Proverbial

At the blog next door, Rico - also this blog’s landlord - posted some very cool pictures of Sao Paulo then and now. Curiously, he passed the chance to talk about how the “Clean City” billboard ban, which he detests on moral grounds, is affecting the city’s landscape.

A friend of mine was there recently (.br) and said the difference was remarkable, and made the city much nicer. Now a kind soul has been taking photographs of Sao Paulo’s mutating landscape and posting them on Flickr. It gives a good idea of how much stuff has been taken down. I’ve said what I think about the ban before, and seeing this pictures just reinforces my notion that, in a city like Sao Paulo, this is a necessary and welcome move.

Sure, it bothers me to read some purely anti-trade remarks, such as the guy who said that where once was a huge billboard on the side of a decadent building, people should “go grab those local ‘hooligan’ graffiti artists, teach them how to use climbing equipment, and have them spruce it up a bit“, as if graffiti was somehow morally superior to advertising. But on the whole, seeing as how it would be impossible to enforce any sort of rational regulation on these things, an outright ban still seems to me like the only feasible option.

UPDATE: this sunday’s Folha de S. Paulo brings a very interesting piece (only for subscribers, though) on how the ban, which also regulates how much space of its facade a store can use to display its logo, is forcing store owners, designers and architects to use different colors and forms to differentiate its brand. It also has some very cool pictures of “before” and “after”, showing how the city’s landscape looks cleaner and more pleasant, and also what the same place would look like without telephone and energy cables - which, to me, are THE greatest source of visual pollution in big cities like Sao Paulo.