{"id":89682,"date":"2017-04-03T12:01:21","date_gmt":"2017-04-03T11:01:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=89682"},"modified":"2017-03-29T12:27:37","modified_gmt":"2017-03-29T11:27:37","slug":"selling-sao-paulo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/04\/selling-sao-paulo\/","title":{"rendered":"Selling S\u00e3o Paulo"},"content":{"rendered":"

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17 Mar 2017 – <\/em>S\u00e3o Paulo is for sale. Jo\u00e3o Doria, mayor since 1 January, is planning to auction off South America\u2019s biggest city piece by piece: not only the racecourse, football stadium and carnival centre, but lighting, transport, health services and even the public funeral system.<\/p>\n

THE GLITZY PROMOTIONAL VIDEO<\/a> is full of glass towers and night shots of glittering avenues; there\u2019s no sign of the heaving lanes of traffic that blast and fume among concrete towers as far as the eye can see. There are few green or public spaces in S\u00e3o Paulo; the biggest, Ibirapuera Park, is now up for sale.<\/p>\n

But the unforgiving landscape is the canvas for one of the most vibrant street-art scenes in the world. Cheap blocks of government housing opposite a baked-tarmac motorway are transformed by the enormous figures of beautiful women painted across them. The water-streaked concrete pillars holding up a flyover are covered with colourful images, both political (a crying boy trying to eat a football) and personal (two people holding one another, with rivers for hearts).<\/p>\n

Doria began to paint over the graffiti, some of which was decades old, in his first week in office. Like Donald Trump, Doria is a businessman, and campaigned as one. Also like Trump, he is a performer, the presenter of Brazil\u2019s version of The Apprentice<\/em>. Mauricio Feij\u00e3o, an urban planner, sees Doria\u2019s idea to paint out the graffiti as a typical populist gesture with little thought behind it.<\/p>\n

\u2018It\u2019s theatre,\u2019 Feij\u00e3o told me. \u2018On his first day as mayor he dressed up as a street cleaner and went downtown to clean up under a bridge. The municipal team went there first and got rid of the homeless for the photo-shoot. There is an expression in Brazilian soccer, \u201cjogar para torcida\u201d. It is used when a player is not really interested in scoring a goal but only making some moves so the crowd goes crazy.\u2019<\/p>\n

Doria\u2019s big show backfired. Paulistas were outraged; the culture secretary said the city was too grey and the walls should be repainted. The city promised to pay for spray-paint to encourage artists back. Doria has announced he is going to start a \u2018museum of graffiti\u2019 \u2013 eight dedicated walls around S\u00e3o Paulo. Private sponsors will supply the paint and prize money.<\/p>\n

Colourful street art isn\u2019t the only graffiti in S\u00e3o Paulo. The form of tagging known as pixo is a lot less popular. The young men who spray the rune-like black characters across the city are wild, climbing tower blocks, surfing trains, teetering off ledges to brand all the surfaces they can. Many have died and many have gone to jail. When the American graffiti artist Barry McGee first saw pixo, it made his hair stand on end. \u2018It blew me away,\u2019 he says in Jo\u00e3o Wainar\u2019s documentary Pixo<\/a>. \u2018It completely strangled the city, completely took over every part of the city that was available, every surface of the city that was available, in the quickest, fastest method I have ever seen.\u2019<\/p>\n

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The local graffiti artist Alex Hornest<\/a> says that pixo is a way in to understanding S\u00e3o Paulo and its grave inequalities. Doria boasts that the city is home to 50 per cent of Brazil\u2019s billionaires and has the largest concentration of shopping malls in Latin America. According to the World Bank, one third of S\u00e3o Paulo\u2019s residents live in slum conditions. The pixadores, Hornest says, are responding to a city that they feel is designed to exclude them.<\/p>\n

\u2018Cities that do not have as much misery, neglect, injustice and class war as S\u00e3o Paulo, do not have graffiti in such excess as we have here,\u2019 he told me. \u2018Our problems are so many that people feel they need to go out onto the streets to scream, to protest, to show that they exist. Graffiti is a way of fighting against all the injustices that come every day.\u2019 Wiping out the graffiti won\u2019t solve the problems it\u2019s a symptom of.<\/p>\n

According to Feij\u00e3o, Doria doesn\u2019t much care if the city works or not. \u2018I don\u2019t think he wants to understand it deeply,\u2019 he said. \u2018If he wanted he could be surrounded by people who could explain this to him.\u2019<\/p>\n

Raquel Rolnik, the former UN special rapporteur on adequate housing, is an architect from S\u00e3o Paulo. For her, Doria\u2019s attitude to pixo is part of a broader strategy to erase the presence of the vulnerable and marginalised and to create a \u2018corporate city directed to the 1 per cent, their cars and desire of consumption\u2019.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 lrb.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

17 Mar 2017 – S\u00e3o Paulo is for sale. Jo\u00e3o Doria, mayor since 1 January, is planning to auction off South America\u2019s biggest city piece by piece: not only the racecourse, football stadium and carnival centre, but lighting, transport, health services and even the public funeral system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[180],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89682\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}