“Like a huge, dynamic mass of gridded patches and structureless emulsions of masonry, asphalt, cars and people, the colossus sprawls across the endless plateau and gobbles its way through the dark green forest, leaving little reddish spots behind. The new developments and the mutations follow the logic of land speculation and are driven by instantaneous impulses such as a randomly placed new factory or an equally randomly placed favela. Admittedly, the ring of motorways around and through the center, together with the railways and two rivers, form a bundle of infrastructure that allows us a distant panorama, and the built-up area occasionally follows an undulation of the landscape, but ultimately these nuances vanish amid the hugeness and chaos of the whole. Thus Sao Paulo has the appearance of a vast, monotonous, dense uplift cut across by deep clefts…Every notion we may have about planning and architecture evaporates here. What do you do about cities with over 10 million inhabitants? You cannot do them justice with ‘normal’ planning or ‘normal’ architecture. That would suggest that the contemplative slowness of the plan or design would work here. In Brazil, action is chronically overtaken by events. No time for consideration, no time for reflection. That’s a European luxury, but here every municipal organization is powerless against the proliferation of the city. All that can be done is to keep things under control. Urban planning becomes a matter of policing rather than a political or cultural discipline.”
NIJENHUIS, Wim; DE VRIERS, Nathalie. Eating Brazil. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2000.
To read an urban study and see pictures of Sao Paolo:
Carlos Leite
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