São Paulo In The digital Age: Legal and Institutional Challenges

Résumé

[extract] The coming decades will bring profound changes in the size and spatial distribution of the global population. The urban population is growing fast; in the city of São Paulo (Brazil), for example, according to IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), the population estimated in 2016 is 12,038,175 inhabitants, out of a total of 94.9% of the urban population. More and more people are moving to large centers, which means more people depending on the essential services of cities, such as water, power, mobility infrastructure, public safety, housing, health services, the artificial environment and other services that make cities livable. The trends in urbanization are totally related to sustainable development. They present great opportunities for development and at the same time immense challenges for social equality, sustainable environment and governance. With proper planning for the future, increasing concentration of people in urban spaces can facilitate economic and social development, offering opportunities to mitigate the unfavorable impact of consumption and production on the environment.

In analyzing this scenario, how will technology transform the cities of the future? Below, we question to what extent it is possible to direct those transformations in a positive way