Studies Toward the Creation of an Urban Mobility Environment in the Anhangabaú Valley: A Design Inquiry

This paper investigates potential architectural configurations for mobility infrastructure in the Anhangabaú Valley – São Paulo’s preeminent historic public space – by critically engaging with its extensive urban accessibility and framing mobility networks as the foundational structuring element of metropolitan urban cores. The analysis foregrounds the historical significance of the Anhangabaú and its environs, acknowledged as the inaugural modern centrality within São Paulo and a constitutive component of the metropolitan mobility network. Addressing mobility within the Anhangabaú demands a critical examination of the different urban levels and the stratified spatial flows converging upon this pivotal public realm. A coherent articulation between this structural framework and the existing vehicular and pedestrian networks, particularly those channeling movement toward public transit nodes, must be established.
Consequently, the hypothesis advanced herein posits that the site’s latent accessibility can engender an integrated "mobility environment," supplanting the prevailing paradigm of fragmented transport interchanges. The inquiry engages with prior transformative interventions assimilated into the valley’s morphology, notably the vehicular underpass and peripheral Metro stations, which remain spatially and functionally disjunct from the Central Area’s urban fabric. The imminent introduction of Metro Line 19-
Celeste, with two new stations within the Anhangabaú, assumes critical importance within this proposition, given the catalytic potential of a metro infrastructure in reasserting the site’s metropolitan scale. Thus, the metro system is theorized as an agent of urban transformation. The methodological approach underscores
the imperative of measured intervention within a consolidated urban tissue. Architectural design is operationalized as an epistemic instrument, with projective experimentation serving as an analytical mechanism to diagnose constraints inherent to antecedent schemes. Representational techniques, deployed as critical mediations, facilitate the analysis of kinetic, topographic, and circulatory dynamics, reinforcing design’s constitutive role within an iterative process of urban inquiry.

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The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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The datasets used in this study are openly available at [repository link] and the source code is available on GitHub at [GitHub link].

This work did not receive any external funding.