[Yuri]

Monkey, about São Paulo, not quite.

Up to the 1960’s, zoning laws were quite liberal and that’s why we have those beautiful urban sets on the old Downtown, with the historic Triangle resembling Lower Manhattan, with narrow streets and 1930’s skyscrapers touching each other. On República, just west of it, lines and lines of 20-floor modernist buildings taking the entire plot. On 9 de Julho Avenue, built on the bottom of a ravine and surrounded by this beautiful urban canyon just like the Metropolis movie.

After that, legislation started demanding large plots to build in an absurd 2:1 ratio (total ground floor area vs plot size). Highrises weren’t stop and it wasn’t meant to do so. Developers started to build those massive and obnoxious common areas on the ground floor to meet this 2:1 rule. Needless to say that encourages an autocentric way of life which is absurd in a city as dense and as big as São Paulo. As a side effect, you have those horrid walls for tens of meters, nothing to see on the sidewalks.

That was corrected only few years ago, with less draconian ratio for constructing highrises and encouraging mixed use, which was something unheard on decades. Now there are new buildings popping up everywhere with shops on ground floor, small apartments and without parking lots, something that had been forbidden (!!!) on the past legislations.