Forefront Excerpt: The Many Lives of Luz

An introductory excerpt from this week’s Forefront.

Credit: Tuca Vieira

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A 123-acre redevelopment project in the heart of São Paulo has set off a debate in the Brazilian megacity, with some saying that the deal will profit real estate developers at the expense of lower- and working-class people. In Forefront this week, Greg Scruggs examines the multibillion-dollar saga, finding unprecedented land use policies that could have long-lasting implications for an entire country.

There’s no denying that the 123 acres in São Paulo that the city has dubbed “Nova Luz”— better known to locals as the neighborhoods of Santa Ifigênia and Luz — have seen better days. Indeed, the whole center of Brazil’s largest city hollowed out over the 1970s and ’80s as major government offices and business headquarters decamped to more modern quarters across town. Yet downtown’s charms remain, from a stained-glass public market to a towering Gothic cathedral to vintage early 20th century architecture. It all frames a bohemian mix of punk bars, used-book stores and edgy nightclubs that give São Paulo the air of downtown New York in the 1970s.

In the busy commercial stretches of Santa Ifigênia, motorcycle parts, audio gear and computer repair are the name of the game. They thrive by clustering, an old-school strategy anathema to the retail mix imperative of São Paulo’s tony shopping malls. The local business association numbers the neighborhood’s small businesses at 15,000, responsible for 50,000 direct jobs and potentially hundreds of thousands more through wholesale business that originates with goods sold here. A smattering of students and artists brush shoulders with a much larger, much poorer population that squeezes into tenements or a handful of squatter settlements in abandoned hotels and office buildings. With its affordable rents and central location, the neighborhood has also become a welcoming spot for new immigrants to the city, a kind of Little Latin America, home to Bolivians, Ecuadorians and especially Peruvians.

It is here that city leaders are battling over one of the world’s largest urban redevelopment projects, financed by the biggest public-private partnership in the country’s history and requiring large-scale expropriation that would result in the relocation of hundreds of families. The Projeto Nova Luz (or the “New Light Project,” a reference to the Luz neighborhood and a nearby train station) is a heated controversy about the center of Sampa, as São Paulo is affectionately known. With its downtown bouncing back to life after decades of disinvestment, these 45 blocks of prime real estate are ripe for serious changes with potentially life-altering consequences for the people — a mix of the city’s poor and working class, native and foreign-born — who call this corner of the Brazilian megalopolis home.

To outsiders, the diverse, busy neighborhood has only one name: Cracolândia, or “Crackland.” As Brazil cruelly relives America’s urban catastrophe of the 1980s, there are mini-cracklands in scattered dark and forgotten corners across São Paulo. But the most visible, central and polemical crackland bloomed right in the heart of the Luz, near a deactivated intercity bus terminal, for the better part of a decade. When the building was demolished in 2010, the hundreds of zombified users, known locally as noias (an abbreviation for “paranoids”), blossomed and thronged nearby streets nightly.

After several years of hysterical reporting that gained international attention, the São Paulo police launched a heavy-handed operation in January 2012 to forcibly remove addicts, demolish drug dens and arrest dealers. The public handwringing that followed highlighted the lack of treatment options and public officials’ unwillingness to confront the root of the problem, although opinion polls indicated 85 percent of residents supported the measures. This despite 68 percent of Paulistanos believing, according to the poll, that even what essentially amounted to a police occupation wouldn’t halt the local drug trade.

Many thought that the police operation was the harbinger of construction cranes. With a surplus of affordable real estate, two commuter rail terminuses and two multi-line subway stations — including the brand new Line 4 with swift service to key financial districts — the neighborhood is a real estate developer’s dream. Rocky past aside, what’s now being called Nova Luz has long attracted the interest of São Paulo elite, who view its not-yet-packed-to-capacity streets as a final frontier in the city’s march toward global capital status. Plans drawn up by a consortium of four organizations, led by the multinational engineering and project management company AECOM, envision the area as the city’s newest arts district.

Thrust into the center of a multibillion-dollar real estate deal, the current residents of this long-neglected downtown neighborhood have become unwitting guinea pigs in a test case with implications for the future of urban redevelopment in São Paulo, as well as for grassroots citizen activism in a nascent democracy. The end game for Nova Luz has ramifications for all of Brazil, as the legality of the land expropriations at the heart of the project could set a new precedent to be replicated across the country.

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Tags: economic developmentimmigrationsao paulo

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