SERIES BASED ON THE BOOK “CITIES IN BRAZIL” BY ANTONIO RISÉRIO CITIES IN BRAZIL “THE CITY” When foreigners ask what the meaning of this city is, you gather together this way because you love each other? What will you answer? We all live together to extract money from one another, or this is a community?
And the foreigner will go back to the desert. Oh, my soul, be prepared for the coming of the foreigner. Prepared for the one who knows how to ask questions.
Everybody very well knows what a city is. Even children do. Days ago I was on a trip and saw a boy, a child looking out the plane window.
He turned to his mother: “Look, mom, a city over there. There is a city. ” Everybody knows it.
Everybody recognizes it. The complication appears when someone asks the question and wants a definition. What is a city?
People get kind of embarrassed. They think twice before answering. The truth is answers vary depending on each person’s education, social status, culture, and interests.
They also vary depending on the nature of their knowledge. We have answers from such fields as Economics, Sociology, Philosophy, Urbanism, Anthropology, Ecology. Samba of mine, and Brazil’s too, Samba of mine, and Brazil’s too, they are trying to scorn you In fact, the city is what we ask her.
We can ask about the materiality of the city, what the city’s face is. We can ask about social networks and what people do in the city. We will have different answers.
We can ask the city based on the idea of inequalities that are reproduced in the city, and we will identify them, too. We can also ask about new horizons and possibilities of life or survival that open to people going to the city and are often fulfilled. I defend that we should continue treating the city as the object that we will not say what it is, but it is a sphinx.
We ask her, and she may answer or not; it has to do with how we ask her the question. We should think, if we can think, in the widest possible way, what causes the cities’ desire to exist. Why on earth people get together?
What exactly do they want to be together? It’s curious because, originally, the city is essentially born out of its use value. People desire to be together for a thousand reasons.
It favors the collective production. They work collectively and produce more, that way they are able to produce surpluses that make trade possible. But from community life they also get other things.
Intangible things of the poetic and sensitive order. So in collective groupings as cities people live, work, and sleep together they love each other, and relate to each other. The camellia fell from the branch, gave two sighs and then died The camellia fell from the branch, gave two sighs and then died The cock is missing the carijó hen The cock is missing the carijó hen Look what a mulatto girl.
Look what a mulatto girl. One, two, timbalada. .
. The city is all that and much more. Much more to the point we can’t imagine the city’s multiple dimensions, both in a pervert sense, as the city can be a place of discrimination, exploitation, and inequalities, and it can also be the place where we fight all that.
I think that the city is the place of dialectics. If we live together, we need to reach a sort of minimum agreement so that our social life be civilized. On the other hand, ours is an open society.
This chance can also be a territory for creativity, search for solutions, improvements, a better community life. Urba imensa, Think of what it was, is, and will be. Think of the ox Enigmatic ox mask Have mercy Megacity Count your boys Sing along with your bells The intense felicity That loses and finds itself in you Light gets thin and thick Think of yourself Enthusiasm devoted to common work.
The future as built can be determined unpredictable. I think that in fact the contemporaneous city results from three revolutions. The first one was the agriculture revolution.
The agriculture revolution has allowed a number of people to congregate within a reduced physical space and build a conscience of community and rights. And in fact politics comes from that revolution. It starts with the right to the city.
The conception of citizenship. The development of that leads to politics. The second one is the industrial revolution.
Mining, the production of energy, the manufacturing industry. And the scale of the industrial city. That’s a city in which you lose the direct interaction with the manager, the ruler and the like.
The third one is the cybernetics revolution that has delocalized the city. We are still at the beginning of this process, but today we go through the following situation: You can be in your apartment watching the opera, working, you can be in a plane watching all that, or you can phone your bank’s customer service located in a call center in Bangladesh for example. Cities that are organized according to different, geometries and topographies.
Cities that are organized as men wanted it. Men and women that will occupy that space of contradictory, contradictions, paradoxes, and dilemmas, that arise at the city gets more and more complex. Riches and sadness that arise from dramas and dreams of men and women when they got together in that little place and had to get along.
Hill, you are the charm of the landscape Sumptuous character of rudimentary beauty Hill, slow and primary progress you are an astounding scenario, inspiration of nature In the city’s topography, with all simplicity, you are called elevation Laneways, alleys, holes, huts, stalls and shacks without discrimination Hills, bare feet on the slope, water can on the head, rough and bright life Children without school or future They will suffer a lifetime if don’t get lucky with the ball Hill, your samba was lullaby, it became too sophisticated, it’s not traditional anymore Hill, you’re pretty when the sun rises, and the pains go on account of social maladjustment Hill, you’re pretty when the sun rises, and the pains go on account of social maladjustment, oh, hill. That’s the city. As I said she hurts and pleases at the same time.
Sunday I was watching a game at the Paraisópolis shanty town, Ponte Preta from Jardim Leme. I was drinking beer with friends. Those are things that money just can’t buy.
They don’t have it at the market. It’s still look in the other’s eye, ask for a cup of sugar. Can I borrow you car to take my wife that will have my baby?
My son injured his leg, can I borrow your car? Go fetch your daughter from college at midnight, please bring my daughter home too. That’s a human thing that wasn’t yet corrupted in spite of all.
Take care of others, neighbors, human beings, humanity. I think there still is humanity in the suburbs. That’s the side effect sometimes the city wouldn’t like to have.
People playing samba together on slab. The kids playing funk on the streets. Police comes, beat them up, and goes away.
There come the kids again. Resist. It’s what we have.
Even having nothing, they don’t want us to be happy. Cities are like catalysts. Everything that happens in a society happens more intensely, faster, and more radical in cities, because in cities people are closer to one another and interactions between people, which can be either friendly or violent interactions happen.
That’s why the city is such an important symbol of what happens in our society. I think that cities are the best invention of man. The city is the physical and symbolic place of encounter and differences as relationship possibilities.
Typically, political thoughts and positions that through history have been anti-urban, are nostalgic and regressive as they like to return to a world that is no longer possible. And so they end up, being conservative in the bad sense. On one hand, we could say those cities have the virtue of being a collective artwork.
An open, inconclusive artwork in the good sense that allows the other, the yet unborn one, to find a place in it and transform themselves in the sense of duty and social space. On the other side, Brazilian cities are in a dramatic situation Brazilian cities are improvised camps in the bad sense. A complete unbalance between the city’s production and use.
Here we have to talk about peripheral capitalism. Specifically for cities in peripheral capitalist countries. We will talk especially about Brazil, in a peripheral world.
In Brazil we lived four centuries of slavery, four centuries, during which people were treated as things. This has left a mark, in a very unequal society. Also the way we got rid of slavery Are there inequalities in the US?
Yes, and they are strong. It’s a racist country, but they got rid of slavery by using a different key from ours. We never got ours.
We haven’t solved the slavery issue in Brazil until today. And the cities’ map, the life conditions map and the distribution of afro descendants is the best scientific proof. Any urbanization process in the world and particularly in Brazil, was a process of finding a place to live.
Finding a better place to live, trying to escape from rural poverty, have a job, and especially education. We did that by the millions. We have agglutinated and agglomerated excessively and lost quality of life.
We have the benefit of being together. Education is better, but quality of life has worsened. We may not enjoy happiness.
I, as a big city dweller can’t see myself living in a small country town. I’m used to the noise of sirens and claxons, and the chaos of a big city like São Paulo. Understanding São Paulo geographically, its dimensions is still a little complex.
From a peripheral point of view, and the surroundings I’m used to, with the Mother of Church at the most. If we try to understand São Paulo, there are 32 cities within this city, so we begin to understand the size, diversity, logistics, and mechanics of a city like this one, trying to think as East Zone, where approx. 3.
5 million people commute everyday back and forth downtown. Work, study, and back home at the end of the day. Think about the logistics, and how crazy that is.
3. 5 million people is the population of a country like Uruguay. Brazilian cities have certain specificities if compared with other cities in the world.
The informality in Brazilian cities, big or significant parts of our cities were not urbanized according to the standards is one of them. I believe the job issue is essential. If we analyze the history of the cities, having had slavery up to recently, is quite decisive.
The fact that up to recently so many people existed without rights, and a good portion of our population remained in irregular conditions a situation in which rights are not naturally vested, but need to be conquered with great difficulties. That is also evident in our cities. Is there greater violence that denying people the right to dwell, eat, have access to quality public services such as health education, and transportation?
Who would consciously find it normal to get on a bus in the far south of São Paulo, take three hours to get to their jobs and another three hours to get back home? That’s not possible, that’s not quality of life for people. Cities were created for better quality of life for human beings.
The up side is that the city throbs. The city never stops. The city is barbiturates.
Prozac. Those who are not crazy please get out. When I was living in the suburbs, I was raised in Jardim Guarujá, by Parque Santo Antônio and Jardim São Luiz.
In my hood there were two streets I could walk. I thought the world was those two streets. I thought the planet was called Earth because the streets were dirt.
One day I went to Bixiga, in Bela Vista, in the early 80. There I realized I was poor, that I had nothing. When I saw those lights, the people laughing here and there.
Lots of white people, everybody was happy, the guys smoking pot in the street "You guys are not afraid of the police? ” Then I realized the suburbs were a different country and I was a foreigner. I fell in love with that.
When I knew São Paulo, the real São Paulo, I went crazy. That was too much for me. There is a short story by Eduardo Galeano, when the boy sees the sea for the first time and says: “Dad, help me to look”.
It was the same for me, the same feeling I had. Help me to look. I found the city fantastic.
I wanted to live there. This downtown and suburb thing is very cruel. This perverse pendulum between downtown and suburb will only be overcome with the sophisticated action that happen in the suburbs, the cultural vanguards collective of artists, and the movements in favor of local architecture, the collective construction of those places, and the social space of cities.
The world is defined by the possibilities there present. The world of Pedro Álvares Cabral was defined by the then existing possibilities. At the beginning of the 20th century the world was defined by the then existing possibilities.
This is the first idea. The second one is that hardly ever man uses all existing possibilities. He constructs situations based on a few possibilities and ceases to construct others based on other possibilities.
So, what does today’s world have to offer to men? It offers a set of techniques. A combination of people that is extraordinary.
The fact is that people got mixed. It had never happened before. Babel is only an allegory.
Today is Babel indeed. Babel was New York, then it was London, and then Paris, but also Los Angeles, and Rio, and São Paulo, and also Lagos. Lagos, Dakar, or Abidjan.
All those are cities where tens of races have gathered in Asia, Africa, Oceania, in the Americas, in Europe, with a multiplicity of tastes, flavors smells, culture, languages, beliefs, religions. All mixed up together. More that in every other moment in history.
All mixed up together in cities. For all living together it is necessary the right measure, the right distance for getting along. Above all, cities seem to be that place where living together is a challenge due to the contradictions, inevitable conflicts, and desirable.
. . differences in will, our desires, values, and beliefs.
To the same degree that it is necessary to find the right distance, and it will be varied and different depending on the circumstances, values, etc. Some people can live together with others. Other people or groups are to keep a certain distance to be able to get along in a civilized manner.
Beautiful. I have everything I don’t want, and nothing of what I want. The Greeks made an elementary distinction.
Besides Polis they also used another word to call the city: haste. Though haste and polis refer to the urban reality, they are not synonyms. Haste is the city in its physical aspects, tangible expression, and urban and architectonic materiality.
In its turn, Polis refers to the city as a civic corpus, juridical and political complex, and symbolic and ideological structure. It’s the political community lato sensu. As a consequence of our cultural and intellectual formation we tend to prefer the Polis, but it’s time to balance the scale.
The environmental discussion takes place in the Polis, but it’s in the haste that the realization of a city project that respects people and nature can take place. In times of environmental crisis, the Polis will have to try and solve the environmental and social problems of the haste. In fact, polis and haste should not be dissociated.
Together they are the stage where human social action takes place. From the beginning there is a good provocation in the one that comes unexpectedly and can formulate the question that puts you again in front of what should be a naturalized field, but that becomes an essential issue in life. Why are we here?
All of us in an effort to live together. And above all, the city seems to be a clear paradox between the charm of us living together and the difficulty that living together inevitably promotes. When the foreigner asks: What’s the meaning of this city?
Are you all together because you love each other? -What will you answer? -We live all together to take money one from the other… or this is a community?
The foreigner will go back to the desert. Oh, my soul, be prepared for the coming of the foreigner. .
. Prepared for the one who knows how to ask questions.
