Urban Setbacks

São Paulo as a parked city

Abstract

Objective – To explore a critical-perceptive approach to the historic center of São Paulo based on an unlikely critical and intertextual relational approach with Bernard Tschumi's Parc de La Villette. The aim is to investigate how a disjunctive strategy structured by points, lines, and surfaces can serve as a controversial conceptual operator for analyzing and imagining, fabulating hypotheses of an unusual "urban parking."

Methodology – Critical-essayistic and conceptual essay built upon the montage of an unlikely comparative dialogue between seemingly unrelated situations. The study adopts the projective structuring logic of Parc de La Villette as a conceptual grammar, transposed by analogy to the São Paulo center. The analysis is organized into three movements: (1) isolation of the operators points, lines, and surfaces in Tschumi’s proposal for the park; (2) analogical transposition to the context of São Paulo’s center; (3) interpretive elaboration of possibilities for urban parking through a stretching of the limits of the senses of the real.

Originality/Relevance – The article proposes an intertextual, evocative, and fabulatory reading, in which the Parc de La Villette ceases to be understood as a formal model to be taken as an essayistic-conceptual language. It inserts itself into the academic debate on the contemporary city through the idea of intertextuality and the reinterpretation of public space as an open palimpsest, resulting from the accumulation of past temporalities and future layers linked to its “forestation.”

Results – Identification and problematization of a territory—the historic center of São Paulo—critically perceived through points, lines, and surfaces as remnants and traces of different urban temporalities, revealing its condition as a set of fragments, associations, and dissociations of heteroclite structures. These elements are read as unlikely potentialities of the possible for the hypothesis of a “parked” center, open to critical reinscriptions, temporal superpositions, and coexistences between the built environment and other natures.

Theoretical/Methodological Contributions – Evidence of how projective operators from other areas, used transversally, can serve as instruments for critical reading of complex urban contexts, paving the way for the construction of strange approximations and analogies that articulate theory, design, and urban critique.

Social and Environmental Contributions – Expansion of the debate on the regeneration and re-signification of central spaces through less evident modalities of parking, of public space and urban memory, suggesting unusual interpretive paths for policies and projects that consider the city as a field of critical experimentation rather than merely functional.