Cities are expressions of an era translated into space. As a manifestation of a society, cities project in the territory what citizens, as a collectivity, aim to be in the present and in the future. This proposal for Arco Tietê expresses this collective desire for construction and legacy that URBEM, as a civil society organization, offers São Paulo through the City Hall, in the context of Public Call nº 001/2013 / SMDU, which revealed an opportunity history of promoting the territorial reorganization of this great bundle that today concentrates the largest flow of people, goods and services in the country.

 

Formerly industrial and now almost without industries, the Arco Tietê perimeter is the stage for what is one of the most extensive processes of productive restructuring underway in the world. There has been a rapid economic deindustrialization over the past few decades - in an area equivalent to that of Manhattan - which has not been accompanied by territorial deindustrialization. In other words, there was an incomplete transition there: industrial activity left the region, but there remains the huge plots that are still underutilized, degraded or even abandoned today.

 

In order to contribute to the reversal of this dark situation, URBEM mobilized a team of 110 professionals from different fields of knowledge. It is a formulation of high civic purposes, always based on economic and financial foundations, in line with the wishes of the various segments of society, consistent with the institutional and regulatory framework in force and attentive to political and governmental realities.

 

URBEM's proposal has the creation of "Cidade-Parque Tietê" as its conceptual core. The chosen name designates a synthesis of a wide range of transformations that aim to build a new city in the territory of Arco Tietê, structured by successive longitudinal and interwoven river parks and boulevards and transversal.

 

As fundamental guidelines URBEM proposes:

- in the urban realm,  densification and verticalization of the river fronts, in order to build a city with a soul, lively and vibrant, marked by a vigorous landscape, symbolic and iconically representative of the global metropolis;

- in production, the development of a privileged space for supporting a creative economy, which, like in other successful cities, transforms the old territories of industrial production into new spaces for the production and consumption of knowledge and innovation;

- in housing, the mitigation of disparities that prevail between the offers of housing, employment, commerce and services, by structuring new centralities and mixed-use urban fabrics;

- in mobility, unrestricted support for the development of an intermodal transport network, public and private, for passengers and cargo, especially for high and medium passenger capacity modes; and,

- in societal terms, the reconquest of the banks of the Tietê, with a view to reestablishing an organic relationship with the river, interspersed with new bodies of clean water and green areas, accessible and enjoyable by pedestrians and cyclists.

 

Such guidelines have an evolutionary and revolutionary character. Evolutionary: they seek to leverage preexisting realities, giving new impetus to established vocations. Revolutionary: they break paradigms, introducing new patterns of occupation and spatial organization for housing, production and leisure.

 

URBEM responds to the Call with the certainty that we are all facing a unique historical circumstance, marked by an extraordinary constellation of determining and essential factors for the success of an initiative of this magnitude:

(a) the existence of a world-class technical staff at City Hall;

(b) the presence of proponents who combine a strong civic inclination, business experience and access to global capital markets - essential for large-scale transformations; and

(c) the city's historical situation, favorable to the alignment and convergence of the three powers that make up the urban process: the political, the economic and the social.

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It is also worth mentioning, within the scope of political power, the effective and accurate articulation that is currently manifested between the three federative spheres - municipal, state and federal - capable of inducing and promoting, on the most diverse institutional and normative fronts, the consolidation of a macro-metropolis of global projection.

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This is the time for São Paulo to reinvent itself from its most central and vital junction - Arco Tietê. Society today has concepts of city tested in recent years that seek to stimulate the interaction of social groups, the integration of human activities - work, housing, culture and entertainment - and the strengthening, through urbanism, of the concept of sustainable development, which seeks a balance between the social, the economic and the environmental. This historic condition, combined with the framework provided by the Call, brings together the basic elements for the third largest metropolis on the globe to transform this vast territory, the space of the First Brazilian Industrial Revolution, into a privileged locus of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, with beauty and functionality, for citizenship and the creative economy of the 21st century.