Paulistas don’t know their city.
Photographers collective Rolê admits this and attempts to explore the city by walking around and exploring. A more ordinary Paulista might know his or her neighbourhood, the area friends or family live in, or the areas they visit for work or leisure.
Everyone knows the central areas, such as the historic centre or Avenida Paulista. Whether they come to visit the park, work, do business or leisure, or just pass by on one of the highways or high in the sky in a helicopter, the centre still is the best known and most recognised part of Sao Paulo.
The unknown parts of Sao Paulo for its inhabitants, are the extensive peripheries that actually make up most of the urban environment. It is here that class and wealth differences that are expressed in spatial segregation lead to ignorance of the people on the other side of the road or wall.
Just like the human brain completes and fills in the lateral parts of the visual field, Paulistas know only the areas of their personal focus. The unknown habitats of the social class outside their personal focus are completed by their brains in the form of stereotypes. These stereotypes can have dramatic effects on the experience of the city.
A specific type of urban environment, for instance a favela, stereotypically is an area that is chaotic and probably dangerous for people from the well-off classes. Fear of the favela dwellers is a result and leads to even further going segregation, eventually making the living in a gated community seem a logical thing to do.
Of course there is a real basis to this fear, but the risk is actually never ruled out. Actually, you can’t live within the walls you have constructed around your house forever.
Can visibility (tearing down the walls or letting daylight enter) solve part of this problem?
Day 3 08/04/09 Alphaville
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Interesting post. Personally I find discussion about mental maps (in their larger meaning) always intriguing. Let’s take this idea a bit further. If you relate your idea to a larger context (Brazil, Netherlands etc) what are the differences you think of such mental city constructs, I suppose Jan will have a good say on this as well.
ReplyDeleteThe bright lights and dark spots of a for Sao Paulo might also not be confined to a clear centre – periphery model, although most people will put favelas THERE opposed to their daily life patterns within the HERE, we have already seen that the informal city is highly connected and overlapping with the bright areas of the city. It would be highly interesting to see how the mental images Paulistas create from their cities reflect such dark areas in proximity of their centres of leisure, work or living environments. Kevin Lynch has managed to translate differing mental maps of Boston in his work, I wonder how the Sao Paulo of a rich and a favela dweller would accordingly differ...