Shopping Centers em São Paulo: imaginário de transformações urbanas

Abstract

The goal of this study is to analyze the establishment of Shopping Malls in the City of São Paulo during the last decades of the 20th Century. These enterprises – a highly visible aspect of a modernization that is multifaceted, both in terms of a commercial activity and real estate, and as regards social habits and behaviors – have come to constitute intricate and significant complexes within the metropolis of São Paulo, easily recognizable by their architectural and urban characteristics.
Shopping Malls were set up in São Paulo as a shop window for new patterns of consumption and leisure behavior and have established themselves as one of the major images of changes in the times and in city living. Their size makes them active instruments of economic intervention and spatial development in various regions of the city.
From a theoretical standpoint, these enquiries seek to understand the role played by these elements expressing the contemporaneity of the metropolis of São Paulo in the production of the urban space, and as a factor and product of the fragmentation of the urban fabric and the emergence of new centers. From a symbolic standpoint, they bring a modern slant to the discussion of the necessary reassessment of both the public and the private dimensions in the urban space, reflecting the crisis as regards traditional public spaces and introducing deep changes in the sphere of ideological representations of the habits and patterns of the urban society.