Sao Paulo

With more than 20 million inhabitants, São Paulo has recently become one of the world’s first ‘hypercities’. In a constant state of transformation, the city has fostered an attitude of improvisation, resourcefulness and cultural cannibalism amongst its artists

Ana Paula Cohen

A writer and co-founder of the project ‘istmo-flexible archive’, and co-curator of the Encuentro Internacional de Medellín 2007. She was born and lives in São Paulo.

‘From now on, I’ll describe the cities to you, […] in your journeys you will see if they exist.’ [...] ‘And yet I have constructed in my mind a model city from which all possible cities can be deduced,’ Kublai [Khan] said. ‘It contains everything corresponding to the norm. Since the cities that exist diverge in varying degree from the norm, I need only foresee the exceptions to the norm and calculate the most probable combinations.’

‘I have also thought of a model city from which I deduce all the others,’ Marco [Polo] answered. ‘It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions. If such a city is the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we increase the probability that the city really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities which, always as an exception, exist. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve cities too probable to be real.’

-Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1974

São Paulo is a megalopolis in a constant state of transformation. As the paulista urban historian Benedito Lima de Toledo has written, the city’s present-day chaos – its complex, intertwining structures and accretions and disjointed aggregate layers – are the result of its having been completely demolished and rebuilt twice within 100 years. This process resulted in three different cities. The colonial city of the late 19th century, with 20,000 inhabitants, was transformed into a modern European-style metropolis in the 1910s and 1920s, with a population of 580,000. Then, when the urban emphasis changed to a progressive ‘technicist’ project in the 1930s (population 1.6 million), the car quickly took precedence over the pedestrian, a trend that continues to shape the expansion of the city today (population 21 million). From the 1930s on, gardens and open spaces were systematically sacrificed to traffic flow and parking.

While the majority of South American capitals were founded on the model of European urbanization practised by Spanish colonials, with a plaza mayor at their nucleus, comprising town hall, church and other fixed architectural elements, the Portuguese colonists in Brazil demonstrated no such inclination for planning. São Paulo’s relation to its past is therefore quite different from that of the major European or North American capitals, as well as those in Spanish-speaking Latin America. On the one hand, there is no real centre or identifiable public area out of which the city can be said to have grown and around which it could continue to orient itself. On the other hand, its expansion has always been motivated by disparate and competing private interests, thereby creating a poorly defined notion of what
is public.

City in Transit

The consecutive waves of unplanned demolition and reconstruction, never subordinated to an overarching urban vision, contributed to the development of a city without open spaces such as parks, promenades, playgrounds, gardens and squares. As a result, the city has evolved a lifestyle that is led, for the most part, behind closed doors. São Paulo is an indoor city, with its inhabitants spending their time inside houses, apartments, restaurants, clubs, cars, bars, cinemas, museums and galleries; on the streets thousands of people can be seen, at any time of day or night, but always in transit. They go from one place to another, concentrating on their journey, focusing on their final destination. So the city can be seen mainly as a passage way – an infinite number of routes taken daily, connecting the different points that together make up the mental map of São Paulo carried within each inhabitant.

The topography of the undulating valley in which São Paulo lies has also militated against the creation of landmarks that are visible from every part of the city – there is no large monument, cathedral or tower that can situate the passer-by. The main reference points are on the high ground, two large rivers (which once defined the city’s limits), as well as the major avenues, many of them built on top of rivers, which serve to orientate drivers traversing long distances. The fact that there are no conspicuous, dominant architectural elements has perhaps served to create a more flexible city, recognizable by its smaller constituent parts – bars, bakeries, signs – which are part of the day-to-day life of every inhabitant. It is common for the residents of São Paulo to mention now-vanished points of reference: ‘It’s near the old Banespa building, where the prefecture is now’; ‘Do you remember that quarter with residential houses near the park, where there’s now an enormous office block? Well, the shop’s right there.’

Architecture/Memory

The short life of architecture in the city is also a disorienting force. Like friends or relatives who die prematurely or suddenly, fragments of the built environment of São Paulo are increasingly disappearing; its population of familiar buildings, houses and neighbourhoods has suffered through a process of rapid transformation, with a turnover time of less than a generation. In contrast to those who have survived a war – and witnessed the total destruction of a city to live with the lasting memory of an immense emptiness – we in São Paulo have lived through continual demolition and construction as part of our everyday lives. A house is knocked down to make way for a block of apartments; a 15-storey residential building becomes a block of 40 offices; gardens and squares become viaducts, road junctions and busy avenues; landmark historical structures are destroyed overnight by owners in need of money and used as car parks until the land is sold.

The architecture of the city interweaves a recent past with an unstable present – all over town, buildings representing every decade from the 1910s to today sit uneasily side by side. It is difficult to identify a signature architectural style from any particular decade; if any one style seems to dominate, there is always an older building close by that bucks the trend or another that is brand new (‘I don’t remember seeing this building the last time I passed by here’). As a result the city can be understood as a selective, private and subjective collection of memories, a landscape of isolated, forgotten parts and of others that have been preserved for arbitrary reasons amid buildings from other eras and architectural styles. As with our more subjective and transient memories (for example, about the colours of the clothes people wore in the 1970s, which get confused in our minds with the hues of the photographs of that decade, leaving us wondering about their real colour), it is impossible to re-enter the house where our grandparents lived or even the house where we grew up. In relation to architecture, access and allegiance are confused – like the reproductions of works of art in books to which we once felt so closely attached that, when we cross the ocean and finally visit the museums where they are kept, we feel disappointed by the originals. There is a subjective memory that will always be linked with the image of photographs, videos of family, stories about people who shared the same space.

Tropical Forest

Among the innumerable layers superimposed on the city there is one that is almost forgotten by those who live here, perhaps because of the natural abundance that surrounds us. The streets of São Paulo, for example, are in constant need of renovation and repaving, destroyed by tree roots that insist on growing and retaking the city. Tough grass sprouts up between paving slabs. If there is no control over the growth of the city, there is also none over what remains of our ancestral city: the forest. Overhead, buzzards with enormous wingspans spiral over the buildings on hot air currents, while underfoot greenery breaks through the minutest cracks and fissures, in places where one would assume there could be no more life, buried under cement, stone and steel.

MASP

In the 1960s the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, designed by the architect Lina Bo Bardi, displayed a radical idea for an exhibition design in which different periods of art history were superimposed and conflated, as they are in the surrounding city. Modernist European and Latin-American paintings mingled with other older works in the museum’s permanent collection with no defined order or itinerary for visitors, inundated by the light and noise of the city outside. Bo Bardi’s innovative open-plan installation has now been completely revamped, but many people who lived in São Paulo in the 1970s and 1980s have embedded in their memories this collection of paintings floating together in a disorganized and suspended field. To ascend into the building via a transparent lift and arrive at a wall of glass fronting the exhibition hall was to witness, all at once, multiple times, stories and languages – all compressed within a two-dimensional image of art history. For the visitor, to walk through this one vast room was to define your own path, to determine your own pictorial narrative and chain of associations.

Like the paintings inside, the MASP building itself was suspen-ded in the void, supported by four enormous columns over a ground-level terrace and belvedere, open to the public who pass along Avenida Paulista. The museum and its contents hovered overhead, approximating in volume the inviting vacuum left below in the street.

[In]visible Cities

São Paulo seems to display more evidently a characteristic that it shares with all big cities: the impossibility of grasping it all at once, of understanding it as a whole, of travelling through every part of it, of applying any system of measurement or logic. It is a city made up of infinite temporary cities, superimposed and criss-crossed by a disorganized and expanding terrain, composed of the ‘exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions’ of which Calvino writes.

Its inhabitants negotiate its different times and spaces on a daily basis; the memory of the city is within each person who lives and moves through it, not in the ruins or buildings they (should) preserve; this makes São Paulo a city that remains alive and intense, in a state of constant flux. ‘Like language, which flows from mind to mind, carrying images, feelings, thoughts. Through its flow, it draws mental landscapes that change the way we relate to each other and to the world. It is about movement and change. It shows how our perspectives and horizons are changed by its incessant flow, how we do and do not step into the same river twice’.5

Ana Paula Cohen