Sao Paulo 300 mm is an exercise to approach its complex and mutating urban system through identifying a series of “joint actions” promoted by three inconstant players: society, public powers and architects. Photograph and digital video records have been used, produced by photographers and artists of the city as transversal tools, capable of revealing urban and social events representing significant occurrences in the construction of the urban fabric in the last few years.

The results encountered are a heterogeneous set of occasional interventions scattered across the geography of a continuously growing city and inhabiting places different from those in the contemporary urban imaginary of the city of Sao Paulo.

Operating Landscape
An aerial and panoramic view of the central area of the city through black and white photographs with the objective of introducing the viewer to a physical reading of the city, understood as a landscape-medium, where many of the specific actions comprising this exhibition take place.

Sao Paulo B Sides
A change of scale where the observer approaches the metropolitan system: this set of photographs reaches out to the everyday reality of the city through records that reduce the complexity of this urban system to tangible readings and scales. These are endemic situations, nearly of immersion in the informal everyday "Paulista" atmosphere: automobile traffic, rear façades and “back doors”, where one can imagine the lifestyle of their residents, or the intimacy of small markets and informal trade as local expressions or cultural elements.

Showing Outskirts
Specific examples of the recent actions of the Government of the State of Sao Paulo resulting from a specific educational programme with the objective of addressing the educational requirements of the most disadvantaged communities settled in the outskirts of the city. The challenge is to build 100 public primary and secondary schools in the next few years. All of them built with prefabricated reinforced concrete structures following pre-established spatial standards.

Mobility Interfaces 
An essential challenge of contemporary cities is that of mobility solutions. On the one side, joint actions are presented between the Government of the State of Sao Paulo and the SP-Trans to build bus terminals in the municipalities comprising the metropolitan area and on the other, the record of a separate action of the city council of Sao Paulo, to build new bus terminals with a forceful visual identity, while renovating the main roads of the city.

Fictional City
The third generation of Paulista architects - trained at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning of the University of Sao Paulo and heirs of the legacy of the architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha - is time and again left outside the city’s building operations. Alternatively, these architects found a niche for real actions in the development of single family home projects built on geographically privileged plots, nearly always amidst environments of exuberant nature in closed residential condominiums, far from the city centre.

Central Reactivation
The lack of interest and public or private investment paralysed renovation of the infrastructure elements in the central area and thus their reconnection with emerging "peripheral" neighbourhoods. The increasing evacuation of the population towards these new districts and the consequent deterioration of the central area were inevitable. This exhibition nucleus shows some of the more recent actions resulting from specific state policies or simply an interest of the market and the population on the recovery, change of image and function of the city’s historic centre.

Vertical Occupation
This nucleus presents one of the “symptoms” or “free” actions resulting from decades of deterioration and neglect of the old centre: occupation of buildings by families organised around social movements. The Prestes Maia Building, located on the most important avenue downtown and vital to cross most of the city from North to South, which had been abandoned for over 12 years, was occupied in 2002 by 468 families, approximately 2000 people, organised by the NGO MSTC - Movement of the Downtown Homeless. In the contemporary history of Latin America there has never been a building occupation concentrating so many people. The clearing of the building by the State Government took place on 15 June 2007.

Appropriate Gaps
The occupation of infrastructure elements with cultural activities, by urban artists or local neighbour communities, is a recent development in this city. This selection covers heterogeneous events of special interest: on the one hand the neighbour community of the district of “Bexiga” occupied an elevated crossing to set up a small boxing gymnasium. This facility, with time, given its ability to incorporate and meet the needs of the community it manages, has become a venue for cultural gatherings and currently has a library, auditorium and computers. On the other hand, the record of peculiar artistic expressions such as graffiti on rainwater galleries and “pixaçoes” - a type of local urban graphics - on façades of abandoned buildings.

Unforeseen City
These images reveal the inevitable social confrontation caused by the juxtaposition of different physical-social situations and textures taken on by the city and the diverse forms of territorial occupation in the last few years. If on the one hand the large surfaces comprised of residential skyscrapers are cut-off by the “islands of favelas” as a limiting factor of the hegemonic supremacy of the real estate market, on the other are the horizontal residential condominiums, made up of detached homes, as “islands of prosperity” in the middle of neighbourhoods historically comprised of low-income communities. The occupation of the city’s natural boundaries - dams, rivers or hills belonging to natural parks under environmental protection - aside from surprising due to the force of the sight of this development endemic to large tropical metropolises - contributes to this exhibition nucleus as a possible instrument for specific criticism of the methodology and capacity of urban territory management and control.

Promoter: Ministerio de Vivienda
Concept and Curators: Ariadna Cantis, Alexandre Cafcalas, Julieta Roitman (Assistant)
Coordination: ac+ac producciones
Installation Design: Andres Jaque
Design: Olga de Dios
Audio-Visual Edition: Gsus Fernandez