The Impossible City

Who needs urban planning? In São Paulo, it's more fun to expect the unexpected.

I hop into the first car in the taxi lineup at Guarulhos International Airport in São Paulo and tell the driver to take me to the Fasano. It’s one of the city’s landmark hotels, but he’s never heard of it and can’t place its address. He steps out to get detailed instructions from his dispatcher before pulling away. I hang on in the back seat as we speed past a jumble of matchbox squatter homes; the horizon is nothing but highrises. Once amid the towers, we’re cut off by a convoy of motoboys. Weaving through traffic in single-file unison, these motorcycle couriers create impromptu lanes where none should exist. Cars don’t dare cross them. Local lore holds that revenge is routinely exacted upon any driver who strikes a motoboy before the police arrive on the scene.

I figure that my cab driver’s cluelessness is a freak mishap but soon realize it’s a fixture of daily Paulistano routine. São Paulo, home to some 19 million inhabitants (depending on who you ask), has neither downtown nor uptown, just city in every direction. It has no lake- or oceanfront, no mountain range in the distance, nothing near or far to mark where it might possibly end, and there’s no discernible order to any of its development.

São Paulo simply defies cartography: With no map capable of showing every street by name, it’s too vast, even for the cabbies, to master.

In the course of my week here, I quickly learn to navigate by neighbourhood: Jardins and its upscale shops; Higienópolis, boasting inventive restaurants; Centro, teeming with old-town bustle; Liberdade, infused with Asian flavour; and Vila Madalena, the bohemian scene of art and nightlife. This is how Paulistanos understand their city. But the layout of São Paulo or any other city is also a sort of neural map that reflects the way people think and live. In Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, city dwellers move in herds through an efficient, predictable grid of 90-degree turns.

São Paulo, founded some 450 years ago, has no grid. It’s a massive maze of imperfect curves and irregular angles. Every trip from A to B is a tangential voyage, and you rarely trace the same trajectory twice – there are an infinite number of paths to any destination. The only way to get through this impossible city is to improvise. And as Paulistanos wander along their thoroughfares, so they amble through life. São Paulo – never efficient or predictable – makes creative, lateral thinkers of all who travel its streets.

“São Paulo’s skyline used to be ugly and chaotic,” says Isay Weinfeld. “Now it’s just ugly.” The architect, who’s designed a number of the city’s landmark buildings, including the Fasano, is referring to the local government’s total ban on outdoor advertising, print and electronic. And this is the defining paradox: Weinfeld and other Paulistanos speak wryly about their city’s looks, but all agree the plain exterior hides a world of intense colour and creativity. The skyline may be drab, but, as Weinfeld puts it, “that’s not the place to look. São Paulo’s beauty is found beauty. It lies at street level, around every corner.”

Which is exactly what I saw en route to his office on a hidden street flanked by neoclassical towers and tiny homes – a side-by-side mishmash that any North American city would consider an urban-planning failure. And yet, it’s still invitingly human in scale. The neighbourhood is a true urban forest, with different building heights allowing sunlight to penetrate down to the ground; the small houses appear sheltered, not crowded, by the highrises. I’d expected Weinfeld’s office to be in one of the towers but located it inside a two-storey Modernist gem, the boardroom overlooking a grassy courtyard, far below the many neighbours’ balconies.

North of Weinfeld’s turf lies Vila Madalena, São Paulo’s go-to place for design, fashion and art. It’s replete with found treasures, including the Galeria Fortes Vilaça. One of the city’s best galleries for local and international contemporary painting and sculpture, it’s housed in a cube of backlit frosted glass, drawing pedestrians to its glow. Its young director, Alexandre Gabriel, first comes across as the stereotypical curator – thin, bespectacled, stubbled – but speaks, refreshingly, without pretension. “São Paulo’s chaos is a source of inspiration. You’re confronted with information all the time here,” he explains, noting that the absence of any reliable pattern keeps people on their toes. The artistic expression that best captures São Paulo’s essence, he claims, is graffiti. “You can outlaw billboards, but you can’t stop people from treating the cityscape as a canvas. And São Paulo makes a great canvas.”

Graffiti, indeed, seems to blanket every surface. Much of it is a nuisance, but some will grab your attention and not let go. Sitting in a small Vila Madalena café, I find myself staring into the distance, across a bridge, to another densely packed, concrete-grey neighbourhood. It takes me 20 minutes to realize that the entire scene is graffiti, rendered in black and white. In a less chaotic city, the piece would never pull off the trompe l’œil, but here it works.

Yet of all the beauty I stumble upon, the most remarkable is in the lobby of the Hotel Unique. There, amid the square angles and perfect circles that make up the building’s bones, I discover a blob of tubular cushions weaving in and out in all directions. From afar, the inventive chaise longue by furniture-design superstars Fernando and Humberto Campana appears like yet another indecipherable map of São Paulo. But up close, it looks more like a series of arteries – the lifeblood of a city, captured in upholstery.

It’s 4 a.m. and all the tables at Bella Paulista bakery are taken, so I opt for a seat at the counter, where the staff is busy making pizza and sandwiches. Bakeries are a major player on the restaurant scene here, with the word “bakery” a bit of a misnomer. They do bake bread and pastries, but the better comparison is to an all-night diner. People flock to them after a night on the town – in my case, a combination of live jazz at Bar Camará and dancing at Bar Samba. At Bella Paulista, the clatter of plates rises above the patrons’ loud banter. The man beside me orders up a Paulistano staple: a mortadella sandwich, the meat served hot and piled high like Montreal smoked meat. Compelled by hunger, he improvises his way through his meal. Balancing his sandwich with one hand, he reaches for mustard with the other, slathers it onto his next bite, opens wide and dives in.

Paulistanos love to eat out. You can see it in the bakeries and lanchonetes (snack bars) that mark every major street corner, proffering such delicacies as pastéis (fried dumplings filled with meat, fish or cheese); bolinhos (doughnuts); and Beirut sandwiches (roast beef, cheese and za’atar on flatbread), courtesy of the city’s Lebanese community. “No place in the world beats São Paulo for eating,” says Luiza Sá, the guitarist for pop sensation CSS, short for Cansei de Ser Sexy (“tired of being sexy”). Ever since the band first charted a North American hit two years ago with “Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex,” its members have been touring the world. What Sá loves most about coming home is the food. “Even for just $5, you can go out and get a meal, and it will be nutritious and delicious. And big.”

And that’s just the cheap eats. With its cosmopolitan population – including massive Italian, German and Japanese communities – São Paulo has always been a city of international cuisine, spanning the techniques and flavours of Europe and Asia. But it’s the city’s renewed interest in regional Brazilian cooking that’s turning gastronomes’ heads. “After many years of globalization, local cultures are reacting against its influence,” says Josimar Melo, São Paulo’s most influential food critic (he writes for the local daily Folha) and the author of Guia Josimar Melo, a guide to the city’s best 800 restaurants. “This is the rebirth of Brazilian values in gastronomy, the rediscovery of forgotten recipes and ingredients.”

I’m chatting with Melo over coffee at Capim Santo, a hot spot for new Brazilian cuisine. Located between the corporate towers lining Avenida Paulista and the upscale shops of Rua Oscar Freire, the restaurant draws a diverse lunch crowd. Some dig in at the buffet (a typical midday fill-up) and head straight back to work; others linger over dessert in the lush courtyard. Morena Leite, Capim Santo’s 28-year-old wunderkind chef, studied gastronomy in Paris but returned to Brazil as soon as she graduated. Here she’s concocted her own colourful take on bacalhau (salt cod), that old grey staple of Portuguese colonialism; made with bright yellow cassava and green olives, it looks and tastes like infatuation. Her beef jerky is stewed with pumpkin, onions and parsley and served in a hollowed-out gourd. “In France, cuisine is such a serious, severe endeavour,” she says. “I worked in some places where laughter was not allowed in the kitchen. I take the opposite approach. There has to be delight in cooking because the emotions you feel as you prepare a meal find their way into the meal itself.”

São Paulo has capitalized on the fact that human activity always thwarts the best-laid plans, and that quite often the unplanned results are better than anything the planners hoped to accomplish. In the heart of the old city lies the Mercado Municipal, where merchants offer neatly displayed fruits, vegetables, meats and cheeses. The real action, however, unfolds in the surrounding blocks, occupied by shopkeepers and turned into a teeming bazaar. Tarp-covered carts laden with toys, bags and jewellery obscure the iridescent storefronts. One man is husking and slicing pineapple on a makeshift table, softly announcing, “Ananás, ananás,” never taking his eye off his knife or his fruit. Sidewalks overflow with vendors hawking their wares, and so shoppers have turned the streets into their walkways. Locals boast that anything you can find anywhere in the world, you can find in São Paulo.

The Portuguese chatter is pierced by what sounds like miniature air horns. Teenagers are demonstrating a balloon-powered helicopter toy: Blow up the balloon, attach it to the plastic rotor and, as the air squeaks through it, the blades spin, sending it up into the air. My three-year-old son will love it. They want 6 reais ($3.35); it’s worth no more than 50 centavos. But I have gringo written all over me. Still, I save face: four choppers for 10 reais ($5.60). The bartering lasts no more than 30 seconds; then the teenagers are on to the next pitch. The bazaar is so ridden with bylaw infractions, minor health hazards and hot merchandise that our municipal governments, aghast at the flagrant breaking of rules, would shut it down, or at least rein it in. But rules are made to be broken, especially in São Paulo.

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