Brazilian way Sao Paulo

Sao Paulo -  São Paulo is one of the fastest growing cities of the world. It is doing very well economically. Every block of four one- or two-storey houses that falls into the hands of building contractors is transformed into another skinny block of flats. Verticalisation they call that here. You see helicopters in the air flying from one apartment building to another, avoiding the never-ending traffic jam.  São Paulo is educating people through well-designed public spaces. You find SESCs (social commercial services) – spaces, where people can meet, read, surf the net, eat and sleep – everywhere in the city. Lina Bo Bardi’s SESC Pompéia, a combined cultural and sports centre, is the most famous. There are free libraries in the ultra-modern metro stations. There is a system called Serviço Social da Industria that allows anybody to get a four-month free training to become a hairdresser or a manicurist or learn how to be a copywriter for the advertising industry. Speed is not the same as haste. We saw old couples walking in love like in their teens and we saw people taking time to kiss goodbye passionately before they rush off to work. But most important of all is the original and informal way the authorities and the average Brazilian find ‘ways to make things easier’. There is a special word for that: jeitinho, which not only has a negative connotation of corruption or taking advantage of someone, but also positive meanings, such as ingenuity, creativity, solidarity and conciliation. The informal job of the catadore is an example of this. A self-organised collective of freelance rubbish collectors under the flyover who are ‘knowledge workers’ and who have realised equal rights for men and women. To stress the Brazilians’ historical predisposition to informality, where the rest of the world says ‘cool’ when something is very special indeed, they use the word legao, which means both ‘legal’ and ‘cool’.  
Lino Hellings – Sao Paulo Lab