Hello there, I live in São Paulo, Brazil. -An introduction in the main aspects of the city, for those who don't know it: Founded in 1554, the 452 year city developed to a huge metro area with 11 million habitants and a total of 20 million in it's metropolitan region. That makes it the 2nd largest city and the 5th metro area in the world. It is an industrial, commercial and financial center for the hole country and for Latin America as well. Just to give an idea, the citys GDP was around 50 billion dollars in 2002. -Urban planning citywide: Unordered growth and planing mistakes made a lot of problems appear in the city in the last decades. The most important are: lots of poor people, pollution, massive traffic problems, floods (it rains a lot around here), crime, health and others. The city has made quite a lot of progress in the tratment of these problems, like: >Popular subsidized housing built over some of the famous "favelas"; >Avenue re-planning and reforms, new lines of subway, lots of bus lanes were added in the main commute channels, car shif? (i dont know the word in english, it is a law that states that for each week day some cars can't enter the city's expanded center. i.e: car plates ending 1 and 2 can't go to the central region on mondays); >'Piscinões" (the name itself means a large swimming pool. in fact it's a big flood control facility, which holds the water of the rain for a period of time before letting it go to the rivers and sewer systems ***); >The 2 main city rivers (Tietê and Pinheiros) are being dredged and having it's margins remade (paved). Tietê used to flood entire neighborhoods and caused a lot of prejudices in the past. Now, with the project almost concluded, even the most intense rains can't fill it enough. Ah, and they are making the river look quite good (a little too urban because of the concrete margs); >Crime is not a huge (but still big) problem when compared to other cities, like rio de janeiro (beautiful city by the way, dont scare yourself, you can go there with no need to worry...but i prefer my city ); >The city center has been really improved. It concentrates a LOT of the services workforce and some of the oldest buildingss in the city. Bovespa (são paulo stock exchange), BM&F (Commodities, futures, derivatives), government buildings, many banks and other institutions are there. It was getting quite ugly because of the abandonment by the government. Now it looks quite good, i was impressed in the last time i went there (i hardly go there). >Health is a massive problem...Public health is a mess and untrustable, so everyone with enough money buys a privete health plan. >Waste care and recycling: São Paulo is famous for it's solutions in this subject. We recycle a lot (nearly every aluminium can is recycled in a very short period of time) and have some interesting facilities like energy plants using the gas produced by the organic trash. >I could go on eternally... -urban planning in my area: I live in a neighborhood called Tatuapé. It is going through an intensive growth process, with loads of residential buildings showing up (loads = dozens and dozens). The traffic in the region has been affected badly due to this growth, so the streets are being converted into one way streets, crossings now have traffic lights, our 2 closer shopping malls are getting pretty crowded in the weekends and in my opinion this wave of expansion should have stopped a long time ago. It seems that planners didnt realize yet that when you take houses out and build big aparment buildings, you increase population density, overcrowding a place not meant to have such population. I would really apreciate if they limited the higher density zones to what they are now, but as the construction of theses buildings leads to job generation and tax income i guess nothing will change in the near future. I guess the information i put here is interesting for you all, and if you are interested in something else about my city feel free to ask. As a civil engineer i'm allways interested in urbanism talking. And i have some good pictures as well, i could post then if you want, just let me know.
