In general, we usually have two basic kinds of criticism towards city and urban life. In the first case, it contrasts the city with the outside world, with countryside life, in wilderness outskirts, a lost fishermen village in the prairie luminosity. In the second case, the subject under discussion is the city itself.
Both in panoramic view and in close-reading. If there is a comparison, it won't be external. The city will be confronted with itself.
The happiness of the suitably urbanized citizen consists in clinging to others within the disorder, deluded as it is, by hypnotic heat and forced contact with the crowd. It has shifted its original contact with rivers, woods, fields and animals for the permanent agitation, contamination of carbon oxide and a set of rental cells, installed on the stiffness of an artificial soil. Natural horizontality, the direction of human freedom over the ground disappears, or disappeared.
Citizens condemns themselves to an artificial stacking. And it aspires to a sterile uprightness. At the same time, the city always had its advocates, its apologists.
Urban-philia is a fact. Which means the city has always been an object of both celebration and criticism. At times it is seen as human victory over chaos, at times as chaos in itself.
And this also happened between us. For a long time there has been a strong contrast between coastal Brazil and countryside Brazil. Today, what we can say is that the countryside, in its traditional sense, no longer exists.
But our ostensibly segregated cities cross the one that is the greatest urban crisis in Brazil's history. Ludovico. .
. Nobody is leaving. Not in a week, not even a thousand!
All the finishing is first-rate, even luxurious, which is to give a high level to the project. I don't think it is worth building buildings for low-income clients. So, here, we are launching a number of luxury ones for high income clients.
People who are leaving their mansions because of stores and robbery problems. These things. This building has 24/7 surveillance.
And this area is surrounded with sensors. How much for the condo? 450 reais.
Each apartment is entitled to two parking spaces. -How many cars do you have? -We don't have a car.
We had two. Pretty modern here, right? It looks like a factory.
Come on in. This one has this big room and the view is really good. The structural tendency of capitalism and in its neoliberal phase, even more, is the concentration of income and production of inequality.
From the urban point of view, the consequence is that cities tend to be increasingly divided between strongholds of power, right? Certain. .
. certain privileged bunkers amidst a tide of poverty and "violence," in quotes. A part of the city follows the law.
Zoning law, constructions and buildings code, land subdivision law. . .
A part. . .
Environmental legislation. . .
We have laws that are among the most advanced in the world. But we follow them in a discriminatory way. They apply for a part of the city, with some flexibility.
And for a part of the city there is no law. It's the "law of the dog. " The bravest cries less.
And in the absence of the State, militia and organized crime. In the exile of periphery. An interesting fact is that, recently, two or three years ago, in Vila Buarque neighborhood, where there are many architecture offices, in São Paulo, graffiti began to appear on the walls that read: "Capital is São Paulo's city planner.
" I don't know who does that, but it is a fairly plausible finding, right? We know. .
. São Paulo, above all, is a city that was built by real estate speculation, almost without any planning. Who are these capitals that profit from the city and dominate the city?
It is buildings construction capital, it is real estate finance capital, real estate development capital and owners of land or real estate. These. .
. They constitute themselves, invariably, in this machine of growth. Much of the gain comes from the so-called real estate income.
This is a key to understanding domination over the city. Hello? Your blessing, grandpa.
It is alright. I'm just showing an apartment for clients. Yes.
Yes, it is a deal. They will take it. Windsor Castle.
This story. . .
I already know it, yes. They went there to talk to me and their uncle, just now. Did they talk to you too?
Yeah. . .
They kissed their grandpa's hand, huh? It is a robbery on public resources. Where and in what will public resources be invested in?
It will be in the sanitation of a periphery that is showing a high. . .
a high indicator of epidemics, or will it be in a tunnel, as we have seen in São Paulo, of sprinkled water, for cars? A tunnel that was not a highway, it was a real estate project, more than anything. To add value to the price of the land.
This is the big deal in the city. That's the big fight in the city. The investment fight that will impact land prices.
I have seen vast riverbanks areas being handed over to real estate speculation. For example, in Belém do Pará. It is a crime.
A whole zone measuring, if I'm not mistaken, 11 miles, between Mangal das Garças, in the historical center, and the Federal University of Pará. . .
An entire zone that was an area of naval yards, of small buildings for repairing of ships and such, was removed. They were stilts, almost slums, removed overnight, for the construction of luxury condos. The perception that these spaces by the rivers are noble spaces, it is evident.
And that brings a shock to our cultural tradition that was the abandonment of these areas to slums, to stilts. And what should be worked out is that, precisely, these privileged zones were areas of public access. Right?
Public spaces areas, not areas given over to real estate speculation, as it seems to be happening, unfortunately. In 2008, a land of the Union, at José Estelita quay, located in downtown Recife, was sold to a group of construction companies in an auction that was questioned by Public Ministry. Those construction companies are the same ones that finance the electoral campaign of many politicians of the city and state of Pernambuco.
In 2012, the city of Recife approved, in a dubious process, a project of luxury condominiums presented by these construction companies. The project was named "Novo Recife. " This is new.
This is new. This is new. And this is new, again.
And this is new, again. And this is new, again. I think certain places in the city are getting improvements, and improvements of all kinds.
Physical ones, infrastructure, equipment. . .
When I say infrastructure, I'd say, I don't know, a place that had no sewage and now has sewage, or electric energy, things like that, cultural equipment, more sophisticated stores, in short, a whole range of possible improvements from the point of view of quality of life, and that often ends up, generating the expulsion of the people who lived there when that place was not that good. And that's what we see: where there is structure, there is no place for the people. Then, more and more, they are expelled to peripheries.
And it is in peripheries services are lacking. Therefore, public transportation is precarious, health services are precarious, leisure and education services are precarious. And what does this city need?
It needs to become a city, because it is not. It's a non-city, it's an anti-city. And when we look at violence rates, where is much of violence?
Much of violence is on the periphery. Whether it is through control of drug trafficking, whether by domination of militias, or because of police violence itself, which is what intimidates the most young people in periphery. But, in fact, there will be no peace for anyone as long as rights are taken from people.
Because fear, it is, to a large extent, a culture. Often there are no exactly palpable reasons to be so afraid. But as you have.
. . As you build guardhouses and electric fences, you become more afraid.
And everyone starts to have. . .
It becomes a psychological system. And this is remarkable in Brazil. Medium-sized cities, rich cities, in Brazil.
. . Ribeirão Preto, Presidente Prudente.
. . All these cities that are also in the South, in the Southeast, in the East.
. . these cities, they are condominium cities.
It is a culture of segregation that does not. . .
which is producing pathologies. It is very important to say that. People, they think they are safer between walls.
They are not. In the 1970's and 1980's, São Paulo elites and its middle classes, in a sense, "fled," in quotation marks, from central regions to the suburbs, rich suburbs - Alphaville, Granja Viana, many neighborhoods like those - seeking a reintegration into nature, so to speak, a possibility of not being in a polluted center, with traffic, but in a more bucolic place, etc. But also, above all, security.
And that was very damaging to the city. Because the city, when it empties, it becomes more insecure, in fact. The dynamics of violence worsens, increases, as this happens.
Now, the interesting thing is that today, in São Paulo, we face the exhaustion of this model that occurred in the 1980's. People are no longer willing to live in Alphaville and Granja Viana. Many are returning to the central areas.
There is a very interesting values transformation in the sense of a. . .
of a rescue of what we understand as cosmopolitanism and urban life. In the city of São Paulo, perhaps for the first time in history, we have a situation where the poor have less and less possibilities of survival, of housing, in the central area. For the middle class, the richest, they are discovering that being in the city, you can come down and you have a built city, to go to a restaurant, a coffee and so on, it's a good thing, it's a nice thing.
And this will, in the future, in 20 or 30 years, produce a city even more divided between center and periphery than we have nowadays. We have some very disastrous housing policies, too. So, we are not saying housing just as a place to live in.
It is a dwelling, in a suitable place, near the whole urban structure, which is, even, for the public power to have no more expenses. "Minha Casa, Minha Vida" Program is an anti-urban program. It is a program that offers housing at low costs, or at zero cost, but it suburbanizes the city because it is done in the most.
. . terrible possible way, so to speak.
It takes the cheapest land. Lands that are far away, which are out of the city. It creates a suburb and a periphery again, even in small cities.
You solve the problem of "housing," in quotation marks, making the problem of the city, of transportation, even worse. How are we going to build new houses? We are going to build new houses with social participation.
And with architects and engineers. We don't want houses outside the cities, as dictatorship did. There is an experience in Manaus, in Amazonas, of a housing complex that has five thousand units.
It is named "Better Living. " I went there, on its opening. There was no school, no health station, no public transportation, no stores.
You need a city. Does it have a price? Yes.
But we have the law to be used. We have a progressive taxation that city statute provides. We have the social function of property.
And we can avoid that 400 thousand empty properties, only in the city of São Paulo, remain idle. The number of homeless people and the number of people who'd fit into empty buildings is, more or less, similar. So, if you simply house these people in empty apartments, you'd solve the problem of housing in the city.
Well, it sounds simple, right? If this is true, then why no one does that? Why is it important for someone to keep an empty property in downtown?
Because these investors are expecting a valuation. They are quarantining a series of properties, relying on the fact that in the future they'll value, and they will be able to get a better sale. It is up to the public power to reverse this situation.
And this is one of the most interesting points of the new São Paulo's Master Plan. If you have an empty property, especially in downtown, you pay a "x" tax. The next year, if it is still empty, you pay a lot more.
And the next year, much more so, and that grows in GP. So, now they have been able to implement a law that will make this effective. This is critical.
This is an anti-speculation law, in that sense, that will help the city to be less ghost like. Rio de Janeiro! What did we see going on in the country?
Constructions, constructions. . .
Urban politics were a sum of constructions. But what constructions and where? Great stadiums, constructions linked to urban mobility that didn't address what was the daily tragedy of mass mobility.
But to meet a mobility, for example, that leaves the airports, or that arrives at airports, such as the two subways of Rio, VLB and subway, the two subways of São Paulo, Salvador's subway. . .
Constructions designed by real state capital. Rio de Janeiro, I said, four years ago, it is going to explode. Why?
Because the concentration of resources in white and rich areas of Rio de Janeiro was scandalous. It was absolutely scandalous. To build a mirage.
The city, it is a complex that works through the permanent interaction between public power, that is, public good, and various private forces, ranging from each one of us, each person, which is a private thing, up to corporations who have power, and who lobby and make bargains. Now, the only salvation towards better cities is intervention of public power, the greatest possible. I'm not being a Stalinist.
But public power is responsible for watching over the collective good. Capital movement won't do that. The movement of capital, it is predatory.
Real estate speculation is a kind of vampire. It wants to extract as much profit as possible, and profit is segregational. For cities to be better, we need direct intervention of the State, of a State that fulfills its role as a State, not only of a capitalist State, and from that, too, we work towards modification in the people.
Because people build the city. State only regulates how these people will relate socially, commercially and culturally. That is it.
