On Jardim Pantanal (second day), we had the opportunity to get in real touch with some settlers, and were invited to have a cup of coffe and some bolachas with a very friendly family on their own house. The father (I forgot his name) told me something that I could’t get out of my mind: he works in São Bernardo do Campo (a municipality that is part of the ABC, the industrial heart of the metropolitan area of São Paulo), and spends no less that 3 hours daily to go and 3 hours to come back: at least during six hours of his day he is commuting. He also told me that he leaves his home at 4 am and comes back at 8 pm: not much is left for him to be with his family or to rest. He is a plumber and probably doesn’t earn much money: nevertheless, he has built himself a nice, decent and big house during many years to shelter his family through his hard work.
That is one of the most terrible sides of São Paulo: the long journeys that most common people have to take from far-away and poor neighborhoods to the most central areas where are all the services and all the jobs. This is an expression of the center-periphery dynamics which has been the main characteristic of the urbanization process in São Paulo during the XX century. Here is a map by GoogleMaps showing an ideal route from Jardim Pantanal to São Bernardo by public transport, just to illustrate how hard it is to commute for many of the residents of the metropolis in the lack of an efficient mass-transportation system.
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