Urban renewal of the Luz region in São Paulo: from the experience of espoliation under neoliberalism and financialization to the classe struggle

• Autor(a) principal: Petrella, Guilherme Moreira
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng; por
• Título da fonte: Pós. Revista do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Arquitetura e Urbanismo da FAUUSP (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://www.revistas.usp.br/posfau/article/view/154916
• topic: Luz region; Downtown São Paulo; Urban renewal; Capitalized income; Financial real estate complex; Tight to the city; Região da Luz; Centro de São Paulo; Renovação urbana; Renda capitalizada; Complexo imobiliário financeiro; Direito à cidade

The Luz region, in the center of São Paulo, has been the object of urban renewal plans since the 1970s, with a view to reversing socio-spatial degradation. Among these plans, those proposed in the 21st century converge in their ways of acting: spatial restructuring in the real estate and infrastructureoverlapping carried out through public-private partnerships, which centralize productive capital (real), unproductive capital (fictitious) and the State (laws, financing, public policies and monopoly on the use of violence). They guide the immediate constitution of the global financial real estatecomplex. Despite the architectural and urbanistic strategies, with their differentiated formal conceptions, their “truth” is economic viability. In this sense, the “right to housing” appears and is realized as a “right to property”. Thus, propertyconstitutes the structure of this form of urbanizationand allows the privatization of social wealth through the arbitrary construction of the price of the real estate product, associated with indebtedness (public and private): a class domination and its proprietary fractions over production and the consumption of space, which, at the limit, indicates the survival of capital accumulation at the expense of the reproduction of life.