SPECIAL ISSUE INTRODUCTION
EXPERIMENTAL URBANITY IN SÃO PAULO
DANIEL GOUGH, AIALA LEVY, AND JOSEPH JAY SOSA
Cities have become “good to think with,” perhaps almost too good to think with. Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid note that academic and other public actors use “the urban” as a diagnostic for contemporary life as well as a means to intervene upon it. They write: “Whether in academic discourse or in the public sphere, the urban has become a privileged lens through which to interpret, map and, indeed, to attempt to influence contemporary social, economic, political and environmental trends.”1 This suggests why urban life is a key object for the study of broad cultural and political projects, among them nationalism, modernity, development, and globalization. Adopting multiple disciplinary approaches, the articles in this special issue examine how urban life is both an object of knowledge and a site of social, aesthetic, and ideological invention. Focused on São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, this issue shows how middle-class paulistanos (residents of São Paulo) make meaning from their urban landscape in relation to their global geopolitics.2
In São Paulo, such meaning-making often manifests in the form of what we call experimental urbanity: emergent or repurposed social forms such as artistic practices, activist movements, or infrastructural innovations that frame collective urban life. As a field of experience, the urban entails both “structural aspects … materially embodied in the development of the built environment” and “cultural aspects … based in the micro-physics of the everyday encounter.”3 Urbanity, in turn, can be understood as the processes that relate the structural to the cultural, a city’s built environment to its inhabitants.4 Focusing on cultural production, we explain how, through the interplay of material and symbolic processes, artists, audiences, planners, businessmen, and activists have experimented with performing, creating, socializing, politicizing, and regulating São Paulo’s urban life since the early twentieth century. The articles focus on middle-class actors in São Paulo’s “expanded center,” an area that underwent dramatic infrastructural and demographic changes at the turn of the twentieth century and has since continued to evolve in ways that are distinct from the urbanization of São Paulo’s periphery, where the struggle over urban resources is constant. Experimental urbanity became a way to describe the social forms that connect aesthetics, urban space, and contentious politics.
The dual valence in the Portuguese word experimentar, which translates as both “to experiment” and “to experience,” also informed our focus on experimentalism. We note this polysemy here to consider how experimental urbanity is not just about invention and novelty, but also routinized experiences within daily urban life. To be sure, the experiential nature of experimentation has long been implied by scholars who have framed the city as a laboratory of social relations or psychological states.5 Yet, many analyses of urbanism convey a premature distinction between the “micro-physics of the everyday encounter” and the presumably top-down approach of “sovereign planning,” interpreting experimentation as the latter.6 We suggest that this distinction does not hold up in São Paulo and might not be appropriate for the Global South more generally. Planners, engineers, and politicians are always trying to fine-tune urban life, but they do so in the context of their own and others’ daily experiences. Experimental urbanity, in other words, is the result of both top-down and bottom-up worldviews and practices—intentional experiments and improvisational experiences—that see the objects, maps, and ultimately people in cities as malleable.
Although we emphasize the experimental character of urbanity, we hesitate characterizing that experimentalism as solely emancipatory or domineering. While every urban experiment has a politics, none has a guaranteed outcome. The creation of new aesthetic and political practices, as well as the containment and management of these practices, generates experimental urbanity. São Paulo’s upper and middle classes have historically been concerned with various forms of sensoria that are “out of control,” voicing since the 1970s their unease with urban sprawl or, more recently, launching moral campaigns against visual and sound pollution.7 This journal issue considers a variety of experiments, from ephemeral or grassroots movements that surge and recede to infrastructural projects whose existence long outlasts the ideas upon which they are founded. In some case studies, it is unclear whether experiments are the means to new forms of social life, political and/or artistic ends in themselves, or both. Embroiled in everyday life, urban residents are both agents and objects of experimentation.
Our argument is not that São Paulo is a unique site of experimental urbanity but rather that, in a rapidly changing city, experimentation is a mechanism by which residents respond to and alter their social, political, and aesthetic realities. In this sense, despite São Paulo’s “exceptional” relationship to the rest of Brazil, discussed later in this introduction, experimental urbanity offers a window into the dynamics of aesthetic politics in the Global South. Our articles show how individuals, built environments, social relations, and “distributions of the sensible” are objectified and mobilized, although to what end is neither predetermined nor even entirely predictable.8 São Paulo’s experimental urbanity, moreover, demonstrates how urban life shapes the contours of political and social possibility in the Global South. While aesthetic considerations of Global South cities have often taken a backseat to political economy, this special issue insists that artistic, sensorial, and symbolic (re)engineerings of the city are crucial to various national and global political projects, particularly as they congeal around urban middle-class subjectivities.9 Cultural production, we contend, is not a mere appendage of political influence but an unruly zone of meaning-making in itself.
EXPERIMENTAL URBANITY AND MIDDLE-CLASS SUBJECTIVITY
The articles in this issue largely focus on cultural producers who belong to São Paulo’s middle class, a category that has been defined by nationalist ideology and identity politics as much as it has been by demography. Middle-class subjects, such as artists, musicians, engineers, urban planners, students, activists, businessmen, and journalists (members of what social scientists in other contexts have called the “creative class”10), have played a key role in shaping the built environment and sociabilities in São Paulo. In turn, São Paulo’s downtown urban spaces have cultivated middle-class sensibilities. Experimental urbanity is a potentially powerful explanation for how class, as a set of dispositions and inclusionary/exclusionary practices, emerges through urban space.11 Additional connections between class and race, gender, or sexuality are further explored by individual authors.
As in many locations in the Global South, the question of the Brazilian middle class has been at the center of anxious considerations about the nation’s place within the global political order. Brazilian economists have focused on the middle class as an “internal market” that can drive consumer demand for national industry, necessary for the country’s economic development.12 Consequently, the cultural markers of middle-class subjectivity are often interpreted as indicators of Brazilian national “success.” As Ricardo López has noted, this measurement of “success” relies on Global-North notions of an authentic middle class, resulting in an international global hierarchy where North American nations inevitably end up at the top.13 Within Brazil, the middle class defined as such has, since the early twentieth century, been identified with São Paulo. São Paulo has been not only the region with the highest per capita income, but also the city and region where middle-class cultural projects have gained the most traction. Such projects include the economic ambitions that fueled rapid expansions in industrial production and, later, finance capitalism, as well as broadcast media and other culture industries that have promoted middle-class lifestyles. In this way, middle-classness became part of the idiom of São Paulo’s cultural and ideological identity.
Modes of class distinction have evolved over time in São Paulo. The city’s nascent middle class in the early to mid-twentieth century carefully managed the symbolic relations around labor and politics in order to maintain respectability in the collective view of lower as well as upper classes.14 It was at this moment that São Paulo emerged as a political and economic force to reckon with in Brazil, the leading entrepôt of Brazil’s most important export, coffee, but also a quickly developing industrial center.15 Industrialization spurred urban migration—São Paulo’s population leapt from 65,000 in 1890 to 580,000 in 1920, surpassing that of Mexico City, Havana, and Lima—and the co-formation of working and middle classes.16 As the city’s population swelled from just over two million in 1950 to nearly six million in 1970 and structural adjustments opened Brazil to new products, middle-class status continued to be defined by and acquired through the consumption of foreign commodities and culture.17 Although the paulistano middle class has often displayed partisan and stylistic diversity, certain features remain constant: its anxieties about status (as individuals, as a class, as a city), as well as its identification with diligence, economic stability, political influence, cultural capital, and a higher moral ground.
Another constant relates to the ways that class, race, and region have functioned as markers of social difference in Brazil. São Paulo’s middle-class ideology, modernist aesthetics, racially exclusionary immigration policies, and “exceptional” status within nationalist, elite discourse present a specific set of considerations. Paulistano sociologist Florestan Fernandes classically argued against Brazil’s racial democracy myth by claiming that São Paulo’s industrial society provided a distinct model of inequality between Black and white paulistanos.18 Through race, political economy, and culture, São Paulo and the Northeast (prototypically the State of Bahia) have been invented as regions, representing opposite extremes of national identity despite their deep links, including a long history of migration.19 One motivation for this regionalism was the influx of immigrant labor—especially from southern Europe, but also from eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Japan—that powered São Paulo’s early twentieth-century industrial boom. Immigration policies based in eugenic thought, combined with labor discrimination, the displacement of Black paulistano communities, and repeated waves of working-class migrants from the Northeast, cemented the association of whiteness with middle class in São Paulo.20
Through its focus on São Paulo’s expanded center, this special issue brings urban space into the intersection of class, race, and region. The center/periphery dyad is salient to paulistano conceptions of social difference on multiple scales. Brazilian elites have often described themselves on the periphery of global capitalism.21 Yet São Paulo’s economic and media predominance has often placed it at the center of the nation, even as paulistanos have seen themselves as exceptional to brasilidade (Brazilianness) both culturally and racially.22 The center/periphery dyad is also transposed onto urban space itself. São Paulo’s history of urban expansion from the center outward has traditionally resulted in each region having vastly different resources depending on how close to downtown one resides. While in other major Brazilian cities, class and racial inequality are told through the idiom of elite neighborhoods versus favelas, in São Paulo the most common shorthand to describe these inequalities is through centro (center) vs. periferia (periphery).23 Thus São Paulo’s expanded center (centro expandido) is not just a geographic location where middle-class publics reside and circulate, but a broader social project. Beginning in the 1980s, São Paulo became a global innovator in anti-poor policing and security measures to protect the elite from rising crime rates. While the elite and parts of the middle class live in securitized enclaves, and poor and working-class people are relegated to reside in peripheral neighborhoods or circulate downtown as service workers after enduring hours-long commutes, it is São Paulo’s middle class that saturates the expanded center with its desires, aspirations, and self-image.
PROVINCIAL COSMOPOLITANISM
One feature of São Paulo’s experimental urbanity that emerges from the articles is what we call provincial cosmopolitanism. In the introduction to their volume on the subject, Carol Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty define cosmopolitanism precisely by its lack of referent. They write:
Cosmopolitanism may instead be a project whose conceptual content and pragmatic character are not only as yet unspecified but also must always escape positive and definite specification, precisely because specifying cosmopolitanism positively and definitely is an uncosmopolitan thing to do.24
Inversely, calls to “provincialize” former centers of epistemic and military imperialism suggest that pointing out the particularities of a location is easier than pointing out its generalities.25 This tension between the abstract universality of cosmopolitanism and the tangible familiarity of the provincial forms the basis for provincial cosmopolitanism. We juxtapose provincialism and cosmopolitanism to highlight interrelated characteristics: the intentionality of paulistano cosmopolitanism in the face of provincialism; the narrowness of what, or rather who, constitutes cosmopolitanism; the parochialism that has generated an exaggerated sense of São Paulo’s global significance; and, finally, the celebration of the hinterland (province) as the birthplace of São Paulo’s cosmopolitanism. Like the hybridity of Néstor García Canclini’s modern and traditional, cosmopolitanism and provincialism coexist in São Paulo.26 They do so as mimetic performances, self-conscious acts, inspired by the threat of the other and, in turn, inspiring a range of social, political, and artistic experiments. Often these experiments demonstrate an uncertainty, perhaps even anxiety, of scale; it is unclear whether the audiences of such cultural expressions are local, national, or global. This doubling, or sometimes tripling, of audience is part of the representational structure of provincial cosmopolitanism.
An important motivation for provincial cosmopolitanism has been São Paulo’s accelerated urbanization. Specifically, the city’s seemingly breakneck maturation has resulted in the binary of center/periphery overdetermining cultural and political meaning-making. In addition to the city’s own division between the expanded center and periphery, municipal leaders have long worried about the city’s relation to the national center. Over the past century, the most vocal of paulistanos have fought to situate São Paulo outside the Brazilian periphery by pointing to the city’s population, wealth, and cultural dominance or supposed superiority. On the global level, Brazil as a BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) country sits between Global North and South in a constant state of perpetually deferred emergence; São Paulo’s potential for enabling that emergence—for advancing Brazil out of its out-of-placeness, to borrow from Roberto Schwarz—has repeatedly been contested.27 Paulistanos’ sense of self, in other words, demonstrates anxieties about the city’s position in the nation and the world, including its position in the world vis-à-vis the nation.
Middle-class paulistanos have consistently responded to these anxieties by turning to cosmopolitanism. São Paulo’s integration into global cultural and commercial networks became an explicit goal of local politicians at the turn of the twentieth century, while paulistanos with the means to do so embraced the everyday consumption of imported goods, practices, and ideas.28 One site in which a wide range of paulistanos regularly consumed the foreign was at the cinema, the subject of Levy’s article. Levy explains how, in marketing their experimental medium as “elegant” and “artistic,” early film exhibitors popularized a refined but reproduceable cosmopolitanism. Moreover, they normalized the notion that the most desirable form of cosmopolitanism was European. The concurrent emergence of a field of modernist production likewise linked São Paulo to Europe’s cultural centers, although more so for artists and patrons than for the paulistano population at large. Among the most eccentric of São Paulo’s modernists was Flávio de Carvalho, who championed a very different aesthetic from that of commercialized elegance. As Anagnost argues, Carvalho experimented with internationalist, avant-garde forms to criticize the same urban masses to whom cinema producers had appealed. His aesthetic and political internationalism clashed with the parochialism of 1930s São Paulo. A similar friction underlies Siwi’s article: two decades after Carvalho, the planners of Ibirapuera Park championed modernism as a means of eradicating—or at least drawing attention away from—what they perceived to be provincialism. More recently, the university activists of Sosa’s article try on transnational repertoires from the global Left, confronting local and national conservativism.
Even as they illuminate the city’s provincialism, performances of cosmopolitanism in São Paulo tend to portray São Paulo as globally typical but nationally atypical. This is especially clear in the realm of urban infrastructure, as urban governance constantly brings in transnational knowledge that highlights the perpetual lag (atraso) of the nation-state. The cases in this issue illustrate this dynamic in a variety of ways. Cardoso shows how middle-class paulistanos touted noise pollution as a sign of their city’s cosmopolitanism, the result of an active urban airport and a tangle of throughways. The government’s effort to combat noise was, in turn, framed as a cosmopolitan endeavor, demanding transnational solutions and collaboration. Similarly, recent advocates of a municipal law for financially supporting musicians couched their effort in the language of cosmopolitanism. As Gough explains, an alliance of cultural producers and legislators drew on contemporary arguments for creative cities to support sustainable musical experimentation. Meanwhile, Steuernagel’s three central figures implicitly debate which transnational model for urban development makes the most sense for their city (and their bank accounts). The internationally recognized theater company Teatro Oficina functions as a meta-stage for the clash of local, national, and global political forces, a battle that threatens an experimental theater as well as an experimental theater company, both of which constitute paulistano and Brazilian cultural patrimony. Provincial cosmopolitanism thus advances what Barbara Weinstein has conceptualized as São Paulo exceptionalism, where paulistanos have figured themselves (racially, culturally, and ideologically) as both paradigmatic of and exceptional within Brazil.29
Cosmopolitanism is constantly performed through references to São Paulo’s demographic diversity even while paradoxically, and perhaps even deceptively, it is among the whitest regions in Brazil. In 1893, over half of paulistanos had been born abroad, many of them the beneficiaries of subsidies intended to “whiten” the country with European and other non-Black laborers.30 Meanwhile, the proportion of Black paulistanos fell precipitously after the abolition of slavery (1888) from approximately a third of the urban population in 1870 to less than a tenth in 1940.31 Many among São Paulo’s elite encouraged and celebrated this demographic shift in the name of progress. The effects of this population management are still felt today. São Paulo’s middle classes often harken back to their Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Syrian, or Lebanese roots, elevating São Paulo’s identity as an immigrant city at the same time that they exclude Africans and their descendants from the privileged category of immigrant. Gillam’s contribution to this volume encapsulates this tendency. Relying on global symbols of Blackness to “Africanize” the largest city in a country that is 52 percent Black, artist “Panikinho” Silva celebrates cosmopolitanism while challenging its historically narrow interpretation, its provincialism.
Finally, São Paulo’s self-identity as a city with migrants from across Brazil casts the city as a cosmopolitan capital that is simultaneously a magnet for provincialism. The paulistano press and other observers have long counterposed urbanity against rurality, coding as rural those deemed antithetical to presumably global standards of modernity. Rurality, in other words, has served to euphemize cultural and racial difference, characterizing a lineup of perpetual outsiders that function as a foil to São Paulo’s cosmopolitanism. Caipiras, the newly arrived bumpkins who in the early twentieth century sometimes sported an Italian accent, along with migrants from the Northeast (often identified primarily as nordestinos or Northeasterners), consolidate these rural/urban imaginaries.32 The perpetual outsider has dominated policymakers’ concerns over the past century, resulting in frequent attempts at the creation of cultural, health, housing, and other infrastructures. Politicians have sometimes extended this modernizing mission beyond the urban boundary, imagining the city as a beacon for the countryside and the country.
At the same time, provincialism characterizes paulistano urbanity in the sense that (white, European) cosmopolitanism has served to modernize, consolidate, and promote the entire region, that is, the province.33 Indeed, municipal and state leaders have regularly made clear that urban and rural cosmopolitanism go hand in hand. Coffee adorns the city’s coat of arms and public buildings, as does the bandeirante, the mythical frontiersman who, during the colonial period, embarked from São Paulo City in search of indigenous slaves and gold.34 Over the past century, the bandeirante’s cachet among urban dwellers has increased alongside xenophobia in the face of labor strikes, alongside racism in the wake of mass migration, and alongside aesthetic elitism at times of mass cultural importation. In these moments, many paulistanos have grounded in the adjacent countryside those values and customs that distinguish São Paulo’s society from that of purportedly more decadent cities. Paulistano provincialism collapses onto paulista provincialism; adherents effortlessly glide between city and state, transforming one into a synecdoche for the other. In this rendering, provincialism is not cosmopolitanism’s antipode, not an obstacle to modernity, but rather what distinguishes local enactments of cosmopolitanism as paulistano.
AESTHETIC RADICALISM, CULTURAL INSTITUTIONALIZATION
We have considered São Paulo’s experimental urbanity as the sustained effect of cultural productions, primarily created by and addressed to middle-class urban publics, inspired by varying ideologies, and not easily directed toward one set of expected outcomes. This section considers paulistanos’ experimentation with the mechanisms that support cultural production, which has resulted in the seemingly competing practices of aesthetic radicalism—the destabilization of artistic forms—and cultural institutionalization—the stabilization of arts patronage. Culture is often a strategic aspect of development, and indeed, early elites in São Paulo were motivated by the idea of wedding “cultural progress” to “material progress.”35 Yet, the scant literature on cultural policy in Brazil has largely focused on Rio de Janeiro as the center of such programs and as the idealized location of Brazilianness.36 This special issue, by contrast, emphasizes São Paulo’s significance not only for the production of Brazilian culture, but also for the engineering of new techniques of cultural promotion. São Paulo has been at the forefront of municipal-level cultural promotion in Brazil, being the first municipality to institute a Secretariat of Culture (in 1935) and the first to pass a cultural tax incentive law (in 1990).37 While the infrastructure of cultural promotion has taken different forms of public and private investment, cultural planners have largely deployed culture toward one or more of the following ends: social welfare, civic participation, or urban “revitalization” (often gentrification).
The biography of paulistano chronicler, modernist poet, and patrimony pioneer Mário de Andrade (1893–1945) exemplifies the ways in which aesthetic radicalism and cultural institutionalization have been intertwined in São Paulo. Andrade’s 1922 collection of poems Paulicéia Desvairada (translated literally as Frenetic São Paulo but published in English as Hallucinated City) is often credited with importing European modernist styles into Brazilian poetry. It was published in the same year as São Paulo’s famed Semana de Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week), which cemented São Paulo’s reputation as the birthplace of Brazilian modernism. Yet these two modernist projects diverge in key ways. The Modern Art Week was sponsored by members of São Paulo’s coffee-producing elite who embraced experimental practices to signal a (circumscribed) progressivism in what might be called São Paulo’s larger project of modernity.38 Andrade’s Paulicéia Desvairada, alternatively, deploys the city as an object of cultural exploration, finding the built environment and anonymous relations as source material for modernist form. In the ensuing years, Andrade remained at the forefront of artistic experimentation but also cultural preservation, establishing a municipal department of culture, instrumental and choral ensembles, and one of the country’s first archives of recorded folk music, most of which remain in operation nearly a century later.39
São Paulo has continued to be the site of simultaneous aesthetic radicalism and cultural institutionalization through the promotion and subsidization of avant-garde projects by governmental, artistic, and financial patrons. Siwi’s account of the post–World War II construction of Ibirapuera Park shows how a subset of the economic elite, led by the industrialist Matarazzo family, promoted modernist architecture and art as part of a broader economic development project, aligning against conservative aesthetic traditions as well as the housing rights of working-class residents of the site. São Paulo’s banking elite subsidized arts-based urban renewal efforts in the city’s downtown in the 1990s, home of the São Paulo stock exchange and the then-important state bank BANESPA, sold to Santander in 2000.40 Here, as in many places, the arts play a role in gentrification when state and elite actors experiment with artistic sociability as a means of transforming urban life in service of increased tax revenues and/or real estate values. Steuernagel’s article examines when this cooperation is pushed to exhaustion, as a celebrity attempts to build a residential tower on the site of a theater revered for its groundbreaking architecture by Lina Bo Bardi and the work of its globally-known experimental theater company.
The centralization and magnitude of São Paulo’s art scene today is a consequence of the distribution and concentration of wealth in the city, reflecting the distortions of the city’s economy. If São Paulo’s commercial elite relies on the city’s status as a “command and control” center of the global economy, so do its artists and other cultural producers. The global art market, shows, musical theater, cultural finance, local and international media, theater, and radio production all have their national and continental hubs in São Paulo. Meanwhile, local institutions—museums, São Paulo’s art biennial, theater companies, and a symphony orchestra, among others—constitute Brazil’s densest arts infrastructure. Brazil’s arts financing mechanisms—a mixture of public and quasi-private funding—exacerbate this concentration. For instance, the so-called S system, a group of federally mandated private organizations dedicated to providing training and leisure to Brazil’s workforce, in 2019 collected R$17.7 billion in payroll taxes to fund cultural programming.41 The S system collects and distributes funds relative to their statewide collections, and much more robustly in the case of São Paulo’s public arts scene than that of any other urban center. Yet even this and other state funding is spatially concentrated in the richest areas of the city, immediately south and west of downtown, creating large discrepancies in access to artistic facilities for people who live in different parts of the city.42 The repurposing of the Minhocão as a concrete canvas for street art underscores how cultural policy at times strengthens the tie between wealth and access to the arts; bemoaned by the middle-class residents of Cardoso’s article, the elevated highway has in recent years contributed to the gentrification of the neighborhoods it penetrates.
Aesthetic radicalism and cultural institutionalization complicate debates over rights to the city in ways that extend beyond the realm of state cultural programming. Levy, for example, demonstrates how, in legitimizing their still experimental medium, early cinema producers “helped to situate aesthetics at the heart of social belonging in São Paulo.” By contrast, the experimental aesthetic practices of Flávio de Carvalho, argues Anagnost, insisted on the need for greater “social control” in São Paulo’s public spaces. Groups centered on artistic labor and identity politics have made claims to financial, discursive, and spatial resources of the city’s center. As Gough shows, a class of musicians in São Paulo has become financially and artistically dependent upon a multifaceted bureaucracy that spans the public and private sectors, but remains unable to muster political support for a more organized system of financial support. Similarly, Gillam’s Black movements repurpose global fashion vocabularies to occupy the discursive center of São Paulo’s identity politics. They deliberately don the aesthetic embraced by pro-globalist elites who seek to differentiate São Paulo from Brazilian cities with stronger Black identities. Sosa’s article highlights the queer movement’s claims to the physical space of Paulista Avenue, a nexus of mass media attention and municipal identity negotiation, in the attempt to legitimize efforts to increase rights.
CITY OF CROWDS
In her 2000 book of the same name, Teresa Caldeira famously dubbed São Paulo the “city of walls,” describing how paulistano public life during the late twentieth century had become increasingly segregated through the proliferation of security architecture and policing.43 We see this as one half of the story; in the same period in which São Paulo became a city of walls, it also became a city of crowds, a city in which large-scale recreational, political, and other gatherings occur on a daily basis. The city of crowds forms a third facet of experimental urbanity raised in our articles. We do not propose the city of crowds as a democratizing force that negates Caldeira’s city of walls. Rather, we note how the movements and concentration of its (middle-class) residents have been crucial to the construction of São Paulo’s urbanity, often flourishing through and not in spite of segregation and security. The articles in this volume attend to the crowd in two ways. One set of articles touches upon crowdedness in downtown São Paulo as a “structure of feeling” that predominates how paulistanos discuss and experience this region or urbanity more broadly.44 A second set of articles shows how the engineering of crowds, from both the top down and bottom up, has been part of São Paulo’s experimental ethos.
Crowds have been central to the aesthetic, psychological, and sociological study of urban life across the globe. Yet, like the study of the city, the study of the crowd has portended different things in different eras. In the early twentieth century, crowd psychologists marveled at the energetics of people amassing together, yet pathologized crowds for eliciting a lower-order thinking deemed inferior to rational deliberation.45 This hierarchy of rationality mapped onto other European social hierarchies, with clear implications for crowds in the colonial and postcolonial Global South. In São Paulo, as Anagnost shows, members of the intelligentsia consumed and applied European crowd psychologies in mixture with new, Brazilian theories of cultural cannibalism (antropofagia, coined by the paulistano writer Oswald de Andrade in his 1928 “Anthropophagic Manifesto”). A more recent global celebration of direct democracy has brought back urban crowds not as irrational entities but as expressive bodies, capable of new forms of collective logics. In the contemporary political iconography that has followed the decade after the Arab Spring, crowds now read performatively as the manifestation of popular will, particularly in the Global South.46
Tellingly, many ethnographers of São Paulo have been attuned to crowdedness and its transformations in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These studies began largely after the 1980s, when trends toward denser downtown neighborhoods first started reversing. Heitor Frúgoli, for instance, has tracked São Paulo’s moving centralidades, or concentrated areas of wealth, building, and people, from São Paulo’s historic center to Paulista Avenue in the 1980s and further westward to Berrini Avenue and the Largo da Batata in the 2000s and 2010s.47 These shifts correspond to the expanding boundaries of São Paulo’s expanded center, where intense verticalization and traffic congestion has long cast crowdedness as a specter; a common refrain of São Paulo is that its throngs of people and brutalist architecture are inhospitable to individuals.
Crowdedness has generated contests over urban infrastructure, which in turn have provoked experimentation in the management or occupation of both private and public spaces. One example is the highly publicized property dispute that Steuernagel offers as a morality tale about the forms of being public in the city. The dispute between a legendary avant-garde theater owner and one of Brazil’s most famous TV presenters becomes a proxy for a city that has become overcrowded, overcommercialized, and sapped of its human vitality. In Cardoso’s contribution, crowdedness leads to experiments in sound regulation, which function as the maintenance of a middle-class sensorium. Urban infrastructures create both the solutions and problems of living together, and their continual projected obsolescence makes continual rebuilding a constant reality. At the same time, the absence of crowdedness has been acutely felt in many locations outside the home, a condition that Caldeira calls the “implosion of public space.”48 It is unsurprising that areas renovated by the municipality since Caldeira’s writing (Roosevelt Plaza in 2010, Largo da Batata in 2015) are now frequent sites of mass protest.
In these and other public spaces, crowdedness invites experimentation with the crowd itself. As Sosa elaborates, crowds on São Paulo’s streets recurrently reinvent a “national stage” for Brazilian politics. While the festive urban crowds of Carnival (most often associated with Rio de Janeiro, Salvador da Bahia, and Olinda in Pernambuco) are one marker of Brazilian national identity, protest and arts events dominate the narrative around São Paulo’s crowd life. Middle-class protest crowds have served as important markers for Brazil’s democratic history, among them the 1964 March of the Family, the 1984 Diretas Já (direct elections) campaign, and the 1992 “painted faces” protests against corruption. While these movements were national in scope, São Paulo boasted the biggest and most broadcast crowds. This was also the case in the more recent 2013 June Days protests that took Brazil’s political system by surprise. Advocating for everything from increases in public school spending to the return of the military dictatorship, scholars, journalists, and activists were left questioning: “Who are these crowds?” Journalists utilized drones, engaged in social media reporting, and mapped the crowd with new counting technologies in an attempt to characterize the multitude on the street.
As in much of the world, São Paulo’s crowds have simultaneously signaled the polarization of politics and the democratization of leisure. Consumer crowds, in particular, figured as a device for apprehending and experimenting with representations of urbanity in the context of São Paulo’s chaotic growth. During the first half of the twentieth century, consumer and leisure crowds were a symbol of downtown São Paulo’s infrastructure. In her article on the cultivation of an “aesthetic of aspiration” among moviegoers, Levy shows how individual sartorial choices became part of the advertisement of modernity alongside architecture. The tamed, consumer crowd emerged as part of the iconography of the resource-rich center of the city. In Siwi’s article, we see the logics of urban planning for consumer crowds at its most explicit. Ibirapuera Park, envisioned as a mega-event venue on par with those of other global capitals, was constructed in 1954 with the aim of bringing together São Paulo’s “productive class” with throngs of international visitors. As Siwi demonstrates, the park’s relatively central location came at the expense of two hundred poor and working-class families, who were displaced from the area.
Today, leisure crowds are once again a routine part of the social life of the expanded center of São Paulo, largely due to careful management by the municipality and a myriad of organizations. Annually held events like the Virada Cultural, LGBT Pride Parade, March for Jesus, and New Year’s Festival bring hundreds of thousands of people at a time to the streets in orderly but spirited, and sometimes contentious, ways. Common to nearly all global cities, such “mini-mega events” involve elaborate public-private partnerships, coordinating security, transit, and sanitation municipal services with cultural content producers. The 2016 Open Streets initiative, which has turned São Paulo’s most iconic thoroughfare, Paulista Avenue, into a pedestrian promenade, shows how consumer crowds can be engineered in the same spaces that are otherwise designated for transportation or protest. These events represent top-down experiments in the production of a street life and public that overcome São Paulo’s securitization and social stratification. The result has been a new display of people, and possibly a pacification of protest—the curation of a desirable crowd. While São Paulo’s middle classes generally fear crowdedness, they are seen as and understand themselves to be desired participants in the right kind of crowd. In the present moment, as illustrated by Gough’s and Gillam’s contributions, the arts serve as the magnet for attracting and assembling that right kind of crowd.
CONCLUSION
Over the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, São Paulo’s unusually rapid rate of demographic, economic, and spatial growth generated a flurry of (sometimes ambitious) urban comparisons among residents, public intellectuals, scholars, and especially municipal leaders. Within Brazil, São Paulo is typically contrasted with Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s second largest city and former capital. The leisurely carioca (a resident of Rio) is juxtaposed with the industrious paulistano, Rio’s beaches with São Paulo’s buildings, and Rio’s Beaux-Arts-palaces-turned-museums, which herald the colonial and imperial past, with São Paulo’s concrete exteriors, which exude an enthusiasm for the (capitalist) future. If intranational comparisons reflect competing national imaginaries, transnational comparisons highlight São Paulo’s entry into global markets and its consequent similarity to other urban centers. São Paulo has been likened by scholars to Manchester for its industrialization, Los Angeles for its sprawl, Chicago for its patterns of socio-spatial segregation, and Mexico City for its landscape’s sublime capacity to overwhelm the spectator.49 Yet São Paulo’s ultimate comparison might be with itself. Paulistano urbanity produces the sensation of acceleration more so than that of consistent velocity. Forms of sociability, work, governance, mobility, and art change at an increasingly dizzying pace, while classist and racist exclusions become more efficient. The effect is that of occupying a city at the extremes: the most cosmopolitan, the most segregated, the most modern, the most congested, the best, the worst. The tendency toward hyperbole in descriptions of São Paulo resonates with what Ahmed Kanna calls the “superlative city,” a term that he uses to describe Dubai, another city on the semi-periphery of global capitalism, where new sociabilities and political governance are emergent.50
In this issue, we see the experiment as a constant genre of cultural production through which the experience of inhabiting a superlative city is deciphered and envisioned. The actors we examine imagine and reimagine social life in a dense and immense built environment, alternately engaging urbanity as a process, a medium, and an object of knowledge. The exigencies of paulistano life force the hand of these actors as they occupy avenues, build and defend theaters, (literally) go against the crowd, and demand recognition of their existence. If powerless to reverse the acceleration of life in São Paulo, these actors show how their responses—their experiments—create the sensory contours of urban existence. Here the illegibility so often attributed to São Paulo, on account of its haphazard urban planning and myriad cultural movements, is in fact what generates meanings, as cultural actors emplace slippery and sometimes contradictory markers of belonging according to class, race, ideology, and aesthetic sensibility.
This special issue itself began as an experiment, an attempt to pinpoint the global location and scholarly relevance of São Paulo. In 2013, we organized what turned into a multidisciplinary, binational conference around an open call for papers on aesthetics, politics, and everyday life in São Paulo.51 Our aim, in part, was to address the relative absence of São Paulo within US-based studies of Brazil. Since 2013, there have been a handful of notable English-language monographs on São Paulo.52 This special issue builds on that work but repositions São Paulo as a site for understanding the role of cultural production—specifically, experimental urbanity—in urban development in the Global South. Our focus is the result of two additional workshops, which evolved into a conversation about the features that made São Paulo a unique field for a number of different cultural projects.53 The themes highlighted over the course of this introduction—middle-class subjectivity, provincial cosmopolitanism, the institutionalization of aesthetic radicalism, and the ongoing role of crowds—emerged as the authors collectively articulated, via their various disciplines, what São Paulo told us about larger global processes.
We find that São Paulo speaks to broader epistemic trouble that the Global South poses for urban studies. As Néstor García Canclini writes, the study of European cities has stood at the heart of theorizing modernity.54 In this Eurocentric ideal, urban life represented the apotheosis of global, civilizing processes, which engendered both enchantment and disenchantment among urban dwellers. A turn in urban theory toward global cities, perhaps best epitomized by Saskia Sassen’s analysis of such cities as command and control nodes of the global economy, has slightly expanded the geographical purview of “the city” to include the metropolises of North America and East Asia.55 Yet, the booming cities of the Global South continue to largely raise questions around social exclusion, informality, and violence.56 Both of these frameworks often obscure more than they explain by forcing a false dichotomy between “global cities” and Global South urban agglomerations.57 This is especially true in the case of São Paulo, where the economic and spatial practices associated with Sassen’s global cities have thrived alongside and among communities defined by the social exclusion of Global South megacities.58 By examining experimental urbanity in São Paulo, the articles reveal the ways in which these two urban worlds coexist, illuminating how middle-class cultural producers negotiate, consume, and reinvent the seeming contradictions of urban life in the Global South.
NOTES
1. Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban?” City 19, no. 2–3 (2015): 155.
2. As in all places, identity in São Paulo is nested. Residents of São Paulo State are called paulistas. Residents of the state’s capital city, which is also called São Paulo, are called paulistano/as.
3. Markus Kip et al., “Seizing the (Every)Day: Welcome to the Urban Commons!” in Urban Commons: Moving Beyond State and Market, eds. Mary Dellenbaugh, Markus Kip, Majken Bieniok, Agnes Katharina Müller, and Martin Schwegmann (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2015), 17.
4. For a discussion on urbanity versus urbanism, see Scott Greer, “Urbanism and Urbanity: Cities in an Urban-Dominated Society,” Urban Affairs Review 24, no. 3 (March 1989): 341–52.
5. For example, the sociability of strangers as experiment in Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 143–50; or the interpretation of movement through the city as a kind of social adventure in Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” Les Lèvres Nues no. 9 (November 1956).
6. Kip et al., “Urban Commons,” 17.
7. Teresa P. R. Caldeira, “Imprinting and Moving Around: New Visibilities and Configurations of Public Space in São Paulo,” Public Culture 24, no. 2 (2012): 385–419; Leonardo Cardoso, “Sound-Politics in São Paulo: Noise Control and Administrative Flows,” Current Anthropology 59, no. 2 (April 2018): 192–208.
8. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005).
9. On the prioritization of political economy in the study of Global South cities, see Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, “Introduction,” in Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, eds. Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 1–35.
10. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2003).
11. In this, we are guided by the conceptualization of conceived, perceived, and lived space in Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991).
12. Celso Furtado, Formação econômica do Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2009).
13. A. Ricardo López, “Introduction: We Shall Be All,” in The Making of the Middle Class: Toward a Transnational History, eds. A. Ricardo López and Barbara Weinstein (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 4.
14. Brian Owensby, Intimate Ironies: Modernity and the Making of Middle-Class Lives in Brazil (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
15. For an overview of the state’s development, see Francisco Vidal Luna and Herbert S. Klein, An Economic and Demographic History of São Paulo, 1850–1950 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018). According to Luna and Klein (xxi), in the late 1920s, two-thirds of Brazilian coffee was cultivated in São Paulo State. The foundational text on industrialization in São Paulo State is Warren Dean, The Industrialization of São Paulo, 1880–1945 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969). See also Wilson Cano, Raízes da concentração industrial em São Paulo (Rio de Janeiro: Difel, 1977); Mauricio Font, Coffee and Transformation in São Paulo, Brazil (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010); Anne G. Hanley, Native Capital: Financial Institutions and Economic Development in São Paulo, Brazil, 1850–1920 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).
16. On the emergence of a labor movement in São Paulo, see Luigi Biondi, Classe e nação: trabalhadores e socialistas italianos em São Paulo, 1890–1920 (Campinas, SP: UNICAMP, 2012); Yara Aun Khoury, As greves de 1917 em São Paulo e o processo de organização proletária (São Paulo: Cortez, 1981); Edilene Toledo, Travessias revolucionárias: idéias e militantes sindicalistas em São Paulo e na Itália (1890–1945) (Campinas, SP: UNICAMP, 2004). For the evolution of labor relations, see John French, The Brazilian Workers’ ABC: Class Conflict and Alliances in Modern São Paulo (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Barbara Weinstein, For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in São Paulo, 1920–1964 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Joel Wolfe, Working Women, Working Men: São Paulo and the Rise of Brazil’s Industrial Working Class, 1900–1955 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).
17. Maureen O’Dougherty, Consumption Intensified: The Politics of Middle-Class Daily Life in Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
18. Florestan Fernandes, The Negro in Brazilian Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). As in every country, racial terms are complicated in Brazil. We use the term Black to refer to all Brazilians of African descent, including those historically categorized as negros, pretos, or pardos.
19. On the conceptualization of the Northeast as a region, see Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Jr., The Invention of the Brazilian Northeast, trans. Jerry Dennis Metz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Stanley E. Blake, The Vigorous Core of Our Nationality: Race and Regional Identity in Northeastern Brazil (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011); Sarah Sarzynski, Revolution in the Terra do Sol: The Cold War in Brazil (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).
20. Paulina L. Alberto, Terms of Inclusion: Black Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century Brazil (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); George Reid Andrews, Blacks and Whites in São Paulo, Brazil, 1888–1988 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991); Kim D. Butler, Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won: Afro-Brazilians in Post-Abolition São Paulo and Salvador (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Petrônio J. Domingues, A nova abolição (São Paulo: Selo Negro, 2008); Ramatis Jacino, Transição e exclusão: o negro no mercado de trabalho em São Paulo pós abolição — 1912/1920 (São Paulo: Editora Nefertiti, 2014). Although Brazilian Northeasterners occupy different classes and racial identities, in São Paulo, the regional identity of nordestino (Northeasterner) has become racialized to infer darker complexion and manual worker status. On the midcentury migration of Northeasterners to São Paulo, see Paulo Roberto Ribeiro Fontes, Migration and the Making of Industrial São Paulo, trans. Ned Sublette (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
21. See, for instance, Roberto Schwarz, A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism, trans. John Gledson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, eds., Dependency and Development in Latin America, trans. Mattingly Urquidi (Oakland: University of California Press, 1979).
22. Barbara Weinstein, The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).
23. The literature on favelas is vast, but a few good places to start are Janice Perlman, Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Rafael Soares Gonçalves, Les Favelas de Rio de Janeiro: Histoire et Droit, XIXe et XXe Siècles (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010); Licia do Prado Valladares, The Invention of the Favela, trans. Robert Nelson Anderson (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019). On urban informality in Latin America more broadly, see Brodwyn M. Fischer, Bryan McCann, and Javier Auyero, eds., Cities from Scratch: Poverty and Informality in Urban Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Alexis Cortés Morales, “A Struggle Larger Than a House: Pobladores and Favelados in Latin American Social Theory,” Latin American Perspectives 40, no. 2 (March 2013): 168–84; Felipe Hernández, Peter Kellett, and Lea K. Allen, eds., Rethinking the Informal City: Critical Perspectives from Latin America (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009).
24. Sheldon Pollock et al., “Cosmopolitanisms,” in Cosmopolitanism, eds. Carol A. Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 1.
25. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
26. Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 46.
27. Roberto Schwarz, “Misplaced Ideas: Literature and Society in Late-Nineteenth-Century Brazil,” in Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture, ed. John Gledson (London: Verso, 1992), 30.
28. Heloísa Barbuy, A Cidade-Exposição: Comércio e Cosmopolitismo em São Paulo, 1860–1914 (São Paulo: EDUSP, 2006); Marisa Midori Deaecto, Comércio e vida urbana na cidade de São Paulo (1889–1930) (São Paulo: Senac, 2002).
29. Weinstein, Color of Modernity, 9.
30. Michael Hall, “Imigrantes na Cidade de São Paulo,” in História da cidade de São Paulo, ed. Paula Porta, vol. 3, A Cidade na Primeira Metade do Século XX, 3 vols. (São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 2004), 121.
31. Alberto, Terms of Inclusion, 30.
32. The foundational essay distinguishing Brazilian rurality and urbanity is Os Sertões by Euclides da Cunha, originally published in 1902 and translated by Samuel Putnam as Rebellion in the Backlands (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1944). Not coincidentally, da Cunha was reporting for São Paulo’s leading daily, O Estado de São Paulo, when he wrote Os Sertões. For the classic text on the caipira, see Antonio Candido, Os parceiros do Rio Bonito: estudo sôbre o caipira paulista e a transformação dos seus meios de vida (Rio de Janeiro: J. Olympio, 1964).
33. Brazil was administratively divided into provinces before the 1889 republican coup, after which provinces were reorganized as states.
34. Antonio Celso Ferreira, A epopéia bandeirante: letrados, instituições, invenção histórica (1870–1940) (São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2002).
35. Aiala Levy, “Forging an Urban Public: Theaters, Audiences, and the City in São Paulo, Brazil, 1854–1924” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2016), chapter 2.
36. Daryle Williams, Culture Wars in Brazil: The First Vargas Regime, 1930–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). Williams’s study of the institutionalization of cultural promotion during the 1930s shows how intellectual and governmental debates about Brazilian culture were central to debates about Brazilian national identity.
37. Roberto Barbato Jr., Missionários de uma utopia nacional-popular: os intelectuais e o Departamento de Cultura de São Paulo (São Paulo: Annablume, 2004); Patricia Raffaini, Esculpindo a cultura na forma Brasil: o Departamento de Cultura de São Paulo (1935–1938) (São Paulo: Humanitas FFLCH/USP, 2001); Cristiane Garcia Olivieri, Cultura neoliberal: Leis de incentivo como política pública de cultura (São Paulo: Escrituras Editora, 2004).
38. Julio Lucchesi Moraes, São Paulo, Capital Artística: A cafeicultura e as artes na belle époque (1906–1922) (Rio de Janeiro: Beco do Azougue, 2013).
39. Carlos Sandroni, Mário contra Macunaíma: Cultura e Política em Mário de Andrade (São Paulo: Vértice, 1998).
40. Beatriz Kara-José, Políticas Culturais e Negócios Urbanos: A Instrumentalização da Cultura na Revalorização do Centro de São Paulo, 1975–2000 (São Paulo: FAPESP/Annablume, 2007).
41. Fernanda Trisotto, “Sistema S escapa de corte anunciado por Guedes e tem maior receita desde 2016,” Gazeta do Povo January 30, 2020, https://www.gazetadopovo.com.br/republica/sistema-s-arrecadacao-2019/. This amount almost certainly decreased in 2020 due to the economic impact of COVID-19.
42. Maria Carolina Vasconcelos-Oliveira, “São Paulo: Rich Culture, Poor Access,” in Cities, Cultural Policy and Governance, eds. Helmut K. Anheier, Yudhishthir Raj Isar, and Michael Hoelscher (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2012): 272–87.
43. Teresa Pires do Rio Caldeira, City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo (Oakland: University of California Press, 2000).
44. See Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), chapter 5. Williams defines structures of feelings as “social experiences in solution,” that is, not yet articulated as discourse or ideology.
45. See especially Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, ed. Robert A. Nye (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1995).
46. The best known example may be Judith Butler, Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
47. Heitor Frúgoli Jr., Centralidade em São Paulo: trajetórias, conflitos e negociações na metrópole (São Paulo: Cortez; Edusp, 2000). Frúgoli observes this process through the mid-2000s. We draw on further ad hoc observations from local news and personal experience to update the process of changing centralities that Frúgoli originally identified.
48. Caldeira, City of Walls, 297.
49. Richard M. Morse, “Manchester Economics and Paulista Sociology,” in Manchester and São Paulo: Problems of Rapid Urban Growth, eds. John D. Wirth and Robert L. Jones (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1978), 7–34; Caldeira, City of Walls; Rafael Guimarães, “Os Estudos de Comunidade e Urbanos Coordenados por Donald Pierson na Escola Livre de Sociologia e Política de São Paulo,” Cadernos CERU 22, no. 1 (2011): 221–38; Lúcia Sá, Life in the Megalopolis: Mexico City and São Paulo (New York: Routledge, 2007).
50. Ahmed Kanna, ed., The Superlative City: Dubai and the Urban Condition in the Early Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Aga Khan Program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2013).
51. The program and video recordings from the 2013 São Paulo Symposium, at the University of Chicago, can be viewed at https://spsymposium.blogspot.com/p/program.html.
52. Weinstein, Color of Modernity; Fontes, Migration; Jaime Amparo Alves, The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018); Felipe Correa, São Paulo: A Graphic Biography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018).
53. The two workshops took place at Tulane University in 2018 and Princeton University in 2019. We would like to thank the University of Chicago, Tulane University, and Princeton University for hosting these respective conferences.
54. Néstor García Canclini, “From National Capital to Global Capital: Urban Change in Mexico City,” Public Culture 12, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 207–13.
55. Saskia Sassen, The Global City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
56. Gavin Shatkin, “Global Cities of the South: Emerging Perspectives on Growth and Inequality,” Cities 24, no. 1 (2007): 1–15; Kees Koonings and Dirk Kruijt, eds., Megacities: The Politics of Urban Exclusion and Violence in the Global South (London: Zed Books, 2009).
57. Colin McFarlane, “Urban Shadows: Materiality, the ‘Southern City’ and Urban Theory,” Geography Compass 2, no. 2 (2008): 340–58.
58. Milton Santos, Metrópole corporativa fragmentada: O caso de São Paulo (São Paulo: Nobel, 1990).