São Paulo,
the anthropophagic city.
Huge, wild, chaotic, elegant, sophisticated, indomitable, cosmopolitan, cannibal. With 11.1 million inhabitants (19 in metropolitan area), São Paulo is the largest city in Brazil. And the real economic heart of Latin America. His Metropolitan Complex (almost 30 million inhabitants) generate 30% of the GDP of Brazil. Besides, the company Skyscraper City consider São Paulo since 2006 as the best city to invest in Latin America, ahead of Chile in Santiago, Miami and Monterrey.
Maybe that is why 58% of rich families of Brazil (about 450,000) live in São Paulo. It is not coincidence that the Bolsa de Valores de São Paulo (Bovespa) has 400 companies, 85.000 businesses every day and moving amount of $ 290 million every year. Everything fits in São Paulo. Immigrants from around the world, indigenous rites. A powerful Japanese heritage, an African connection, and a lot of European blood.
The writer Italo Calvino, in his book Invisible Cities, spoke of a city, Zenobia, in which the houses were at different heights, on stilts, and sidewalks were joined by hanging bridges. São Paulo is Zenobia, the city of impossible /parallel heights. Metaphorically, São Paulo is still more Zenobia. The rich executive fly over the city in helicopters (the city has 260 heliports and is unique in the world with air traffic controllers within the urban area). But at the same time, São Paulo has more than 10,000 beggars. And has an extremely poor favela belt.
Photographer Carlos Cazalis, World Press Photo 2009, portrays perfectly this horizontal city, with its parallel strates. On the one hand, wealthy people in exclusive ghettos. On the other hand, the abandoned class, occuping old buildings or living without shelter in the street. São Paulo summarizes the Brazilian miscegenation. And the anthropophagic movement that Oswaldo de Andrade anticipated in 1928: "It was because we had never grammars or collections of old vegetables. And I never knew what was urban, suburban, border and continental. "
|
|
