Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
Encountering São Paulo: Moving Outside in
Simon Wright
Wright is a writer living in Bristol, England. This essay is part of a larger work that uses observation and encounter to explore ideas relating to space and place, architecture and the city, and philosophy and everyday life. He explains: “Brazil is an emotive subject for any writer and one particularly prone to the seductive and spirited Dionysian daydreams that, more often than not, the country has come to represent. I went to Brazil to write but ended up rejecting all the excesses. I decided instead to write a book rooted in a normal street in an average portion of the (un-average) city of São Paulo. It was in this ‘Brazil’—of the ordinary and everyday and away from the beaches, the crime, the color, and the carnival—that I found enough inspiration to last a hundred lifetimes.” simonwrig@hotmail.com. © 2009 Simon Wright.
I’m sitting alone on São Paulo’s subway on my way into downtown, on the hunt for a few bits and pieces we need for our new apartment. I look around me, at the rows of plastic chairs, chocolate brown, buffed by overuse. I note the generous floor space and the no-nonsense boxiness of the carriage. I watch the pleasing geometry of chrome as it forms and un-forms configured conduits that dart around the space.
São Paulo’s Metro is a parallel urban universe, a portal through the city, off limits to everything that makes the urban, urban. Locked firmly onto rails, we’re breezing through suburbs under smooth control, sweeping human litter from elevated platforms, gliding to our well-timed destination, cutting unmolested swathes over and under the edges of the ‘real’ city. This train mocks the resistant rage of São Paulo’s buses. It’s their rational, honed, predictable Other, and it seems to ridicule the city, negating it by showing it to me slyly from a distance as detail-less, innocuous piles of stacked-up giant cubes. This detachment is reiterated through the train’s last-minute decision to burrow underground on our approach to the chaotic center of the city.
I look at the impossible mix of faces all around me: Some belie distant shores, others the more typical complexions that distinguish North from South Brazil, while yet others are simply exotic, but in an ordinary way—a fascinating gene-pool puzzle into which I’ve placed my own. I glance above the doors at the diagram, a red string of exotic locations and then out at the blurred urban landscape that rattles and races across the windows of the train.
I first visited Brazil in 2000, and I’d used the Metro then. Nothing’s changed. All these things were here then exactly as they are today. But now I see things all so differently. I’m buffeted to and fro and realize how ‘everyday’ it’s become, as I sit here processing mundane concerns, trivially preoccupied and looking around disinterestedly. I’ve been living in São Paulo for only two months, yet how I’d seen it then, seven years ago, so wide-eyed and wary.
I’ve internalized something about Brazil and find it easy to locate the uniqueness of the São Paulo flavor. I’ve built up an immunity to ‘strangeness’, and I’m shrouded in a Brazilian comfort zone, a blanket of domesticity and everyday routine—a structure missing from my life while on the road the previous eight months.
I’m relishing this comfort now. I look around and feel pleased by the thought of my newly perceived confidence. I feel at home. I’m not looking at everyone and everything with a concealed curiosity, nor anymore registering with pin-sharp clarity everything that happens. No, not anymore. Now I’m so far along I can tell without looking the name of the next stop, even how many people are likely to get on and off. I’ve learnt the places where the train rocks and lurches as it shifts tracks, and I’ve absorbed its rhythms and the distances between stops. I know the busy interchanges, when it gets crowded, where it’s likely to be delayed. I see, feel, know these things without really having thought about them. I’ve internalized them slowly, unintentionally.
But I’m in Brazil. An outsider, a foreigner, a gringo who not so long ago had been trampling round its shores and cities, living through a world of difference. This is an intense strength of feeling—so at home yet in a foreign land.
So what was São Paulo to me that first time when I came here, and what’s it now? What frames of reference, what structure of attitude and feeling did I work through then and how do they differ from what I use to work through this place now? In what idiom, through what concepts, ideas, and devices—imaginative, symbolic, subconscious, sensual—did I phrase and form this city that’s the one I know today? There’s no doubt I’m using the discrepancies arising through contact with another culture as a deliberate tactic, a catalyst or amplifier that makes explicit and sharpens my awareness of place.
I’m interested in my movement from the outside in—first the tentative borrowings, then the retentions of the cultural pieces—the sinuous journey that leads to a sense of constructed belonging. I focus on that movement, that journey, that process—not the end itself which, anyway, is a mirage whose chimerical qualities I acknowledge.
These understandings are slowly cultivated from patterns of thought and feeling that shift the city imperceptibly as though a mental fault-line was running through its heart. It’s due partly to the weight of time, but not duration in a linear sense or the accumulation of experiences culminating in a final understanding. It’s not something that hardens and ossifies like geographical knowledge. It’s more lateral and informal, more mutable and protean. A dialectical motion with residues and blanks, amplifications and extensions, oscillations back and forth—overlapping, simultaneous, diachronic, uncertain, unsteady—a lived process with no teleology to underpin the mutations of its shifting shape.
We pull up at Sé. I step off the train, and the feeling’s gone, forgotten, dispersed already, somewhere among the crowds.
Eighteen Stories
The eighteenth floor of my
apartment, looking westward back across São Paulo. Fine July winter
morning, wonderfully blue sky—so fresh. I’m lucky. The Avenida
Paulista runs across the skyline in the distance. I hunt out the
Banespa building. I’ve worked out the relationships. There it is.
Closer now. Hard to see the activity, but I hear it humming. The street below. Strange angle—acute, extreme. Up here I dance down sidewalks, over skylines, drift and rest on buildings. From here I read the city like a page, swallowed in flowing sequence line by line. This tidiness is a temptation. There’s someone walking and small movements between the crevices. Up here a sea of passages lap senseless at my door. Noise from the construction site opposite. A flash of sun illuminates a stairway, the spiral vertebrae around its growing spine. Soon to be entombed forever—dark kernel of domestic bliss. Movement restrained, subdued, mechanical.
My viewpoint is prejudiced. Omit the background, go for the particular, events through details. Lived experience doesn’t deliver the urban this way. São Paulo everywhere. Interlocking roofs, terracotta scales rising, sliding, pitching down below.
Backyard. Half in sun, half in shade. Black tracksuit hanging on the line, bucket in the middle, three pillows placed along the wall, a towel—all drying in the sun. Someone walks into the adjacent yard, turns, disappears. To the right, lithe blocks of commerce divide the distance beyond the river Tietê. Oversized slabs contrasting the intricate motif of a dominating domesticity.
******
September now, back at the window—this time evening. Poured a cachaça and sit sipping it, looking out. A bird tweets its chorus overhead. A warm breeze blows balmy, summer’s early breath. Once all this was Matta Atlantica, Atlantic rain-forest stretching out as far as the eye could see. I’ll take that one on trust, I’ll have to. So utterly inconceivable from here.
Once more off again. The excavations of my mind’s quiet murmurings are underway. The intellect injected till all the magic’s gone. That bird and this breeze. Nature’s presence in the city. The qualities of an originary place persist: watercourses, hollows, escarpments, gentle inclines, wind patterns, trails becoming roads then thoroughfares.
Natural conditions find responses in the cityscape. Irony? São Paulo? This glittering paradigm of synthetic urban sprawl. I get taken in by it all. Indulgence and the privilege of panorama. Both soporific and intense, close to dreaming. Tune in, let go. Myth of totality, comes, goes, explodes.
Small occurrences going on down there. I could make an endless list that would always lag behind. Each event equivalent to 15 million others going on around me as I look. The evidence becomes a supposition. Then a fact. I let the streets regress again. Into the distance, turning indecipherable shades of grey. Mountains on the horizon to the right. They stave the terror—a reminder that the madness ends.
I take pictures of the setting sun. The sky begins to quiet. Settles to cool blue. The city glistens in reply. Evening easing, slow and steady. The highway Radial Leste to the left, its busy headlights on.
The evening flickers magically with mystery. Benignly, it’s equally mundane. In the city’s half-light, the cosmic hands over to the human. Lights go on and off and headlamps bleed through all the streets. I appreciate the release. As daylight fades, it’s comforting somehow, the way things loosen up.
I sit, sipping my cachaça, not thinking. When it’s actively pursued, the city refuses you. There’s no way to keep with the flux if you pause to represent it. But you can’t. Not without the break, the hesitation, the creation of some new reality.
Lights come on. Others go off. Metal shutters closing over windows. Lights sprinkled across the Avenida Paulista’s heavy haze. Something so achingly revealing. The cachaça’s starting to take hold, the evening feels special. I’m glad and thankful to have witnessed it. Don’t want to have to think. Just want to sit and soak it up. Let it wash all over….
******
Back next morning, coffee in hand. Seven-thirty. The builders have banged since seven—my wake-up call. Quick scan: a few people on the way to work. Cool breeze this morning. Prelude to the day confirmed down there at the pool, the zelador, or caretaker, preparing it. Thanks for the platitude.
A woman walks her dog. He anticipates what’s coming. He knows the route: The other dog that barks at him from the doorway and the lamppost where he’ll urinate. I wonder if we’re any different. Time to think ahead, to plan, arrive. Coffee’s taking effect. I start daydreaming—still waking up, no doubt. Same for them down there: Locked routines of hopes and dreams. The elevator at the construction site rises. Twelfth floor, thirteenth, fourteenth, still rising. Changing landscape. A burst of sunlight crawls timidly toward me, recedes and dies away. This youthful city, blessed with spatial amorality, with no regard for rooted place, succeeds and fails through hotchpotch trial and error.
But listen hard, the voice of Heritage and Patrimony still whispers liturgies of sacred sites and loric spaces for citizens and tourists: Luso-Iberian settlers, the Jesuits, Loyola and Anchietta, founding fathers, founding lights. I harbor an inclination to record the low-lying houses down there for posterity. I know what fate has in store for them just around the corner. I’ll be a long-lost guardian holding these city secrets in a distant foreign clime.
Knowing
São Paulo
Situated to the east of
the city’s geographical center, my neighborhood, or bairro, is
part of the larger area of Tatuapé, one of a mass of community
clusters that throb intensely all over the larger city that subsumes
them. On a map, my neighborhood appears neatly enclosed in a rectangle
but, on the ground, only three of its four sides have clear physical
features: On the north, the east-west axis of the river Tietê; on
the south, the tracks of the Metro paralleled by the Radial Leste
highway; and on the west, the Salim Maluf highway. The north and
south edges can be crossed but only by a number of bridges and
overpasses. On the west, the Salim Maluf highway requires
endurance-testing deference to a complex configuration of traffic
lights.
The eastern boundary of my neighborhood is different because I don’t perceive a clear boundary, mostly because I rarely venture in that direction. The considerable distance of that edge from my flat means the clear geometry of my neighborhood lacks easy resolution in experience. My home is simply too far west. My sense of any eastern border involves a richly textured residential area with no fixed margins or acknowledged bounds and verges. The imprecision of this edge works through a series of intensities and lulls, in ambient shifts that bind some streets but not others in a lattice-like embrace.
There’s one feature—the Avendia Celso Garcia—that cuts a swathe through my bairro. This street is my neighborhood’s premier artery and captivates me most. Running north and south through Tatuapé’s center, the Avendia Celso Garcia forms a border of sorts. This border, however, is an incision, a bisecting vortex that does not encircle and contain but, rather, penetrates, separates, and drives right through. This street both divides and gathers the activity of surrounding streets and squares into uneasy resolution. These streets and squares cling to Avendia Celso Garcia, feeding off its teeming life. A shifting landmark, defining, unifying, and undoing the territory it tears through almost by default.
Following the Avenida Celso Garcia west from my flat, I cross the Avenida Rangel Pestana and go on to Praça da Sé, at the city’s heart. I experience concentrations of action and activity as a rhythm of peaks and troughs gathered and concentrated in waves along the streets. When I reach the Largo da Concórdia, I pass over the railway line that brought the city’s immigrants from the port of Santos. I go up onto the Viaduto de Março along a tightrope thread of sidewalk. All around and below me, the city whirls with elevated highways and merging intersections, rising, falling, circulating with ceaseless traffic. From here, the views—and the Banespa skyscraper—are iconic in their encapsulating São Paulo’s vertical and vigorous beauty.
Not only at this crucial orbital point but also less spectacularly at others, the center-periphery paradigm is inadequate to describe São Paulo. Bustling places are interspersed and linked by quieter, more soporific areas of disuse, abandoned industry or residential enclaves with public spaces always shy of people. The distortions of a shifting suburbia create new patterns of segregation and separation, division and exclusion through fortified enclaves that increasingly close down public spaces and heterogeneous local centers. At the same time, inner-city areas experience post-industrial restructuring and the speculative forces of gentrification. Even as I sit here writing, these and related processes rearrange São Paulo’s spatial logic irrevocably.
******
Cartography affirms the center-periphery model, but experiencing a city involves movement through space, not projections on space. Enmeshed and entangled within the tumultuous city, my bearings assemble themselves through engagement with real spaces. My mental map radiates from home to link sites through lifeworlds experienced on the move, constructed by legs and feet, by travels via subway, bus, or car—a cartography of shifting sensations accumulated through contact with the city.
Mastering São Paulo geographically has complemented, in some ways, the fits and starts I’ve had with learning Portuguese. In coming to know a language, one constructs sentences slowly around key verbs that then dissipate into vagueness round the edges. In a parallel way, orienting oneself spatially, moving from place to place, establishing routes and pathways, making use of transport infrastructure—all these efforts involve a kind of ‘phrasing’ or ‘sentencing’ constructed around prominent geographical and architectural features—buildings, monuments, bridges, metro stations, and the like.
These features act as key ‘punctuation’ points that locate and situate through repeated use until a more intense level of familiarity extends outward and links all the pieces of place together in new ways. As with discovering the subtlety of new words, the learner of place initially overlooks the environmental subtleties because he or she is oblivious to the deeper contextual associations that “natives” understand unself-consciously.
For the newcomer to a city, elements of the built environment evoke a certain ‘feel’ or ‘ambience’ and project perceptual generalizations that ignore the nuanced, particular reality of specific neighborhoods. In São Paulo, these elements include door types, entrances and exits, bars and shutters, aluminum window frames, bricks and brickwork, building proportions, color repetitions—all seen with a blurred uniformity that confers a ‘thereness’ on place but no clear ‘whereness’ beyond the loose geographical abstraction of “São Paulo” as a name.
Experience and memory make connections across the urban landscape, and the rhythms they generate paint lived patterns that color perceptions of place. Rhythm implies motion and flow, which are an integral part of how a city is experienced and lived. In short, there is no one conception of the city. Rather, the stasis and rigidity of urban forms dissolve into the infinite mosaics of real-world places sustaining ordinary and extra-ordinary life.
******
Once again I digress. Before I know it, I find myself emulating São Paulo’s wandering logic where no ends meet. Just tangled trajectories going everywhere and nowhere.