BUILDING UP WALLS - THE NEW PATTERN OF SPATIAL SEGREGATION IN SAO-PAULO

The article focuses on the new way in which spatial and social segrega tion is organized in contemporary Sao Paulo, Brazil. Throughout this c entury, segregation has found at least three different forms of expres sion in Sao Paulo's urban space. The first lasted from the late ninete enth century to the 1940s and produced a condensed city, in which diff erent social groups were packed into a small urban area and segregated by types of housing. The second urban form (1940s to 1980s) was the c entre-periphery, in which different social groups were separated by gr eat distances: the middle and upper classes lived in central and well equipped neighbourhoods and the poor lived in the precarious hinterlan d. A third form took shape in the 1980s. Its main instrument is the fo rtified enclave, and its legitimating rhetoric is that of the fear of crime. Recent transformations are generating a city in which different social groups are again closer in the city space, but separated by wa lls and technologies of security, and tending not to circulate or inte ract in common areas. The article argues that this pattern of segregat ion gives ground to a new type of public sphere. Its ideal is one of s eparateness and no longer one of commonality and universality.