“São Paulo is a great city, but not a beautiful city.”
I post often about São Paulo, mostly about how it’s a city portending the worst of urban trends. It turns out there’s a bright side.
Norman Gall gets optimistic in The Wilson Quarterly:
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. The author-journalist Roberto Pompeu de Toledo described São Paulo as “frightening, giddy, tentacular. São Paulo does not inspire admiration in a benign or gentle way. It provokes amazement in a way that admiration becomes fear, a consequence of its enormity, its omnipresent sense of urgency, its disturbing awareness of being in an urban labyrinth that reaches toward the infinite.”
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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