Discovering the place of informality within a formalized public world

My project is based on the experiences I had when I traveled through Brazil last year. When I came to Sao Paulo I had already been in Brazil for nearly two months and explored both numerous cities, like Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, Recife, Natal, Fortaleza, and the interior of Brazil with its more remote culture. Back then I found the public culture in Sao Paulo was entirely different from all the other cities I had visited. Of course you can’t generalize cities into one kind of public culture and especially in Brazil where most cities have an entirely different background, population and so on. But in general, looking at the public culture of the cities, they all have one thing in common. Brazil has an unrivalled outdoor culture which exposes itself in people using the streets, beaches and parks as the extension of their home. Compared to Dutch public culture, the ‘Brazilian version’ is much more vivid and tangible. Here people tend to use the home for eating and sleeping, but other than that they prefer to go somewhere in order to find a location for their activities.

Looking at its public culture, Sao Paulo is a different story though. Here the public life is not as much on the foreground as we could find in other Brazilian cities. This could mean two things: either the public life is only present to a smaller extent, or it is less visible. This could have to do with different variables, among which the enormous scale of the city, which could result in a flattening or spread of the public culture, with the way the city of Sao Paulo has developed a strategy to give a place and time for public culture, or with characteristics of the city and its inhabitants, like economy, historical background, growth, climate and so on. Whatever reasons there may behind it, one thing is for sure: the typical Brazilian outdoor culture is less present or at least differently arranged in Sao Paulo compared to the majority of Brazilian cities. This discovery has been the starting point for my project proposal.

In my view, this difference could be the consequence of two phenomena. Either the public culture in Sao Paulo is drawn inside or it is restricted to certain areas. Also important to point out is the difference in use of public space at day and at night. At daytime the majority of public space is used for infrastructural, logistical reasons. This in itself is not that strange, since a city’s public space mostly consists of streets that take people from one place to another. But where in other cities these streets and squares are also used for a more diverse and longer use, in Sao Paulo the streets seem to be used to go from one interior to the next. It makes the public space a dynamical whole, but one without any surprises, spontaneous events and other kinds of informal responses to this formal use. At night, the dynamical whole is totally gone. The streets become deserted, emptiness with nothing more than here and there a taxi passing by. Almost everything is closed, even most of the cash machines. This is all because of the lurking danger, but on the same time this desertedness increases the danger too.

At the moment there is almost no space for informal responses in the formal city, which makes its public culture rather predictable. Even the informal responses to this predictable formality are as much as possible being staged by the municipality by giving it a place in time and space. Both temporal and local responses happen in- and outdoors. Examples are Ibirapuera, Centro or the way part of Sao Paulo’s highway is closed off on sundays in order to provide, aware of its lack, public space for the Paulistanas. This has led to my theory in which the formalized city of Sao Paulo is split into so called free zones and controlled zones. In the free zones there is room for informality, here you can do whatever you want to. In the controlled zones informality is tied as much as possible, here you do what is expected of you. The obvious critique is that informality can’t be controlled by limiting it to a time or space, since informality is a response to this exact formalization.

My goals for this workshop are twofold. Firstly, I want to put this theory to the test. This I’ll do by walking the strip and mapping it into different zones for different public cultures while trying to find out whether this free zones–controlled zones contrast is really as black and white as I just elaborated. This will result into a map in which these formal and informal zones are given a place, accompanied by recordings of these different zones, either through pictures, videos or audio recordings. This I’d like to finish on Tuesday or Wednesday around noon at its latest. Secondly, I’ll think of alternative strategies in order to revitalize Sao Paulo’s tied public culture, both day and night. To me it has become clear that the public culture in its actual appearances has a lot of potential that is not being fully employed. These alternative strategies will be visualized in text, diagrams, sketches and/or pictures. In the post-production phase this could lead to alternative designs for the public space of one or two locations that have the highest potential.