Conference on city’s future casts doubts over future of elevated highway.
It’s called the Big Worm — a 2.2-mile-long elevated highway that wiggles through the center of South America’s largest city, curving beside bedroom windows of once-elegant art deco buildings and carrying 80,000 noisy vehicles through a wide swath of cityscape each day.
Urban planners say that the 40-year-old concrete monster has no place in São Paulo and that flattening it should be on the city’s to-do list if this sprawling metropolis is to modernize. This city, Brazil’s economic heart, has to revamp the kind of out-of-date infrastructure embodied by the Worm, those planners say, if Brazil is to maintain the strong growth that has transformed the economy into one of the world’s most vibrant.
“Demolish it!” said Pedro Taddei Neto, an architect and urban planning expert from the University of São Paulo. “The developed world is demolishing structures like this. We have to follow their lead.”
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