The Making of the Middle-Class City: Transportation Policy in São Paulo

The adaptation of urban spaces to cope with increased automobile traffic has been called the ‘building of automobile cities’. This is a vague and otherwise politically naive interpretation of these important changes in capitalist societies. Cars do not run on their own and one has to ask who is behind the wheels, and for what purposes. I argue that these spatial transformations are definite economic and political undertakings related to capitalist modernization processes, in which the middle classes, as preferential partners of ruling classes, play the most important role. In these contexts, the automobile turns out to be an essential means for the reproduction of the middle classes in their pursuit of social mobility. Therefore I argue that these large transformations should instead be seen as the ‘building of middle-class cities’.

This paper is about how São Paulo was transformed into a middle-class city. In it I emphasize the period from 1960 to 1980, when the city population increased from 3.6 million to 8.5 million, and 1.6 million new automobiles were put into circulation. In this period Brazil experienced a highly dynamic capitalist modernization process, with high rates of GNP growth, under authoritarian (and often repressive) political rule. New middle-class sectors were generated, supported by the concentration of income and by their ideological commitment to the new regime. The city space was physically transformed to allow for a new pattern of circulation which was directly related to the new economic activities and the new lifestyle of these middle-class sectors, for whom the automobile became a vital means of social reproduction. The middle classes were represented, inside the state, by transportation planners who promoted the ideology of modernization. The space was then reshaped in a way which favored the circulation needs of the middle class population, in its prime role of driver, rather than the needs of the majority of the population, in their primary roles of pedestrian and captive public transportation user. Moreover, the mobility and fluidity needs of these selected middle-class sectors were pursued regardless of the safety and environmental consequences of the new circulation pattern.

Similar processes can be identified in the developing world where other middle-class cities have been created. In spite of social and political differences, these processes share the objective of readapting space to ease the circulation of the social sectors which are relevant to economic accumulation and political legitimation.