A cidade como lugar: a rua São Bento no contexto da vida cotidiana paulistana - ontem e hoje

Abstract

Over the past decades, the city of São Paulo has experienced transformations connected with historic processes initiated primarily in the second half of the 19th century. Understanding São Paulo today requires, in addition to grasping the events of the last century, reflecting on its history since its first years, in the 16th century. Its very birthplace, when it was still a village, today concentrates the region known as the Old City Center, administratively defined as the Sé district. This ethnographic research sought to analyze the transformations that took place in the city starting with one of its first roads, São Bento street, which provides an insightful look into the way life in the city takes shape. The space of the street is configured not only as a passage but also as a mediation, a synthesis of life in the city. As one of the first roads in town, it also experienced the most rudimentary forms of development and transformation, enduring mutations in its own history, going from being one of the vertices in the imaginary triangle within which the city was concentrated for many years, between the São Bento Monastery and the Church of São Francisco de Assis to an important metropolitan centrality. As a street, São Bento is indeed a passage, where tertiary economic activity takes place, such as commerce and services, but it is also a locale which is embedded in identity, relations, and history. It is in fact an “anthropological locale” and a “place of memory,” and while it still exists as a region in the traditional centrality of the city, it still observes transformation processes in its own history and surroundings. Not unlike the city of São Paulo, a locale which concentrates and amplifies social life, so does São Bento street is a product of itself