'A Final Statement'

The city fascinates us. Mainly because of its enormous diversity and complexity. But what do we refer to when we are talking about the city? Can we still describe the city with the language and research methods we have created for describing the city? The first thing that comes to mind when we think of the city is the spatial arrangement of a highly dense building environment. Cities established as the clustering of a place to trade and developed many supporting services as the settlements grew into cities. But surely, the cities we live in today, and especially the metropolises, have reached an incredible complexity with innumerable layers of history, stacked over time. The city is a time box in which over time snapshots of its contemporary situations have been collected, from the establishment of the settlement until the city it has become today. The city carries the memory of its own development.

Within the city the public sphere has always played an important role, because of its potential for communication, confrontation and connectivity. We refer to it as a sphere because there is not one public layer or dimension but many, one nothing less important than the other. They are all realities that all together form the Public City. To develop our notion of this complex theme in a city of incomprehensible scale, we have chosen for a threefold approach: firstly we have observed the public sphere in Sao Paulo and documented our experiences in pictures, sketches, diagrams and texts; secondly we have started to develop an ‘urban vocabulary’ that relates to the concept of the city in general. The next step has been to link the urban alphabet with our experiences of public Sao Paulo, as a tool to render the publicness of Sao Paulo in a broader context. By interlinking the words and images we could discover different realities or layers of publicness that cover the contemporary situation of Public Sao Paulo best. Important to understand is that many more layers can be found within this public sphere of the city, but as we have not intended to decompose the city’s complexity into a few defined layers that form a complete representation of the city’s publicness, these are the ones that describe our notion of Public Sao Paulo best.

The final step would be to find out how these different realities relate to one another. As can be seen in the public web and the diagrams, the different layers are not isolated but are connected and influence eachother. The informal city meets the infrastructural city where the infrastructural network congests and traffic jams grow, making it the perfect spot for entrepreneurs to sell their goods or services to the awaiting mass. The formal city meets the universal city when people want to recreate, to represent themselves and confront others in a representational environment, when people want to disconnect from their private situations and plug themselves into the public. Within these overlaps we find potential. The potential to trigger something new, not for the benefit of one group of users but for more.

The question is not how can we decompose the complex city into fragments and into a language that we understand? Not how to make the notion of the city graspable. Because it is this ‘ungraspability’ that makes the city so fascinating. And perhaps, our own language would not suffice in taking on this task and therefore could not represent the Reality. Neither have we intended to confine the public sphere of Sao Paulo and the city in general since the public sphere has an inexhaustible capability to grow, adapt and transform itself. The quality of the public realm lies within its freedom for different interpretations. Let the people have their own interpretations, their own realities, multiple realities.
The question is how can we as architects, urban planners and municipality develop a tool or strategy to leave space for these different interpretations and design public spaces that in fact are public, that have the potential to transform into something more. In stead of confining the public realm, excluding undesired visitors, determine and control the user’s behaviour within our pretty ‘public’ spaces we design for profit and consumption today. At the same time, this is nothing new because ever since the first public places, like the Agora in Athens, undesired guests were not welcome to participate. Still, here a little more passiveness would be in place. While at the same time, temporarily or locally, the city is left unguarded and abandoned when a more proactive approach is needed. Within this quest valuable lessons can be learned from the flexible, adaptable informal city, always in a process of development into something appropriate.

Urban Alphabet

The public sphere is one of the most complex themes in architectural theory. To get a better grasp on this subject, I tried to establish an archive of words that all relate to the Public. After making a dictionary of words that all relate to this theme in general, I weighed them and linked them to my experiences of the Public in Sao Paulo. By doing that and linking related words to eachother, I found a way to describe the different realities of the Public in Sao Paulo. It’s clear that Sao Paulo is too big, too complex and there are too many contradictions to be able to narrow it down to a single reality.

Now I’ve found a few realities that all show a different aspect of Sao Paulo, this makes it easier for Nicola and me to select the words that describe the public sphere of Sao Paulo best for our second part of our presentation for the expositions. We want to select some pictures that show the different realities and accompany them with a word that describes these varying aspects. I think that would really add something to the presentation since “one image says more than a thousand words.” This could be in the form of large printed out pictures or a video presentation.

By no means, this dictionary is finished and complete. Feel free to add more words and comment on my experienced realities. Because that’s what always fascinates me about the Public, there is space for different interpretations of the same.

A
Acceptance
Alternative
Anonymity
Appropriation
Authority

B
Behaviour
Bureaucracy

C
Citizenship
Coherence
Collectivity
Communication
Community
Concentration
Concept
Condition
Conflict
Confrontation
Congestion
Connectivity
Consolidation
Constitution
Construction
Contact
Context
Continuity
Control
Clustering
Culture

D
Danger
Decor
Destination
Democracy
Density
“Depublicisation” (privatization)
Development
Differentiation
Digitalisation
Distraction
Downgrading
Dynamical

E
Emptiness
Exclusion
Experience
Experiment

F
Facilitation
Fear
Flexibility
Formality
Freedom
Functionality

G
Genericality
Globalisation
Growth

H
Hierarchy
Homelessness
Hybridism

I
Identity
Illegality
Improvement
Informality
Infrastructure
Integration
Interiorisation
Isolation

J

K

L
Layeredness
Law enforcement
Locality

M
Maintenance
Memory
Migration
Mobility
Modernity
Monstrosity
Monumentality

N
Necessity
Neglection
Network

O
Occupation
Openness
Organisation

P
People
Planning
Potential
Popularity
Power
Privatization (“depublicisation”)
Process
Protection
Provocation

Q

R
Reality
Recreation
Regulation
Restriction

S
Safety
Segregation
Society
Spatiality
Statical
Strategy
Structure
Supervision
Surveillance
Sustainability

T
Temporality
Territory
Trade
Tradition
Transformation
Transportation
Tourism

U
Universality
Unemployment
Urbanity

V
Visibility

W

X

Y

Z
Zoning


As I said there is not one reality that really says it all about the public sphere of Sao Paulo. The city is a monster, in the way that this city more than anywhere has created itself for decades without the strict supervision of a municipality. From my point of view, for a long time the city has literally been “out of control.” Now municipality is trying to get back in control, but not without resistance. Informal processes follow out of necessity and establish themselves in their purest form. They are there for a reason, have developed through time and can not be easily replaced by a formal layer of urban planning. Besides, informality is always a response to formality, so formalizing the informal will evoke new informal processes because certain groups, behaviour etc. will be displaces that have established there place on that spot through time.

Next to the formal-informal realities, there is a big difference between Sao Paulo at day and at night. At daytime the city becomes something between a hysterical circus and an overloaded infrastructure that in now way can supply the demand of its population. The car is the only option because distances are great and the development of the public transport has been on a stand still while Sao Paulo was growing out of its own skin. Not to mention the pedestrian and the cyclist that are liked guests of our European cities but have no place in the public network. Of course all these things are relative. For instance, there are clusters of a vivid public life where pedestrians are very present, but these clusters often are poorly connected, creating a tissue around them that is dominated by cars again. And very apparent is the way these clusters are dealt with: often with a gate around it and surveillance controls making sure there are no unwelcome guests that do not comply to the “appropiate” behaviour. At night, the streets become deserted. Again clusters of nightlife, but anywhere else the smell of trouble in the air. This fear has established itself over the years but has become an important factor in the way people use the city but also the way people have designed the city. Contrary to the stereotypical Brazilian outdoor public life you will find in most other cities in the country, a significant part of the public life of Sao Paulo occurs indoors. Yes this also has to do with the climate etc but it can’t be denied that the fear of danger plays an important role in this. Putting the Public behind a door makes it easier to control, protect and watch them. People will always have the urge to become public: to meet with strangers, to claim your own place in society, to give your life a meaning and an identity, to get distracted and to be just an anonymous element in the mass before turning back to the private again, where comfort is found but responsibilities and duties too.

Reality 1: the Reality of the Formal City
Authority, Behaviour, Conflict, Control, Exclusion, Formality, Hierarchy, Isolation, Law enforcement, Maintenance, Power, Privatization (“depublicisation”), Protection, Restriction, Segregation, Surveillance, Zoning


Reality 2: the Reality of the Traffic
Congestion, Connectivity, Clustering, Destination, Dynamical, Infrastructure, Mobility, Network


Reality 3: the Reality of the Night
Danger, Fear, Emptiness, Homelessness, Interiorisation, Territory


Reality 4: the Reality of the Informal City
Acceptance, Appropriation, Citizenship, Community, Constitution, Density, Development, Flexibility, Functionality, Genericality, Growth, Illegality, Informality, Necessity, Neglection, Occupation, Potential, Process, Transformation


Reality 5: the Reality of the Public Man
Anonymity, Collectivity, Communication, Confrontation, Contact, Democracy, Digitalisation, Distraction, Freedom, Globalisation, Identity, Integration, People, Recreation, Society, Trade, Tourism, Universality, Urbanity, Visibility