The Streets of Sao Paulo. Berlage Institute Research Report n. 47

“The Streets of São Paulo” is an attempt to understand the reality of contemporary São Paulo starting from its geographic condition. Faced with the need to confront with a 20 millions inhabitants metropolitan region, the 2011 Berlage Institute, first year, spring term studio proposes to combine a precise reading of the metropolis at geographic scale, a detailed phenomenology of its infrastructural system and a careful investigation of three different infrastructural systems within the metropolitan area. The studio recognizes a series of strategic areas with the potential to concentrate geographic understanding of the city and working at the scale of the single architectural intervention. By focusing the attention at possible crossing points over the São Paulo highways system, the projects (a series of pedestrian bridges combined with public program) expose the possibility to use São Paulo metropolitan landscape as an element in the construction of the collective memory of the city. The bridges in fact, not only connect neighbourhoods that have been separated by the highways, but offer a new view over the metropolitan landscape, highlighting the complex link between the infrastructure and the geography of the planalto and framing the lengthy drives of the Paulistas, and become landmarks for the drivers that go through the complex infrastructural system.