South of the centre

Directly south of Sé Square is Liberdade, São Paulo’s large and colourful Asian (largely Japanese) district, with a great variety of restaurants and stores and a square that hosts folk festivals and a weekly open-air market. The Museum of Japanese Immigration is also in this district. West of Liberdade is the city’s Italian district, Bixiga. Well to Liberdade’s southeast is Independence Park, housing the Paulista and Zoological museums of the University of São Paulo. To its south are the districts of Jabaquara and Santo Amaro, site of the Empresarial Centre office complex (home to branches of many U.S. companies), which merge into the southwestern district of Campo Limpo, one of São Paulo’s larger industrial districts. Its expansion has spilled over into its southeastern neighbour Socorro, where the Interlagos Autodrome is the venue for Brazil’s Formula 1 Grand Prix competition races as well as other major auto races.

North of the centre

North of São Paulo’s centre are working-class neighbourhoods dotted with pockets of favelas, similar to those of other areas east and south of the centre. The run-down Luz district has been undergoing renovation since the early 2000s. The Jardim da Luz, a large park just above Luz Railway Station (1901), offers performance spaces and houses the Museum of Sacred Art (formerly the church and convent of Luz [1579]), a short distance farther north.

The upper reaches of the neighbourhood of Ifigênia, along with Campos Eliseos and Santa Cecilia to the northeast, became part of São Paulo at the beginning of the 20th century. To the west is more-developed Bom Retiro, traditionally home to immigrants from the Middle East and a large Jewish community, but since the 1970s populated by Korean immigrants. Nearby, the former Julio Prestes grand Victorian railway terminal has been transformed into a concert hall—the São Paulo Concert Hall, home of the São Paulo State Symphonic Orchestra.

Farther north the canalized Tietê River, with its bordering highways, provides a buffer for massive Anhembi Complex (1970), the site of a convention centre and the well-known Sambódromo, used for samba school parades during Carnival and for musical presentations.

On the south side of the river is another of the city’s large football stadiums, Canindé, home to the Portuguesa team. In the Água Branca neighbourhood, a mile south of the Tietê River and two miles north of Pacaembu, where the even more famous Corinthians now play, is the Palmeiras Sport Society’s Parque Antárctica. Across the railroad tracks to the north lies the Thomas Edison Industrial Park, extending up to the Tietê. While much of the northwest is largely poor, the northeast, stretching up to suburban Guarulhos, contains middle- and upper-class neighbourhoods.

East of the centre

The eastern boundary of the centre is constituted by long Dom Pedro II Park, a recreational oasis for Paulistanos, which runs along both sides of the canal of the Tamanduateí River reaching down from near the Municipal Market to the Minhocão elevated highway at the level of Liberdade. East of the park are a host of chiefly residential neighbourhoods of widely varying socioeconomic status. Like most outlying districts, they are characterized by low, red-roofed houses interspersed with high-rise apartments and office complexes, singly or in clusters. Farther south, in the populous working-class Moóca district, directly east of the city centre, yet another of the city’s football teams, Juventus, plays in Rua Javari Stadium. Still farther out, in Tatuapé district, is São Jorge Park, the original venue for the Corinthians, who now play most of their games in much larger Pacaembu Stadium.

Surrounding areas

São Paulo is surrounded on all sides by nearly two scores of industrial suburbs officially part of its metropolitan region. The largest include Diadema, São Bernardo do Campo, Santo André, São Caetano do Sul Mauá, and Ribeirão Pires to the south; Moji das Cruzes and Suzano on the east; Guarulhos in the north; and Osasco, Barueri, Cotia, and Itapecerica da Serra to the west. Guarulhos is the site of São Paulo’s international airport, while Santo Andre, São Bernardo do Campo, and São Caetano do Sul (locally referred to as the ABC suburbs) contain a high concentration of automobile and steel plants.

What most sets São Paulo apart from the world’s other large urban conglomerations is its unique proximity to other large metropolitan regions. The gap between São Paulo’s southern suburbs and the north edge of Greater Santos has all but disappeared except for the steep drop down the escarpment. Similarly, São Paulo’s northern suburbs reach out almost to the environs of Jundiaí, which itself is close to becoming an adjunct of Greater Campinas, whose steadily creeping southward edge is a mere 15 to 20 miles (25 to 30 km) away. Moreover, eastward toward Rio de Janeiro, the São Paulo suburb of Moji das Cruzes is about 20 miles from Jacareí, a satellite of São José dos Campos, which is fast becoming the hub of a metropolitan region that is not significantly smaller than Santos or Campinas, where Brazil’s aviation and aerospace industries are located. To the west, the São Paulo suburb of Cotia is only a little more than 30 miles (50 km) from Votorantim, an annex of fast-expanding Sorocaba.

At present rates of growth, São Paulo is at the centre of four metropolitan region “spokes.” With smaller but already populous projections filling in between these, an extended Greater São Paulo will embrace possibly millions more inhabitants. São Paulo’s planners and policy makers must confront this daunting prospect and at the same time attempt to maintain and improve infrastructure and services for the region’s several million favela inhabitants and hundreds of thousands more slum dwellers.