From productive restructuring to urban restructuring: an analysis of the metropolis of São Paulo from the large national contractors standpoint

Abstract

The 1970s marked the beginning of the productive restructuring process in the countries that occupies the central roles of capitalism, culminating in the inflection of the Fordist-Keynesian system into what Harvey calls a "regime of flexible accumulation", resulting in important social and political adjustments in the Western world. In Brazil, this process began to develop in the late 1970s, with the crisis of the development model based on import substitution, and intensified in the 1990s after the redemocratization, with the opening of economy to international markets. The global financial system is reorganized, with the emergence of "financial globalization", with the dominance of financial capital, the logic of the capital's financial valorization, and the central presence of fictitious capital in the accumulation regime. In addition to the transformations within the production units, the productive restructuring has consequences in territorial transformations, which have been configured as a broader process of urban restructuring. There is, in this sense, an advance of the accumulation of capital frontier towards urban space, in a space of production (industrial) movement of inflexion for the production of space. Industrial decentralization, the approximation of financial capital to real estate, real estate restructuring and transformations in urban planning policies are some important changes to be observed. The largest national contractors undergo important changes in parallel to these transformations, acting as an important agent to promote them, after already being consolidated as a sector of prominence in the configuration of great Brazilian capital in the late 1970s. Already in the 1990s, important processes of capital centralization, diversification of activities, specialization and internationalization could be observed, transforming large contractors into large conglomerates operating in various sectors of the economy. Therefore, these companies are involved with the production of space in the works of large infrastructures produced and in the real estate production. The general objective of this research project is to understand the performance of the largest national contractors in the transformations in space production, observed from a productive and urban restructuring, glimpsing the role of these companies as agents of socio-spatial, economic and national political structure. As a privileged territory for the analysis of the new logics of urban production, the Metropolitan Region of São Paulo cuts out our research in space, taking as a temporal focus the processes that began in the late 1970s and intensified in the 1990s and 2000s. We will take as a methodology the analysis of the contractor's performance from the case study of the "Study Company" (EE) in the transformations in the production of the metropolis of São Paulo's space before the processes of restructuring. We will be support by discussions about space production, processes of productive and urban restructuring and transformations in the pattern of capitalist accumulation towards the production of space.