Beat Diaspora: Beats, Buses, Bricks

Google satellite doesn’t lie:

“Throughout this century, social segregation has had at least three different forms of expression in São Paulo’s urban space.  The first lasted from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s and produced a condensed city in which different social groups were packed into a small urban area and segregated by type of housing.  The second urban form, the center-periphery, dominated the city’s development from the 1940s to the 1980s.  It has different social groups separated by great distances: the middle and upper classes concentrated in central and well-equipped neighborhoods and the poor exiled to the hinterland.  Although residents and social scientists still conceive of and discuss the city in terms of the second pattern, a third form has been taking shape since the 1980s, one that has already exerted considerable influence on São Paulo and its metropolitan region.  Superimposed on the center-periphery pattern, the recent transformations are generating spaces in which different social groups are again closer to one another but are separated by walls and technologies of security, and they tend not to circulate or interact in common areas.  The main instrument for this new pattern of spatial segregation is what I call ‘fortified enclaves.’  These are privatized, enclosed, and monitored spaces for residence, consumption, leisure, and work.  Their central justification is the fear of violent crime.  They appeal to those who are abandoning the traditional public sphere of the streets to the poor, the marginalized, and the homeless.”
–Teresa Caldeira, City of Walls, p. 213

The center of São Paulo is the “green zone” of this Brazilian Baghdad, an analogy made by DJ /rupture but relayed to me secondhand.  One can spend months, years, a lifetime circulating this hive of culture & commerce, pleasure sites for eating, drinking, dancing, without venturing into the periphery (except, blinders on, heading to the airport or on the highway out of the city, headed for distant points, beaches, abroad).  Not unlike the Parisians of Roissy Express.

I myself have been caught up in that capitalist feedback loop during the few times I have been to Sampa, but I felt compelled, in light of Caldeira and the informal cities exhibit at the Museu da Casa Brasileira (a rework of a Harvard GSD exhibit, “Dirty Work,” for which I provided the soundtrack), to pick a bus and simply head out.

Over an hour of standing room only later, I disembarked in Grajau.  Here I had crossed beyond the horizon point, where the viewing platform from the highest building downtown yields high-rises in every direction as far as the eye can see.  The glamour of São Paulo yields to the mundane – a favela on the hillside, a park, a school.  This area, at least was near several bus lines and a train station.  The bolder move would have been to strike out for truly hard to reach territory, but with limited time, I still clung to the familiar spine of easy routes back to the center.

The politics of transportation are a powder keg in Sampa.  I commented to a friend how on major avenues downtown, dedicated bus platforms had electronic signs with accurate displays on which bus lines were coming next and in how many minutes.  Not all buses are created equal, he reminded me, and these were comparatively affluent bus routes, not infrequent, suburban-bound, packed-to-the-door routes.

Meanwhile, the metrô is expanding and even greening, with Paulistanos encouraged to get off of four wheels and onto two.

But not far from Grajau, riots erupted over inadequate bus service.

São Paulo is still the undisputed home of “consciência,” conscious music, the hip-hop that speaks truth to power.  A friend tipped me off to Frente 3 de Fevereiro, named after the anniversary of a notorious act of racially-motivated police brutality.  They weld hip-hop, spoken word, funk, and Afro-Brazilian music as they fuse contemporary urban/racial concerns with the deep roots of Afro-Brazilian culture.  Check the website to download the full album.  This is but the preamble to their manifesto:

The February 3rd Front is a multidisciplinary research and direct action group concerned with racism in Brazilian society.  Their approach creates new readings and puts into context the fragmented data that comes to the population through traditional communication channels.  The direct action creates new forms of protest on racial issues.

New strategies are necessary to think and act in a reality of constant transformation, permeated by cultural transformations of diverse processes and meanings.  The February 3rd Front affiliates with the artistic legacy of the generations that have thought of ways to interact with urban space and the history of resistance in Afro-Brazilian culture.

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“In neighborhoods like Morumbi, streets are leftover spaces, and the material quality of public spaces is simply bad.  Because of the inward orientation of the fortified enclaves, many streets have unpaved sidewalks or none at all, and several streets behind the condominiums are unpaved.  The distances between buildings are large.  Walls are high, out of proportion to the human body, and most of them are topped by electric wires.  Streets are for cars, and pedestrian circulation becomes an unpleasant experience.  The spaces are intentionally constructed to produce this effect.  To walk in Morumbi is a stigma: the pedestrian is poor and suspicious.  People on foot may be workers who live in nearby favelas and who are treated by their richer neighbors with distance and disdain—and, evidently, with fear.  Since middle- and upper-class people circulate in private cars while others walk or use public transportation, there is little contact in public among people from different social classes.  No common spaces bring them together.

The paths inside the favelas are for walking, but the favelas too end up being treated as private enclaves: only residents and acquaintances venture in, and all that is seen from the public streets are a few entrances.  The favelas can be seen in their entirety only from the windows of the exclusive apartments above them.  When both rich and poor residents live in enclaves, passing within the walls is obviously a carefully policed activity, in which class signs are interpreted in order to determine levels of suspicion and harassment.  Empty streets of fixed boundaries and scrutinized differences are spaces of suspicion and not of tolerance, inattention to differences, or wandering around.  They are not enjoyable urban spaces.”
–Teresa Caldeira, City of Walls, p. 310

Caldeira’s argument is less about the sprawling poor periphery, and more about the arrival of wealth in the periphery (cf Alphaville, where I couldn’t enter even if I tried) and the arrival of poverty in the urban core.

I walked in Morumbi at dusk settling into nightfall, dodging the streams of anonymous cars, windows tinted by the dark if not already shaded.  It is uncanny to feel so alone in the middle of the fourth largest city in the world, but that’s the peculiar construction of São Paulo’s fortified environments.  Simple urban exploration is an act of defiance to the auto-centric order.

My destination was the Morumbi counterpart, a tiny favela demarcated by an ‘F’ among the winding suburban-style streets on my map.  The most direct route was stymied by walls and gates, the sprawling condo and shopping mall complex of the Cidade Jardim (but this was no garden city) had cut ostensibly public streets (why map them if they are closed? But then there is a branch of the city government that actually facilitates the gating off of previously through streets).

I was tipped off by the trickle of pedestrians and bicycle riders, the only others not ensconced in automotive security.  They followed one of the spurs off the road to arrive at a cluster of favela architecture, wedged between the looming high-rises (walled off) and a sloping hill down to the Marginal Pinheiros, a highway along one of Sampa’s fetid rivers.  I stopped at a bar at the entrance for a Coca-Cola and asked the name of the community.  “Jardim Panoramica,” the same as the upper-class neighborhood surrounding it.  Even favelas in São Paulo seem to have less character than their Rio’s counterparts.

A dog sniffed around lazily.  A man sat on the steps plucking his guitar.  Neighbors chatted.  It was, as usual, a community at work, even as metropolitan machinations seek to continually wall off the built environment, its citizens, and their citizenship.

How is the view from your balcony pool?