Da aldeia à metrópole: colonialidades, extermínios e apagamentos na formação urbana de São Paulo

Abstract

This thesis proposes a critical analysis of the urban formation of the city of São Paulo from a decolonial perspective, with an emphasis on the centrality of Eurocentrism as a producer of urban space and the consequent exclusion of Indigenous peoples. Based on the premise that the city is more than a physical territory — being also a symbolic, epistemic, and ontological expression of the subject who designs it — the argument is that São Paulo has historically been shaped by a model of the modern Western subject: white, male, urban, rational, and universalized as the measure of humanity. The study highlights how this subject, by defining what must be visible, inhabitable, and legitimate in the city, enacts a systematic erasure of Indigenous populations and their ways of dwelling, knowing, and existing. The city, in this sense, emerges as the result of a colonial rationality that naturalizes hierarchies, denies subaltern epistemologies, and imposes an exclusionary spatial organization. To this end, the research draws on theoretical contributions from decolonial thinkers such as Enrique Dussel, Aníbal Quijano, Ramón Grosfoguel, Walter Mignolo, Catherine Walsh, Aimé Césaire, among others, in order to understand how the coloniality of power, knowledge, and being manifests in the urban landscape of São Paulo. The research traces the trajectory from the processes of “aldeamento” (Indigenous resettlement) and catechesis, which gave rise to the city’s foundation, to modern mechanisms of urban planning, such as the Plano de Avenidas, demonstrating how colonial logic reinvents and perpetuates itself in new forms. By repositioning the gaze toward the forgotten territories — those the city denies, marginalizes, or erases — this thesis contributes to a critique of the ontological and epistemic foundations of Western urbanism, proposing pathways to envision the city through other civilizational frameworks