The typological making of retail streets. Santa Ifigenia Street in São Paulo: origin 1850 – 1931

ABSTRACT

This article reconstructs the building transformations of Santa Ifigenia Street, São Paulo, to determine the formative process of a retail street. The work establishes the sequence of incremental changes using official building files between 1850 and 1931. The results reveal that retail specialization derives from the adaptation of mostly residential to retail uses, where the transformative process requires long periods of several decades to occur and it is mainly self-organized. Planning regulations must take into account these considerations for a proper management of retail areas.

KEYWORDS:

• Retail streets
• building types
• self-organized urbanism
• retail planning
• Santa Ifigenia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Here we are referring to urban retail which follows the sort of development of that before the 1970s, when big formats begun to appear in the periphery and suburban areas of the cities. Big retail types have different emergence conditions than traditional retail inside urban areas. Along this paper we refer traditional retail as urban retail.

2. For example, Avenida Rio Branco, Avenida São João or Rua Brigadeiro Tobias.

3. The street was the northwest natural exit road of the historic centre through one of the two entrances that saved the passage of the Anhangabaú Stream, linking in its path the main institutional buildings of the city.

4. Although public transport positive externalities for retail are favourable in the early stages of new urban areas, they may decay without great prejudice in more advanced stages when the areas have achieved some retail inertia.

5. Considering that Santa Ifigenia Street has existed since the second half of the 18th century – only in half its total extension –, but until the 1850s it just had nineteen buildings, the urban fabric occupation thus began with intensity from 1850 onwards, being this year who initiates the first cycle of our periodization that will lasts until 1889, when Brazil establishes the republican regime. This cycle is followed by another one of about forty-two years, until 1931, where in both country and city, and also at political and technical level, strong changes of urban development took place.

6. Following the logistic model described by Maraschin (2009).

7. The cycle identified in our study begins in 1850, with the approval of the Land Law, and is reinforced by the announcement in 1856 of the arrival of the railroad in São Paulo, as well as the prohibition of trafficking slaves from Africa. Many experts are unanimous in affirming that the construction of the ‘new Brazil’ has its most remote roots in the year 1850 (Campos Junior 1997).

8. The promulgation of Sanitary Codes, the implementation of the sewerage system, the expropriation of properties to rearrange the urban fabric, the improvement of the streets’ quality or the construction of Santa Ifigenia’s Viaduct, among others.

9. It designated mainly those buildings above a single storey.

10. The rest of the buildings have been statistically disregarded as they are unique cases. These are buildings for religious, institutional, educational and garage uses.