Contextualization of presented data

It is estimated that at the time of the foundation of Sao Paulo in 1554, no more than 100 inhabitants lived in the vicinity of the college erected by the Jesuit priests, constituting the initial nucleus of the future city. Over the next three centuries, the town experienced a slow growth, only altered from the 1870s, when the first census survey conducted in Brazil in 1872 indicated the presence of 31,385 residents.

Thus, by the end of the nineteenth century, São Paulo had left behind its status as a remote village from the main economic centers of the country, mainly due to its privileged geographical position, between the port of Santos and the interior of the Province, where the cultivation of coffee, and became increasingly important as a commercial warehouse and a point of intersection of the routes through which coffee production was exported.

In this situation, it began to attract an expressive volume of workers and to establish a significant part of the flow of European immigrants initially directed to replace the slave labor in the coffee plantations. Many of these immigrants ended up staying in or returning to the capital after some time. This immigration flow lasted in the first two decades of the twentieth century, which kept the city in a high rate of population growth. During this period, the foundations for the industrial development of São Paulo were created, with the transfer of capital generated in agrarian activity to the incipient local industries.

The transformation of Sao Paulo into an important industrial center was progressively made, but it was already fully visible in the 1920s - the artistic manifestations of the Modernist group in 1922 reflect this fact well. The process of industrialization in Brazil, centered in São Paulo, benefited greatly from two major historical events: the 1st and 2nd World Wars, respectively, from 1914 to 1918 and from 1939 to 1945, periods in which the world trade generated the need for import substitution, favoring the local production of consumer goods.

By 1950, with the flow of foreign immigration quite low and, at the same time, in a phase of great industrial impetus, the city began to attract population contingents from other States of Brazil, becoming then the largest pole of internal migration . More than 3 million people - workers and their families - arrived between 1950 and 1980, and this process, together with the population's growth, maintained the city's high growth rates in the period (between 4% and 5% a year) .

However, since the 1980s, this situation has changed considerably, as a result of the industrial deconcentration process that affected the city in the mid-1970s and redirected part of its industrial facilities to other regions of the State of São Paulo and of the country, as well as the process of technological and managerial modernization, which suppressed jobs in the secondary sector of the economy. The city had then reduced its power of population attraction, happening to present negative migratory balances. Still in the 80's, the vegetative growth also suffered a cooling, due to the decrease of fertility and birth rates in the Brazilian population.