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São Paulo: A City Without Ads

From Adbusters #73, Aug-Sep 2007
adbusters.org/the_magazin...out_Ads.html

In 2007, the world’s fourth-largest metropolis and Brazil’s most important city, São Paulo, became the first city outside of the communist world to put into effect a radical, near-complete ban on outdoor advertising. Known on one hand for being the country’s slick commercial capital and on the other for its extreme gang violence and crushing poverty, São Paulo’s “Lei Cidade Limpa” or Clean City Law was an unexpected success, owing largely to the singular determination of the city’s conservative mayor, Gilberto Kassab.

As the driving force behind the measure, mayor Kassab quelled the rebellion from the advertising industry with the help of key allies amongst the city’s elite. On many occasions, Kassab made the point that he has nothing against advertising in and of itself, but rather with its excess. He explained,

“The Clean City Law came from a necessity to combat pollution . . . pollution of water, sound, air, and the visual. We decided that we should start combating pollution with the most conspicuous sector – visual pollution.”

Since then, billboards, outdoor video screens and ads on buses have been eliminated at breakneck speed. Even pamphleteering in public spaces has been made illegal, and strict new regulations have drastically reduced the allowable size of storefront signage. Nearly $8 million in fines were issued to cleanse São Paulo of the blight on its landscape.

One sore loser in the battle was Clear Channel Communications. Having recently entered the Brazilian market, the corporation was purchasing a Brazilian subsidiary as well as the rights to a large share of the city’s billboard market. Weeks before the ban took effect, Clear Channel launched a counter-campaign in support of outdoor ads, with desperate slogans that failed to resonate with the masses: “There’s a new movie on all the billboards – what billboards? Outdoor media is culture.”

Although legal challenges from businesses have left a handful of billboards standing, the city, now stripped of its 15,000 billboards, resembles a battlefield strewn with blank marquees, partially torn-down frames and hastily painted-over storefront facades. While it’s unclear whether this cleanup can be replicated in other cities around the world, it has so far been a success in São Paulo: surveys indicate that the measure is extremely popular with the city’s residents, with more than 70 percent approval.

Though materialism and consumerism, along with gang violence will continue to pollute the city of São Paulo, these human dramas may at least begin to unfold against a more pleasant visual backdrop.

– David Evan Harris


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

On The Media’s Bob Garfield interviewed Vinicius Galvao, a reporter for Folha de São Paulo, Brazil’s largest newspaper, about São Paulo’s ban on visual pollution.

Bob Garfield: I’ve seen photos of the city, and it’s amazing to see this sprawling metropolis completely devoid of signage, completely devoid of logos and bright lights and so forth. What did São Paulo look like up until the ban took place?

Vinicius Galvao: São Paulo’s a very vertical city. That makes it very frenetic. You couldn’t even realize the architecture of the old buildings, because all the buildings, all the houses were just covered with billboards and logos and propaganda. And there was no criteria.

And now it’s amazing. They uncovered a lot of problems the city had that we never realized. For example, there are some favelas, which are the shantytowns. I wrote a big story in my newspaper today that in a lot of parts of the city we never realized there was a big shantytown. People were shocked because they never saw that before, just because there were a lot of billboards covering the area.

BG: No writer could have [laughing] come up with a more vivid metaphor. What else has been discovered as the scales have fallen off of the city’s eyes?

VG: São Paulo’s just like New York. It’s a very international city. We have the Japanese neighborhood, we have the Korean neighborhood, we have the Italian neighborhood and in the Korean neighborhood, they have a lot of small manufacturers, these Korean businessmen. They hire illegal labor from Bolivian immigrants.

And there was a lot of billboards in front of these manufacturers’ shops.And when they uncovered, we could see through the window a lot of Bolivian people like sleeping and working at the same place. They earn money, just enough for food. So it’s a lot of social problem that was uncovered where the city was shocked at this news.

BG: I want to ask you about the cultural life of the city, because, like them or not, billboards and logos and bright lights create some of the vibrancy that a city has to offer. Isn’t it weird walking through the streets with all of those images just absent?

VG: No. It’s weird, because you get lost, so you don’t have any references any more. That’s what I realized as a citizen. My reference was a big Panasonic billboard. But now my reference is art deco building that was covered through this Panasonic. So you start getting new references in the city. The city’s got now new language, a new identity.

BG: Well, cleaning up the city’s all well and good, but how do businesses announce to the public that they’re open for business?

VG: That was the first response the shop owners found for this law, because the law bans billboards and also even the windows should be clean. Big banks, like Citibank, and big stores, like Dolce & Gabbana, they started painting themselves with very strong colors, like yellow, red, deep blue, and creating like visual patterns to associate the brand to that pattern or to that color.

For example, Citibank’s color is blue. They’re painting the building in very strong blue so people can see that from far away and they can make an association with that deep blue and Citibank.

BG: Now, the city has said, having undertaken this effort, it will eventually create zones where some outdoor advertising will be permitted. Do you expect São Paulo eventually to just revert to its previous clutter?

VG: Not to revert to previous clutter, but I think like very specific zones, I think they’re going to isolate the electronic billboards in those areas, in the financial center. I don’t think they should put those in residential areas as we had before.

BG: Now, the advertising industry is obviously not happy about this. They’re complaining that they’re deprived of free speech and that it’s costing them jobs and revenue. But is there anyone else in São Paulo who’s unhappy about this? Tell me about the public at large. What’s their view?

VG: It’s amazing, because people on the streets are strongly supporting that. The owner of the buildings, even if they have to renovate a building, they’re strongly supporting that. It’s a massive campaign to improve the city. The advertisers, they complain, but they’re agreeing with the ban. What they say is that we should have created criteria for that to organize the chaos.

BG: Vinicius, thank you very much for joining us.

VG: Thank you so much.

BG: Vinicius Galvao is a reporter for Folha de São Paulo.

Excerpted from “NPR’s On the Media” from WNYC Radio.

Depicts 125,000 one-hundred dollar bills ($12.5 million), the amount our government spends every hour on the war in Iraq.

Ben Franklin, 2007
8.5 feet wide by 10.5 feet tall in three horizontal panels

Depicts 125,000 one-hundred dollar bills ($12.5 million), the amount our government spends every hour on the war in Iraq.

close up of image
www.chrisjordan.com/

video pod on current.tv
www.current.tv/pods/art/RD06106

Running the Numbers
An American Self-Portrait

This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.

My only caveat about this series is that the prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended. As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little web images. Hopefully the JPEGs displayed here might be enough to arouse your curiosity to attend an exhibition, or to arrange one if you are in a position to do so. The series is a work in progress, and new images will be posted as they are completed, so please stay tuned.

~chris jordan, Seattle, 2007


This series will be exhibited at the Von Lintel Gallery in New York from June 14th to the end of July. Opening reception on June 14th. More info at www.vonlintel.com.

Squirrel goes on rampage, injures 3

BERLIN (Reuters) - An aggressive squirrel attacked and injured three people in a German town before a 72-year-old pensioner dispatched the rampaging animal with his crutch.

The squirrel first ran into a house in the southern town of Passau, leapt from behind on a 70-year-old woman, and sank its teeth into her hand, a local police spokesman said Thursday.

With the squirrel still hanging from her hand, the woman ran onto the street in panic, where she managed to shake it off.

The animal then entered a building site and jumped on a construction worker, injuring him on the hand and arm, before he managed to fight it off with a measuring pole.

"After that, the squirrel went into the 72-year-old man's garden and massively attacked him on the arms, hand and thigh," the spokesman said. "Then he killed it with his crutch."

The spokesman said experts thought the attack may have been linked to the mating season or because the squirrel was ill.

link to Reuters article:
tinyurl.com/yvs36d

Plan Colombia: Cashing-In on the Drug War Failure

Allegedly intended to fight the production of coca and cocaine in Colombia, the $2 billion-U.S. "Plan Colombia" assistance package (currently renamed "Andean Initiative") has 80% of its aid going to the Colombian police and military for weapons, training and helicopters. While this policy meant huge contracts for U.S. defense contractors paid for by U.S. tax-payers, it translated into abruptly stopping a peace and dialogue process between then Colombian President Andres Pastrana and the leftist rebel groups, stepping up the war in the country's 50-year civil struggle. Recently elected Colombian President Alvaro Uribe has actually intensified the fighting against the two main rebel groups, the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and the ELN (Army of National Liberation) with newly delivered U.S. weapons and helicopters.

Colombia is now sinking into a hellish spiral of violence with more bombings and kidnappings, more disappearances and murders of opposition figures and union leaders and intensified warfare by the Colombian military. Plan Colombia is helping to combat the leftist guerilla-movements, not the narco-traffickers.

While the U.S. Congress had demanded that U.S. military assistance be used only to fight drug-trafficking and not to meddle in the Colombian civil war, the U.S. State Department has found a way to sidestep this issue by officially announcing a shift in priority from fighting drugs to fighting so-called "terrorism". This makes it easier to target the actions of irregular armed groups in Colombia with a focus on leftist groups controlling territories rich in natural resources, oil in particular.

Colombia is rapidly becoming one of the main oil suppliers to the U.S., following closely neighboring Venezuela that produces over 1.5 million barrels of oil a day. Now Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez is viewed as a black sheep by the current U.S. administration for his leftist policies and sympathy for other leftist world leaders including Cuba's leader Fidel Castro. Colombia for its part is governed by a few extremely wealthy families with historical ties to the U.S. power elite. But their grip over Colombia is being increasingly challenged by leftist guerillas that already control most of the countryside.

Located primarily in the North-East and South of the country, Colombia's oil resources are all the more attractive that they are close to the U.S. while most other known oil reserves in the world are now starting to dwindle. But international oil companies including Los Angeles, CA-based Occidental Petroleum, that are currently prospecting and exploiting these resources are faced with a major problem: most of these resources are located in areas controlled by leftist guerrilla movements, primarily the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and the ELN (Army of National Liberation) that are "taxing" their operations for their own funding.

Coincidently or not, the focus of the U.S. military assistance under "Plan Colombia" is precisely in these oil-rich countryside areas where the Colombian military and paramilitary forces are having a hard time fighting the guerrilla. In February of 2002 though, the U.S. State Department officially announced shifting its priority in Colombia from anti-drug to anti-guerrilla policy. At the same time, President Bush pushed a request through Congress for a total of $100 Million earmarked to train a new Colombian military unit for the specific mission of protecting the drilling and piping operations of the U.S. Occidental Petroleum corporation in Colombia. The ambiguity of the initial "Plan Colombia" of U.S. President Clinton seems to have dissipated with the now openly pro-oil, anti guerrilla stand of the current U.S. administration that comes entirely from the oil industry.

The FARC and the ELN are Colombia's foremost armed leftist rebel groups today. The official position of the FARC is that a strong leftist opposition movement cannot possibly enter the political arena in Colombia without risking its members being murdered and massacred like what had happened to the leftist "Patriotic Union" in the 1980s. With 20 to 30,000 armed guerillas and an unknown number of civilian supporters and sympathizers, FARC controls the larger half of Colombia's countryside, organizing 70 separate fronts each responsible for their own funding. Deprived of any foreign assistance, the movement now relies on three main sources of funding:

1) "Taxing" economic activities in the territories they control

2) Kidnaping thousands for ransom and exchange for prisoners with the Colombian government

3) Coca and cocaine-trafficking even though FARC officials claim the movement only taxes traffickers who come and buy coca-paste from the farmers.

Involved in a peace-process with the Colombian government until February 2002 when President Andres Pastrana abruptly invaded the peace-zone he had given them, the extremely well-armed and equipped FARC have now intensified their war against the Colombian armed forces despite the U.S. military assistance. Both sides of the conflict agree that there is no end in sight as the FARC are not strong enough to capture major cities and neither the Colombian military nor the irregular paramilitary groups are strong enough to regain the countryside controlled by the guerrillas.

Growing coca-leaves has been a medicinal tradition throughout the Andes for well over 1,000 years. The "matte de coca" for instance is a tea made from dried coca leaves that indeed cures ailments and increases strength and spirit. Cocaine, however, is a highly chemical and toxic by-product of the coca leaves that has nothing to do with Andean traditions but rather with the sociological and psychological imbalance of today's modern urban societies. Production of coca and cocaine has exploded from the 1980s, fueled by a seemingly ever-increasing demand from the United States in particular. A growing movement throughout Latin America calls for the legalization of the production of coca leaves with some going as far as calling for the legalization of illicit drugs in order to fight organized crime and money-laundering.

While fortunes are being made by traffickers and corrupt international financial institutions, poor farmers in the Andes, in Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia, have been cornered into growing the only produce that still brings cash on their farm. Coca leaves and coca-paste, a mixture of coca leaves macerated in kerosene, are the only products that buyers will come and pay cash for in areas where there is virtually no presence of the state and no social assistance whatsoever. The international agrobusiness competition, American for the most part, has destroyed their ability to sell other agricultural produce even in their own markets.

The U.S. "Plan Colombia" offers a one-time payment of less than $1,000 as assistance to farming families and does nothing to help the local agriculture compete against the much cheaper imports from the United States. Already caught between the warring factions, the poor farmers of Colombia are being further victimized by the U.S. policy of spraying defoliant on their lands with unknown consequences to their health.

While it has been proven that spraying defoliant on coca fields has no other impact than actually stimulating production in wider areas, the dangerous pesticides involved (a beefed-up version of the commercially available "Round-Up" by the Monsanto Corporation) destroys legal crops, poisons the water supply, contaminates local populations and affects the fragile Amazonian eco-system in ways that we are only beginning to understand. These fumigations are conducted in Colombia by the U.S. defense contractor "Dyncorp", a supposedly private corporation that answers to the U.S. government just as any regular army branch but without any oversight by the U.S. Congress. Even though this policy has proven useless and even counter-productive, it still provides a substantial income to Monsanto and to Dyncorp, a corporation with many ties to the U.S. military and power establishment. The official position of the U.S. State Department is that defoliation is safe, however, this same position was also taken by the Pentagon when Agent Orange was being spread in Vietnam. In 1991, the U.S. military eventually acknowledged the toxicity of agent orange and started compensating U.S. Vietnam veterans (though not the local populations) that had been exposed to the spraying. Independent studies have already pinpointed the long-term health and environmental impacts of the chemicals being sprayed in Colombia.

A country of mountains, Colombia like the other Andean countries where similar U.S. spray-programs have been implemented, constitutes the highland of the Amazon basin, a zone that includes parts of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela, Guyana and Brazil. This forest, representing one of the lungs of planet Earth (the other lung being Siberia, an area also undergoing raging destruction), is one of the richest and most diverse ecosystems in the world, a delicate and fragile system despite its apparent imposing strength. Just like the mere fact of building a highway cutting through this environment affects life in ways unforeseen, spraying chemicals meant to destroy the foliage will also have consequences that are not too difficult to imagine and will upset the entire cycle of life around the giant trees of the Amazon. Just like anywhere else in the world but on an even greater magnitude, attacking the trees means attacking the soils, attacking the insects, attacking the birds and attacking all the other life-forms that live off them. We know how these processes start, but we can only imagine how they will end. Many world governments have little if any consideration for the environment -- such destructions are still catching up on us all -- and a heavy price will be paid for failed ideas such as spraying defoliant over coca fields in Colombia.

-plancolombia.org/

Plan Colombia: Cashing-In on the Drug War Failure is now available for $25 plus $7 s/h or $12.99 + free s/h on amazon.com.

Wikipedia on Burning Man and effect on global warming

A group of San Francisco scientists are calculating how much the event will contribute to global warming. They have created the CoolingMan organization and have implemented a system that will calculate how much greenhouse gases Burning Man participants will create. The project has inspired many to look for positive ways to get involved in the global warming and climate change movements by seeking out solutions. The CoolingMan website suggests ways that Burners may offset the damage by planting trees or investing in alternative energy solutions. Since this is a new development, the impact won't be fully realized until Burning Man 2007, a year when ecological concerns will also be explored through the art theme of "The Green Man".
-Wikipedia.com

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn...al_warming

"By reducing your junk mail for 5 yrs, you’ll conserve 1.7 trees & 700 gallons of water & prevent 460 pounds of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere – & you’ll gain 40 hrs of time!"

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