São Francisco Master Plan
São Paulo, Brazil

175 HECTARES • 18,000,000 SF

São Francisco, commissioned by the housing authority of the City of São Paulo, comprises the refurbishment of a 175 hectare area in the east region of the city. With approximately 50,000 inhabitants, the site has been the object of a series of unsuccessful social housing projects since the 1980s. The scope of the new project includes the master plan of the entire area, redesign of several public spaces and streets, and development of approximately 640 housing units. The completed plan aims to improve the connections of the site internally and with other areas of the city. The redesign and better articulation of car, pedestrian and bike circulation, new parks and public spaces, and mixed-use and mixed-income housing developments will provide a general sense of community and neighborhood.

The planning of the area depends on complex institutional arrangements which can only be implemented on a long term. However, the development of the area cannot be frozen and several problems ask for an immediate solution. Davis Brody Bond was invited to develop an urban master plan which would guide future interventions. Once those guidelines would be established, several smaller scale interventions would be carried out in specific areas of the site. Once the main guidelines of a cohesive city are created, the master plan will examine the scale of the individual neighborhoods. The combination of architectural and urban scale will allow us to redesign the city and propose actual changes for the people living there.