Documentary screening: “From ideal to concrete: São Paulo, a mosaic of contrasts”

The ICTA-UAB will host the screening of the documentary “From ideal to concrete: São Paulo, a mosaic of contrasts”, by Beatriz Pierri Daunt, from the BCUEJ group at ICTA-UAB. 

 

Documentary Screening

 

Title: “From ideal to concrete: São Paulo, a mosaic of contrasts”

Speaker: Beatriz Pierri Daunt, BCNUEJ (ICTA-UAB) and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) 

 

• Date: Tuesday, 10th November, 2026
• Time: 13.30–15.00 h
• Venue: Sala Montseny (Z/022 & Z/023) ICTA-UAB

 

After the viewing, the Brazilian filmmaker Manoela Meyer will join us online for a discussion about the documentary.

 

São Paulo, Latin America’s largest metropolis, grew from 1.3 million inhabitants in 1940 to around 12 million today, with nearly 18 million across its metropolitan region. Decades of unplanned expansion produced a deeply segregated city: the well-serviced centre concentrates nearly 70% of jobs but houses only 20% of residents, while over one million lower-income people live in self-built settlements on the periphery, where floods, landslides and heatwaves hit hardest.

The documentary examines the city’s 2014 Strategic Master Plan, designed to reduce socio-territorial inequality and tackle the climate crisis, and the gap between its ambitions and what has been carried out, as real estate and financial interests have repeatedly weakened it. It argues that a master plan should work as a social contract that guarantees the right to the city for all.

The film is the result of research funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and the María de Maeztu Programme, and is intended for a non-academic audience.

Beatriz Pierri Daunt holds a PhD in Geography and is a former María Zambrano Fellow at ICTA-UAB. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher with the URBANLOG group (UOC-DIGIT) at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and an associate researcher at the Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability (BCNUEJ-UAB). Her research examines how planning decisions and regulatory frameworks shape socio-environmental transformation and spatial justice.

Manoela Meyer is a Brazilian filmmaker, cinematographer and editor whose work spans documentary, fiction, institutional video and live streaming. She holds degrees in Journalism from the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) and in Ecology from the Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp). She co-founded Crop Coletivo, which develops transmedia and interactive narrative projects. For many years she has researched the relationship between blindness and audiovisual media, which led to her documentary “Escute…” and the project “Sentirgrafia”. Her work focuses mainly on the environment, science, culture, health and education.