8 - Colonialism’s Uneasy Legacy

Summary

Roaming around in São Paulo can be quite a stimulating experience: The city’s bustling rhythm, its effervescent cultural life, and its ethnic heterogeneity leave little room for doubt as to why Brazil’s largest city is generally considered South America’s most vibrant and cosmopolitan metropolis. Meanwhile, the city’s “tough concrete poetry”¹ also bespeaks a configuration in which human bodies are dwarfed and citizens are constantly reminded of their respective place – a proverbial “city of walls”² in which the utopia of a universally accessible and politically empowering public space has long since been thwarted by a maze of privatized streets, fortified urban enclaves, and an omnipresent array of surveillance devices. Despite the local elites’ attempts to depict São Paulo as a place which is defined by both its tolerance and its diversity,³ the city’s very material configuration thus indicates an urbanistic model which segments and separates more than it joins and unites. Rather than the clichéd melting pot, São Paulo resembles a kaleidoscope in which social class and ethnic affiliation assign each citizen a precise spatial coordinate in a cityscape defined by a mesh of internal frontiers – some brutally physical, others more subtle and ethereal – and the corresponding characteristic of an almost suffocating impermeability.