The Cities Within

The Formal City is the city we are most familiar with. It is the city where most of us work, where people from in- and outside the city recreate and where we can find our institutional buildings. It’s the flagship of the municipality, that leaves no effort untouched to make sure the formal city looks as pretty as possible and is used by the most-favoured visitors in the most-favoured manner. It’s a display of modernity, that shows the city governments’ construction towards an “ideal” future.
In Sao Paulo there is not one formal core that tries to evolve and expand, but rather many formal clusters that differ in scale but all have the same sense of control. Since Sao Paulo has grown so rapidly during the last century the formal clusters have become surrounded by informal tissue and therefore harder to control because of the many “threats” around them. This has led to an unrivalled desire of municipality to control the formal city and protect it from undesired influences. In other words, undesired visitors are excluded from use of this city, either by raising a gate around the cluster like at Ibirapuera, by patrolling the streets with surveillance cars like at Centro, by interiorizing public places like the indoor terraces of most bars/restaurants and many shopping malls or even by privatizing (= depublicizing) the public.


The Informal City is the city that grows where the formal city doesn’t suffice. It is the oldest way of city development and grows out of necessity and functionality. The informal city is never finished, it is in a constant process of transformation and improvement. This is the purest form of bottom-up development, where only what is needed gets built at a time when there are the possibilities to built it. Inhabitants of this city are not cared for by their formal counterpart. They often live in illegality but long for acknowledgement, citizenship and constitution.
In Sao Paulo the share of the informal city is enormous. City development could not cope with the uncontrollable growth of the city half a century ago and many city inhabitants were one their own. This led to the establishment of new communities, close to the formal city, and developed their own systems, strategies and set of rules. Throughout the last decades pieces of informal tissue have been swept away by city planners trying to formalize the tissue and expand the formal clusters into one core. But as informality is always a response to formality, the evicted inhabitants found new sites with potential to occupy and start all over. Occupy, appropriate, grow, transform and develop. Can city development be more pure than that?


The Infrastructural City is the city that creates a constant situation of dynamical flux throughout the entire city. It provides a network of connections from one place to another. Users of the infrastructural city use this city very often but never permanent, on the contrary, rather as brief as possible. Therefore the infrastructural city is always in a constant process of advancement too, trying to provide its users the best service possible. Since there are many ways of transportation, all customized to the preconditions of the desired undertaking, this city is often multilayered and complex.
In Sao Paulo, a city of 18 million inhabitants and 8000 km2, we would not be able to speak of one metropolis without the support of an infrastructural network. The incredible density, in big parts of the city 200 – 13000 inhabitants per km2, shows the need for a sufficient infrastructure. One that is not there at the moment. The scale and density of the city and the singularity of the existing infrastructure guarantees the congestion of the infrastructural city throughout the year. The car dominates, leaving no space for cyclists and pedestrians, while the public network is in now way appropriated to the massiveness of the city. An infrastructure of only overcrowded streets, overloaded roads and congested highways screams for the development of a sufficient underground network, that at the moment has only 2 decent lines, comparable with Rotterdam, a city 30 times smaller than Sao Paulo.


The Deserted City is the city that gets abandoned, often temporarily and sometimes only locally. This city expels the reality of the other cities from time to time, the night being its favorite domain. The dynamical whole of people using the streets during the day is replaced by nothing but emptiness, having a permanent smell of fear and danger that evicts large groups of users but attract others for whom there is no place during the day. This is the city that becomes territorial in a matter of hours, almost as fast as it disappears.
In Sao Paulo this permanent smell of fear and danger has become an integral part of the urban life. In every big city this is a reality, yet not at the same scale as in Sao Paulo. Usually there are certain neighbourhoods that become deserted and need to be avoided for your own safety. But here almost the entire city is abandoned at night. The taxi driver passing by only now and then, with only few concentrations of active nightlife. Even there is space for publicness, there is none to find. Two striking examples: bars, restaurants and clubs have their outdoor spaces inside and can only be reached by car or taxi; and the business district, the territory of men in suits, glitter and glamour at daytime, morphs into the territory of the homeless and the drug addicts at night, lining up their pieces of cardboard in front of abundant banks and offices to form a temporal community and using the impressive boulevards as their collective toilet.


The Universal City is the city creation of the urge for publicness of people. People leave their private domain, where they can find harmony and work on their public appearance, to show this homegrown identity and compare it to those of others. The universal city is the place to meet strangers, to become part of society, to put your life in perspective, but not less important to forget about the concerns of the everyday life and their responsibilities, to become anonymous for a while.
In Sao Paulo is the wrong way to start off this sentence because the universal city is the city that in concept is universal. It is everywhere around us, because it is where the people are. It is not even restricted to the tangible world anymore, nowadays the internet is just as much the place to communicate, to confront and to evolve your identity. Throughout the entire city people trade, play and talk, the public space still being the perfect place to do so. Take a stroll through Ibirapuera Park in the weekend and publicness is what you will find.