São Paulo in the middle of the marginals: the paulistan image reflectedon the rivers Pinheiros and Tietê / São Paulo no centro das marginais: a imagem paulistana refletida nos Rios Pinheiros e Tietê

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2010

RESUMO

The rivers Pinheiros and Tietê have always stood out as a unique landscape on the hilly plateau over which São Paulo has settled. In a process of transformation already begun at the end of the 19th century and whose apex occurred during the 1940s and 1960s decades - when these creeks were channelized and rectified and a pair of urban freeways were built on their banks -, a new design shapes the biggest floodplains of the city. Time after time, new elements - bridges, pumping plants, railway, industrial, commercial and residential buildings, etc. -, are connected to this shape, then fit to the urban fabric. So the structuring character of the natural system is intensified by the marginal avenues3 that, besides adapting themselves to the growth of the city, contribute to the consolidation of the metropolitan region. In the other hand, the centre of this new shape - presented by the rivers themselves that, before the big changing, could create a harmonic relationship with the city by the development of social activities on their bed and banks -, suffered a continuous process of contamination that, added to the blocking provoked by the freeways and the railway, did isolate it from the urban fabric. By trying to reverse this framework, a program of requalification takes place in 1990, aiming to clean the waters as well as controlling the floods that still have been ravaging the metropolis. Though, in spite of this evident environmental degradation, we believe that the shape created by the rivers, the marginal avenues and the urban elements - for its physical-geographic and historical-cultural importance - constituted a urban visual communication system with a primordial character to the identity of São Paulo, and in which the first elements, by being strictly connected to the heart of the creation of this system, stand out as essential for reflecting representations of the city itself. So we intend to investigate the confirmation of this fact by a theoretical analysis - by emphasizing the projects and plans idealized and realized for the floodplains of the rivers Pinheiros and Tietê - and a practical analysis - by emphasizing the importance of the inter-relationship between the several elements of the system and the representation of the places strategically chosen: the mouth of the river Tamanduateí, the Bandeiras and Cruzeiro do Sul Bridges, the railway stations and the Ecological Park of Tietê. For this last one, we used methodological proceedings that took us to a semiotic reading, by considering the system as a sign and understanding the environmental perception by a phenomenological focus. Besides that, our investigation is complemented by an analysis of the natural design of the system in its several levels of coverage (metropolitan, regional and nation) and a history of the process of reintegration between cities and rivers (or bays or seas) initialized in the middle of the 20th century in the developed countries. 1 Actually the term corresponds to the marginal avenues which are popular known as marginal (ones). Once the adjective is not used on plural in English we decided to use the term marginals. 2 Related to São Paulo city. 3 The marginal avenues received this name for having occupied the original banks (margens) of the rivers.

ASSUNTO(S)

percepção ambiental semiótica environmental perception rio pinheiros são paulo (sp) urban form forma urbana river tietê semiotic rio tietê river pinheiros

ACESSO AO ARTIGO

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