ABSTRACT
This aim of this paper was to present Roger Bastide´s reflections and analysis on the city of São Paulo and the records he left during his time in the city from 1938 to 1954. When commenting on the verticalization process of the city, Roger Bastide called it a cathedral city. He glimpsed in the curves of some modern buildings a possibility for Baroque modernism and analysed, from a sociological point of view, the so-called “machines for living”. When addressing urbanity, the French sociologist imagined the city of São Paulo as a tentacular city, with its tentacles moving outwards in all directions. In these movements, Bastide saw the movements of aggregation and segregation of the black population in the city. However, Bastide’s metaphor can be extended to a series of other inclusions and exclusions produced by the São Paulo metropolis both then and now
