CENTRALITY, GOVERNANCE AND GLOBALIZATION The challenges of constituting the São Paulo macrometropolis

The city of São Paulo now has 11.2 million inhabitants, but the metropolitan region, which totals 39 municipalities in the State of São Paulo, raises that figure to 19.6 million, making it one of the largest urban concentrations in the world. On the other hand, the dynamics of economic development in the past decades makes it ever more difficult to consider it separately from the metropolitan regions of the Santos Lowlands and Campinas, as well as nearby cities such as São José dos Campos, Sorocaba, and Jundiaí, among others. So, this expanded metropolitan complex (or the São Paulo macrometropolis) would surpass 27 million inhabitants, concentrating a productive force that is equivalent to the GDP of countries like Argentina or Switzerland, and bigger than that of Austria or Portugal. The conditions of this change in scale of São Paulo’s territorial development, however, are not self-evident and demand understanding and interpreting efforts both in the array of urban phenomena that accompany the expansion and the factors that explain it. We shall now underline some relevant elements of this relation between the city, the metropolis, and the São Paulo macrometropolis in order to identify strategic issues and start to assess the challenge