Creative Destruction: Housing, Segregation, and Citizenship in Post–World War II São Paulo

In one of his best-known sambas, a tune titled “Saudosa Maloca,” Adoniran Barbosa tells the story of three friends who lived together in a rundown building near downtown São Paulo until, one day, they were evicted by their landlord. Standing in the middle of the street with their belongings strewn around them, the three friends watched helplessly as their home was torn down. Years later, a tall building arose on the very same spot as their beloved maloca. Barbosa’s samba bears uncanny similarities to what the residents of Vila Barros, one of São Paulo’s oldest and largest tenements (cortiço) experienced in the mid-1950s when their dwellings were demolished to make way for Edifício Japurá, a sixteen-story modernist residential housing complex. By focusing on the circumstances surrounding the destruction of Vila Barros and the construction of Edifício Japurá, this paper tells how São Paulo’s postwar urban renewal tore the city’s social fabric. The paper pays close attention to a group of architects and social reformers and their efforts to rebuild downtown São Paulo along modernist lines and, just as important, to introduce housing solutions for working-class Paulistanos inspired by design principles developed by Le Corbusier. The paper also explores how the urban poor, especially the residents of Vila Barros (socially and racially diverse), resisted the vision of the city promoted by leading Paulistanos by challenging the dominant narrative of cortiços as hotbeds of crime and promiscuity and by using the court system to halt the demolition of their homes and avoid having to relocate to the outskirts of the city. Exploring the tensions surrounding the making of Edifício Japurá, this paper shows how the efforts to transform São Paulo into a modern and progressive city further divided Brazil’s largest metropolis along the lines of class and race.