São Paulo is a great city, but not a beautiful city. The ­soot-­darkened buildings of its old business center resist all claims of glamour or novelty. Its periphery is an oceanic sprawl, bursting with gaudy commerce and neighborhoods where many thousands of shacks have become, within a generation, sturdy but nondescript houses of brick and concrete. Its residents are regularly shocked by corruption, prison revolts, failing public education, truck hijackings, armed robberies, and murders at traffic lights.

Yet for all that, São Paulo is a complicated, qualified success. Because of the dynamism and diversity of its economy, and despite its many contradictions, it now may be the most successful “megacity” in the developing world.

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Great cities have always been hard to manage. Like other complex systems, they grow spontaneously but then demand more management and investment if they are to avoid decay and disintegration. A time comes in the lives of big cities when the need for regulation and rational allocation of space, money, and other resources prevails over impulsive processes. For São Paulo, the beneficiary of so much good fortune, that time is now.