MAUD

Extrametropolis: Urban Design Across the Scales of the Paulista Metropolis

Advised by Rahul Mehrotra, Renee Tapp, and Gabriel Kozlowski

Extrametropolis is a multiscalar investigation of the agency of urban design in integrating urban form to transportation and infrastructure. It attempts to envision an alternative future for development frameworks for cities in the State of São Paulo.

São Paulo is a victim of its own success. It consistently has outgrown its urban capacity and infrastructure—from village to city, city to metropolis, and metropolis to region over the past 200 years. By doing so, it faces environmental, social, and economic struggles that are extrapolated by its own scale. The growth logic of other major cities in the state echo São Paulo’s formula of expansion and continue to develop, perpetuating this model and extrapolating the accumulation of negative externalities that come with uncontrolled growth at a regional scale.

Extrametropolis seeks to challenge the growth logic in São Paulo, laying out the agency urban design can have in structuring the intersections between infrastructure, urban form, and transportation to allow for new and viable futures. It builds on the ongoing context of a State Regional Rail project (Trem Intercidades) that seeks to integrate São Paulo’s main cities through seamless rails. It sets Campinas, São Paulo, as a pilot project for a new multiscalar design framework that attempts to address the socioeconomic and environmental challenges uncontrolled growth has created. This strategy, showcased in Campinas, could be reproduced in other cities along the entire regional rail network, throughout an area that is home to over 30 million people.