In the last twenty years the city of São Paulo and its large metropolitan region have experienced deep transformations. Some may argue that this is no news, for Paulistanos have proclaimed since the 1950s that theirs is the city in the world that grows the most, and they have adopted as its slogan "Sao Paulo cannot stop!" However, although the city and its residents may have been accustomed to constant change, to dismiss the past, to reconstruct the urban environment in a matter of each generation, and to play with images of the ephemeral and the transient to describe their modern city, they seem to be perplexed by the current transformations. In fact, one of the crucial changes affecting Sao Paulo is that its previous imaginary is no longer credible. The era of developmentalism and belief in progress has come to an end and with it the credibility of the frameworks in terms of which change used to be understood, explained, and criticized. No longer able to conceive of its transformations in terms of the optimistic imaginary anchored in notions of progress, development, growth, and incorporation, the citizens, administrators, and social scientists of Sao Paulo frequently find themselves ill-prepared to address the present configurations of the city. Moreover, since to abandon the thrill and the excitement of constant growth and of imagining the future in terms of progress seems to be difficult and frustrating, nostalgia becomes an almost irresistible impulse. 

In this essay, I look at the city of São Paulo and its transformations to retrace the transition from the era of progress to the neoliberal configuration.  I indicate that two new narratives – that of the fear of violence and that of the reduced role of the state and enlarged space for nongovernmental associations -- intertwine in complex and frequently contradictory ways with the process of democratic consolidation.  The essay also highlights how nowadays social and spatial inequalities have become even more acute than they have been in the past.