Centrality production, space monopoly and dispossession: looking at the southern frontier of São Paulo’s Southwest Vector

Abstract

In this article, we discuss the process of producing business centralities in previously non-central areas of São Paulo. Considering the tendency to a new expansion of the spatial axis of the metropolis that concentrates command activities of large companies, the so-called Southwestern Vector, we analyzed the Urban Intervention Project Arco Jurubatuba, an urban restructuring plan proposed in 2018. This project targets an area that we identified as the southern border of the Southwestern Vector and its proposals seem to favor the advancement of a real estate front. However, the objectives and possible impacts of the project are not homogeneous in relation to the territory. In order to understand the process of centrality production, we discuss the conditions related to the concentration of economic and political power in certain urban areas. In view of the economic meaning of such a process, we examine the role of centrality as a privileged location, which generates monopoly conditions for certain sectors of the real estate market. We also discuss the fundamental participation of the State in the attribution of centrality to new locations, substituting uses and elaborating new images and symbolic contents for space through the mobilization of legal devices and its repressive force.