Soon after the foundation of São Paulo, in 1554, Jesuit priest José de Anchieta, with the help of some friendly indigenous people, erected a mud and stick wall to help keep it “safe from attack”. The undesirables were other natives who did not want to convert to the Christian faith, and who had tried to take over the camp several times before.

Over the years, the village expanded beyond the mud fence, which eventually collapsed. It was from São Paulo that the so-called Bandeirantes – prospectors who hunted, killed and enslaved thousands across the land, and who extended the Brazilian territory in search of wealth – set off.



From Africa, the slave trade brought men and women to toil on the farms that today are districts of the city, or to endure the lash of merchants and artisans in the city centre. At the beginning of the 19th century, São Paulo became a stronghold for students through its first university, where law is still taught today. They wrote poems and made speeches for freedom. Later, it was filled with the scent of roast coffee and chimney smoke, odours mixed with the sweat of the immigrants, peasants and factory workers who arrived in hordes – just as they do today, only with different accents.

São Paulo is hugely contradictory, with an elite who talk of the future but maintain their privileges from the past

Despite the frenetic transformation of the small village into one of the world’s largest and most populous cities – the financial and commercial centre of South America, with more than 12 million inhabitants – that wall knocked into the ground in the 16th century still exists. Only now, it’s invisible.

São Paulo resembles a medieval castle. It has a richer and more urbanised area in its so-called “expanded centre”, surrounded by the moat of the rivers Tietê and Pinheiros, and a poorer periphery – where life is difficult and death comes easily.

The residents of the richer area, whether they are progressive or conservative, revolutionary or reactionary, right or leftwing, atheist or religious, live in relative comfort and safety compared with those “on the outside”. It’s a microcosm of Brazil – the 10th most unequal country in the world, according to the United Nations’ latest Human Development Report.

Homeless people sleep on the pavement in downtown São Paulo. Photograph: Nelson Almeida/AFP/Getty Images

In the central district of Jardim Paulista, lined with trees and full of mansions, the average life expectancy is 79.4 years. Meanwhile, 19km away, in the poor district of Jardim Ângela, full of precarious, low-quality housing, the average drops to 55.7. The figures come from the 2017 Inequality Map, a survey produced by Rede Nossa São Paulo, a coalition of organisations who work to improve quality of life in the city.

On the outskirts, there’s a lack of basic sanitation, medical services, healthy food and decent work. And there’s an abundance of violence.

The majority of those killed are young, poor and black, with little education, who die at the hands of police or are caught in the middle of drug traffickers’ territorial disputes. Periodically, reports of massacres appear on the news. On 4 May this year, for instance, 10 people died in two attacks: seven in a bar in Jaçanã, in the city’s far north, and three more in Campo Limpo, a poor district in the south. The second incident took place a few blocks away from where I spent my childhood, and where my parents still live. It is close to Jardim Ângela, the place where people can expect to live to 55.

Economic growth in the last decade has reduced poverty in Brazil, but inequality has been maintained. It is in districts such as Campo Limpo, and not in the more affluent areas, that the difference between those who have something and those who have nothing is most evident. The friction between these realities, in a society which has learned that money and goods makes the difference between being seen and being invisible, helps explain the crime situation.

A survey by the country’s largest newspaper, Folha de São Paulo, shows that only 15% of the city’s lethal robberies took place in the “expanded centre”, and most of the rich boroughs don’t even appear in the crime statistics. On the other hand, a group of poor districts that squeeze in 9% of the population accounts for a quarter of cases.

The affluent suburb of of Jardim Paulista, with central São Paulo in the background. Photograph: Alamy

Multimillionaires escape all this by air – São Paulo is one of the global leaders in helicopter ownership. The Brazilian Helicopter Pilots Association estimated the city was home to more than 400 aircraft in its latest survey in 2013, making 1,300 journeys a day. At the same time, the city has the world’s largest number of armoured cars, with more than 140,000, according to the Brazilian Association of Bulletproof Manufacturers. The rich paulistano (resident of São Paulo city) brings the sensation of fortification from their walled mansions and gated condominiums to the streets.

Meanwhile, the gentrification process expels the poorest to the periphery, beyond the reach of high-quality public services. The current economic crisis has only aggravated the city’s chronic housing problems. The Homeless Workers’ Movement (MTST) estimates a deficit of 500-700,000 housing units.

The land was empty before, there was nothing. Now it is fulfilling its social role, as stated in our ​constitution Maria das Dores Cerqueira

The inequality in São Paulo makes it difficult for people to see themselves and others as being entitled to the same consideration, something that should guide all social relations. At the same time, there is a perception – arguably correct – that the state authorities are there to serve the wealthiest and control the poorest, using the police and the political process to defend the privileges of the former by using violence against the latter if need be.

However, one of the world’s most unequal cities also has an intense and lively network of social movements and organisations fighting to change the status quo.

And if there is a shift in the way the city treats the most humble, it is due to their own mobilisation, pressure and struggle – and not to the kindness of the supposedly enlightened or charity from the most well-off. Especially because our “great leaders” are useless during the rainy season when the city’s rivers overflow, or in times of drought when taps run dry due to a lack of urban planning.



Most of those present at the opening ceremony of the World Cup in São Paulo on 12 June 2014 could not have imagined that, right next to the stadium, 4,000 families connected to the Homeless Workers’ Movement had occupied an enormous piece of land one month before. And that they had resisted until the government gave in and decided to expropriate the area, unused for 20 years, and allocate it for housing. Building should begin in January 2018.



The new housing estate will be called the People’s Cup, the name given to the occupation.

Inside the São Bernardo do Campo occupation. Its name is Povo sem Medo: People Without Fear. Photograph: Nelson Almeida/AFP/Getty Images

MTST’s largest occupation in São Paulo is called Vila Nova Palestina (New Palestine) and is located in Jardim Ângela. It contains 3,000 families.

Recently, 7,000 families occupied a piece of land that had been empty for 40 years, in São Bernardo do Campo, an industrial suburb where many of workers live. On 31 October this year, they marched 23km to the seat of the state government to demand the land’s expropriation and allocation for housing developments.

They asked me to write a text about the present and the future of my city. What separates the two at present lies in an improvised shack covered by black plastic, erected on the bare earth, beside communal toilets and kitchens. As a reporter, I have already covered armed conflicts outside Brazil and know that hope can adopt many faces. Around here, it resembles someone who feels cold and hungry, and is fighting to have a roof over their head.

“The land was empty before, there was nothing. Now it is fulfilling its social role, as stated in our constitution,” says unemployed baker Maria das Dores Cerqueira, 47, in one of MTST’s settlements.



The images that truly represent São Paulo are not those that appear on the covers of travel guides, or in adverts produced by the Brazilian tourism department. They are not the glass-fronted high-rise blocks of Paulista Avenue, the greenery of Ibirapuera Park, the aromas of the Municipal Market, the flavours of the restaurants and the sounds of night clubs, the street carnival or the great concert halls.



São Paulo is a young man who is born poor and black on the city’s periphery and who, against all probability, makes it to adulthood. It is an informal vendor who leaves home at 4.30am every day and returns late at night, but still finds time to be a mother or father. It is the young girl who, after being sexually harassed in the supermarket where she works, is not afraid to organise her fellow workers to demand respect. It is the transvestite who holds his head high on the street, a target for prejudice, who knows he can’t find work because of who he is. It is the homeless worker who is called a tramp for having the courage to do what other city inhabitants do not.

A drone photo shows thousands of improvised tents at a site occupied by the Homeless Workers’ Movement in São Bernardo do Campo. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

São Paulo is resistance. Not that celebrated in prose and verse, the resistance of the rich and powerful, whose feats can be read about in great books or seen on TV – but the silent resistance of the anonymous people who have nothing, but continue to believe they can change the world.



For each piece of land or property occupied in São Paulo, a small piece of mud topples from that wall built in the 16th century to protect the white invaders. And the sense of São Paulo as a medieval castle is lessened. Slightly.

I’m not capable of drawing a scenario for my city in 25 or 50 years time, as I don’t know how many egocentric and incompetent administrators we will have along the way. But the abundance of social movements makes me certain that, yes, the city will have a future.

“Why can’t these people suffer in silence?” was one of the numerous comments I read on social media protesting against the homeless movements. Because they decided that their lives would take a different direction from the ones that the owners of São Paulo decided for them. Because occupying is not only a matter of fighting for rights: it is the conviction that human lives matter, in spite of everything that tries to convince us of the contrary.



In the district where I was born, TV satellites came to the rooftops before the roads were paved. And shops selling washing machines appeared decades before the sewage system. São Paulo is hugely contradictory, with an elite who like to talk about the future, but at the same time defend a model that maintains their privileges from the past.

We do not decide where we are going to be born, but we choose where we want to live. I was born here 40 years ago, but I chose to live in São Paulo not because it is where my friends, family and stories are, but because São Paulo is an idea being constructed and disputed. A beautiful, fair and humanitarian idea that might turn into what millions have dreamed about.

If São Paulo is the sum of the stories of its people, then São Paulo is worthwhile.

•Leonardo Sakamoto is the director of Repórter Brasil and councillor for the United Nations Voluntary Fund on Contemporary Forms of Slavery.

Guardian Cities is in São Paulo for a special series of in-depth reporting and live events. Share your experiences of the city in the comments below, on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram using #GuardianSaoPaulo, or by email to saopaulo.week@theguardian.com