Neil Fraser
27 September 2002
Some years ago I was on the 50th floor of the Carlton Centre with the Star's James Clarke chatting about various aspects of the city. I was bewailing the fact that many of the more modern buildings were totally introverted - people came to work and parked in the basement, caught a lift to their office floor, ate in the cafeteria at lunch-time or in one of the executive dining rooms, had a work-out in the corporate gym and at the end of the day caught the lift back down to the basement and drove home. No interaction with the city at all. And the losers? The city as well as the individual. Livability isn't just something that the city environment provides but is the sum of many things, and one of the vital ingredients is people. Whilst we were chatting, we saw a helicopter zoom past and settle on a rooftop helipad, disgorge its passengers who disappeared into the building and then zoomed off again. "There, see" I said to James, only part in jest, "some don't even trust our roads!"
I was reminded of that incident when I was given an article on Sao Paulo published earlier this year in the Washington Post. The article says; "Sao Paulo – a city of 18 million, populated by the fantastically wealthy and the severely poor with little in between – is, by some accounts, a vision of future urban life in the developing world."
In the case of Sao Paulo it was an industrial boom over the past century that lured millions of poor Brazilians from the destitute areas of the country to the city. As the writer puts it; "Most trade destitute rural lives for urban misery, piling into ever-growing slums that have become dens for gangs dealing in drugs, kidnapping and arms." Sound familiar? Only in our case it was, ironically, as a result of our first taste of democracy as the repressive and restrictive laws of the previous regime, its social engineering, officially disappeared from the statute books.
And in our case, much of the "big business" that was still left in city, upped and left for the sought after sanctuary of the northern nodes led by many of our "captains of industry". Sao Paulo appears to have been different in that business appears to have largely stayed in the city but moved their residential addresses in a double whammy that has been even more devastating. Firstly, they make no attempt to deal with the city problems, isolating themselves from the streets and, secondly they have moved their homes and families into new 'settlements'. But forget the three metre high walls topped with spikes and electrified fencing that our suburbs boast. Road closures and suburban fences? Oh no! they have moved to the next generation!
Whilst business has stayed in the city, the executives commute by helicopter, to home, to office, to meetings outside offices, to shop, even to church. There are 240 helipads in the city (New York has 10 – we have one maybe two) and helicopter companies estimate that liftoffs average 100 per hour. As helicopters are not cheap (between R4 million and R20 million in Sao Paulo), some businessmen syndicate their use, paying a one time fee of four hundred thousand rand and then a further fifteen thousand rand per month.
The determinants are quoted as being high crime (60 murders to 100 000 residents compared to 7.4 and 7.8 in the Washington metro area and New York respectively); frustration with traffic, lack of acceptable public transport and clogged highways.
A recent study has shown that a million Brazilian residents live in walled cities of which Sao Paulo has more than 300. These walled communities have helipads and limited entrances and exits all monitored 24 hours a day. Private security ‘armies' some as large as 1 100 officers oversee every aspect of public life within the walled areas, whether at the shopping centre, school, sports facilities or gyms. Inside the ‘compounds' every visitor is recorded by cameras and all exiting employees are ‘patted down' and searched in front of live TV.
The wife of a banker who lives in Alphaville, some seven-and-a-half miles from the city centre (a walled community of 300 000 residents, three helipads and only four entrances/exits each monitored 24 hours a day) says that she is concerned that her kids are growing up in a bubble - "they go to school here, their friends are here but when we go (infrequently) to the city they ask "Mommy why is that man begging?" or "why do those kids live on the streets?"
Teresa Caldeira a noted Brazilian anthropologist and author of "City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in Sao Paulo" sums it up; " The elite have made a decision. Instead of looking to better Brazilian society in general, they are abandoning it and finding their own personal protection behind guarded walls. The rich are retrenching, restricting their lives in incredible ways and living their lives in an increasingly paranoid fashion."
Other sociologists concur saying that Sao Paulo provides all the signs of the way urban society in Latin America's largest nation is changing. The writer of the article suggests, as you will have seen previously, that it may also be a "vision of future urban life in the developing world."
For us, warning, maybe, but vision, no! There are just too many visible signs of progress made during these past two years in particular. There is just so much energy, so many people and organisations committed to and actively working on the revitalisation of this city that I have every confidence that we have reversed the downward spiral and are off the bottom and on our way up. And 'people and organisations', thankfully, include the Executive Mayor and Council who continue to show the political will that is so essential an ingredient for success.
As an aside, I trust that their political will is going to continue to hold under the latest pressure that threatens the city's recovery, that from hawker associations over MetroMarket and street trading. They seem to be determined to prevent their members from being part of the future of the city by forcing them to continue trading on streets at subsistence levels and less. They, the hawker associations not the hawkers, would do well in Sao Paulo!
