Morphological legacies and informal city: understanding urban dynamics in the Vetor Leste do Centro in São Paulo

From the middle of the 20th century, the center of São Paulo began to undergo a deep urban transformation resulting from the transfer of the ruling classes to other sectors of the city. The related dislocation of higher-income housing, trade and services toward the south- west of the metropolis has left the city center in a social, economic and urban decay. The Vetor Leste do Centro, classified as the first industrial suburb of São Paulo, is the territory that has most being participated in the urban metropolitan process and it repre- sents the privileged area where the sedimentation of ways to inhabit has produced con- tinuous spatial modifications. Its intrinsic condition of centrality, as well as being the gate- way for the Easter Zone of the city, demonstrates a series of historical and geographical conflicts of the Varzea Do Carmo’s urbanization which confers the peculiar morphology to the area. Consequently, to read its tissue it means recognizing the sequence of each life cycles that the metropolis of Sao Paulo has experienced through its urban expansion, from its colonial period until nowadays. The analysis starts by recognizing, in the urban morphology, distinctive elements of typical industrial landuse. The criterion, that has been chosen as the driving guideline, is the spatial and functional modification occurred inside each urban block during the industrial dismission. The paper critically examines how the urban area of the VLC represents one of the most complex and interesting case for understanding how formal and informal practices has intervened in the production of the urban spaces of this large metropolis.