Drifting through the city, we find a dazzling flow of images; contrasts, discrepancies, machine-like motion, the images of wealth and poverty, graffiti, faces, details and everything in between. São Paulo as an endless collage.

1. Jan v.B., Rutger H., Sabrina V., Martine V.
Picturing São Paulo
Presentation 2
17-04-09 14:00-18:00
FAU-USP Lecture Hall
IN.SP PROJECT PRESENTATIONS 2009

2. Motivation: How to deal with understanding the urban complexity of Sao Paulo.
“(…) the panorama of the surface is already so vast and rich and various that it more than
suffices to saturate the mind with information and meanings. (…) It is only after you have
come to know the surface of the things, (…) that you venture to seek what is underneath.
But the surface is inexhaustible.”
Italo Calvino – Mr. Palomar
1.) How to find a format that does not reduce the city to false abstractions,
to create false transparency.
2.) A tool that expresses complexity, but that on the other hand provides
information about urban phenomena in the broadest sense.

3. What you did: ‘Walking in the city’
Michiel de Certeau
Mapping the city all its diversity to
create an urban collage:
Literary descriptions
Photography
Video
Paul Citroen – Metropolis, 1923

5. Go to: Parallel reality

6. The relevance :
The instrument has its relevance on two levels:
1.) General: Contemporary metropolitan cities are difficult to
represent. My instrument shows the diversity and complexity
by incomplete flashes and fragments, instead of abstract
scientific data.
2.) The relevance of the collage: The city is the endless surface
that appears to us when we walk through it, experienced by a
human eye in a walking body. A restless eye, reading the city
not as text, not chapter after chapter or word after word, but
by fragments and flashes, skipping almost simultaneously
from details to widescreen overviews. The collage is the
perfect representation of this.
3.) The collage (in the broader sense of the word) is especially
suitable for the condition of Sao Paulo where so many
different realities are running simultaneously together. In a
world of walls and enclosure, in a desperate search for
security.

7. Parallel Worlds Project by Rutger Huiberts
Paulistas don’t know their city. It is just too big.
On top of that, in this urban jungle one does not need to know all. Paulistas live in parallel worlds,
each of which is spatially and socially segregated by mechanisms of exclusion.
Walls, fences, feelings of peril, unwritten dress codes and entrance fees make it impossible and
undesirable for all to know all.
Crime levels are high, but are these feelings of unsafety, threat and the need to segregate not just
exaggerated by the unknown world behind the wall?
I cannot understand this city in a few weeks. Therefore I have the feeling that I cannot solve its
problems. But the eyes of the stranger can view things from a different perspective.
Exploring São Paulo has been my goal these weeks. Attempting to experience the city not from
the Paulista point of view (car, bus, helicopter, and shutting themselves off from an overkill of
visual input) but walking and drifting. Trying to find connections, gradients, events, similarities
and parallel worlds along the road.

8. Parallel Worlds
Some issues that I want to address after the walks I made:
Abandoned buildings
Walls, gates, cameras
Telecommunication
Traffic
Shopping mall
Gated community
(hyper)dense São Paulo
Cortiços house
Kites
Urban agriculture
Homeless guy
and more...

9. Parallel Worlds
Approach
Make use of the billboards that were
whitewashed after the Municipal ban of
2006.
Use 1 photo to describe the city from a
formal, or top down approach.
Then make a collage with a narrative /
detail / experience, putting both elements
of the collage in a new perspective.
Map the photos and the links.

10. Parallel Worlds
The window openings of many of the
abandoned buildings of São Paulo are
closed with brick walls.
Is it to prevent people from entering and
squatting or to hide what is inside?

11. Parallel Worlds
A rich neighbourhood is recognised by
its gates, walls, security cameras, fences
and closed façades.

12. Parallel Worlds
Good Morning.
Transit.
Work.
Transit.
Good Night.
Written on a wall in Morumbi

13. Parallel Worlds
“I can rent this piece of land from the
electricity company who owns it. The
contract is renewed every year. I grow
beetroot, cabbage, lettuce, melons, some
herbs and a few banana trees. It is close
to my house and provides income. And I
don’t have to commute for it.”

14. Parallel Worlds
How to advertise without words?
Using brightly coloured façades is becoming an important strategy
after the use of too many words was banned by the Municipality
in 2006.

15. Parallel Worlds
The streets in Paraìsopolis are densely filled with people,
merchandise, advertisements, cars, children playing, priests
preeching.

16. FORMAL
Sabrina Verhage
INFORMAL ARTS
INFORMAL

17. Rua Augusta

18. Stencil art
Poster art Wheatpaste Graffiti Sticker art

19. The architectura
l facade as a blan
k piece of paper,
with specified w
riting columns
PICHACAO

21. Pavements in public spaces
The diversity of street patterns in Sao Paulo

22. Pavements in public spaces
Pavements are an integral part of every urban fabric, literally the interstitial tissues of our cities’ networks.
75 street patterns
Google geotagging + all patterns in map
walking the strip
monday
tuesday
wednesday

23. Pavements in public spaces
Urban ground is where the public appropriates and modifies the very surface of the city
Spatial Appropriation Bela Vista Moema
Appropriation as vehicle of meaning, from informal to formal and temporary to permanent

24. Publicness vs. Appropriateness
A pavement could be considered as a place to pass by or as a mapping notation.
consequence
of
constant
circulation
passing by passing by
boundaries
mapping notation passing by

25. The relevance lies in Publicness vs. Appropriateness
pavement as vehicle of meaning
subthemes
color
function
boundaries
boundaries
continuities
discontinuities
+
continuities
location
discontinuities
yellow lines
analyzis
Google geotagging + clustering per subtheme