James Holston, produced most of the city: whole neighbourhoods raised by their inhabitants, at first without asphalt or sewers, which later demanded services by organising in associations and forced the state to arrive. The periphery was not the failure of planning but its substitute.

Fortified enclaves: the fragmented city since the 1980s

From the 1980s the pattern changed. Rising violence and fear of crime led the middle and upper classes to withdraw into fortified enclaves, condominiums, towers and guarded malls, often built next to favelas, so that rich and poor live close by without sharing space. City of Walls analyses that segregation of proximity and the talk of crime that justifies it, and shows that walls do not reduce violence but redistribute it toward those who cannot pay for protection. The resulting fragmented city replaces geographic distance with physical and symbolic barriers.

Peripheral urbanization: the peripheries' own logic

In Peripheral Urbanization (2017) Caldeira proposes reading the peripheries of São Paulo, and by extension those of the Global South, through a logic of their own. They are produced transversally to the law, occupying first and regularising later; they are built over time, with houses growing floor by floor for decades; and they generate politics, because those who made them become citizens who claim rights. That logic explains both the precarity and the creativity of the peripheries, which in recent decades have produced a culture of their own, rap, poetry saraus, pixação graffiti, that Caldeira has studied as a way of claiming the city.

The struggle for equity and its limits

The struggle for equity has had uneven results. The 2001 City Statute, the regularisation of settlements, upgrading programmes and transport have improved the periphery, but inequality has reorganised itself: new gated developments on the edges, expulsion of the poor from central areas that gain value and a violence now managed by criminal organisations and a lethal police. Caldeira shows that inclusion policies coexist with the privatisation of security and space, and that the city does not move in a single direction.

Caldeira's lesson about São Paulo applies to many metropolises: urban inequality is not a residue that growth corrects but a structure that growth produces, with autoconstruction as its base and walls as the response. Understanding the city requires looking at once at those who built it with their hands and those who protect themselves from them, and an equity policy has to act on both: recognising and upgrading the periphery, and dismantling the walls that keep it out.