# Managing Historic neighbourhoods: preservation and participation

**Bruna Fregonezi; Nadia Somekh**

Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie

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## Abstract

During the 1980s, in the context of studies about urban zones in São Paulo started a research about urban environmental heritage. One of these zones was the Bexiga region. This field is featured by a single urban morphology and architecture range. Before being a well-known Italian region, it was already occupied by the black and quilombola population. Due to this fact, Bexiga became a plural region with an intense cultural life in public spaces.
These studies were the beginning of a process that lasted nearly 900 buildings as heritage. On one hand, this action safeguards the land structure and it profited the maintenance of cultural activities at the public space in the neighborhood. However, the number of buildings that need maintenance became a challenge.
Recently, from 2014 to 2016, new laws and public policies in São Paulo revealed new possibilities for fundraising, protection, and promotion of cultural heritage. Some of them are the heritage journey and the law allowing the owner of historical heritage to raise funds through the sale of space adrift.
More than using the income from space adrift to fundraising, the citizen who wants to do that needs to approve a maintenance plan on the heritage council. This tool is helping laypeople to preserve buildings with correct techniques, reducing invasive restorations in the future.
These new possibilities added to several cultural groups that were articulated in the 2015 heritage journey made it the perfect environment to emerge the Fábrica de Restauro movement (Restoration Factory movement). The proposal is to develop the region restoration in a collective way, including inhabitants and specialists in the process, aiming to prevent gentrification.
The movement's actions are divided into 3 workgroups: the first one deals with professional training, from project to the execution. The second one is about fundraising and the third deals with forms of association.
Thus, the aim of this paper is to examine how the urban policies and new laws are changing the reality of heritage in São Paulo city. Furthermore, to discuss how the impacts of large-scale renovation can gentrify the region and what we can do to reduce it.