If I were God and I existed, I would execute an act of administrative intervention on São Paulo. I would raze the whole city to the ground throughout the next decade: it stays just the way it is. Nothing else will be knocked down, nothing more will be built. Try to work on the city as it exists: monstrous, imbalanced, poorly planned and poorly maintained. If it’s a matter of moving money, invest in public spaces: in roads, squares, gardens, sidewalks, lighting, leisure centers, flood prevention—anything and everything that makes of what would otherwise be nothing but a heap of housing, something alike to that impressive human invention we call a city. Investing in urbanity also gives financial return.
São Paulo, seen from a celestial perspective, looks like a city that has been bombed. Huge craters pepper every neighborhood and there are blocks upon blocks of demolished houses. The poor are tossed from here to there during the search for somewhere to build new refugee camps, from where they will soon after be expelled. There are floods, traffic, and people trapped inside cars, desperate and going mad because of the difficulty of the day-to-day; people who feel in their bodies, in their souls, the effects of living under a black dome of pollution so enormous it can be seen from above. It may look like war, but it’s just capitalism: swelling, making the few richer and the rest poorer while the city becomes hellish, offering itself up to those who can pay the sedative of living in a tower, high above the ground, where they can escape from urban life. The nouveau riche use of the term “tower” has replaced its obsolete equivalents, “tenement” and “building,” or even the fun-loving and childish “sky-scraper”. In fairy tales, princesses are locked up in towers; in São Paulo, it is a privilege to live pent up in one.
But how do you put a stop to the city’s real-estate businesses, to its economy, to a whole generation of jobs? Let’s just say that if I were God, I’d handle it. If a government as rich as ours invested the taxes it gets from other activities instead of just playing into the hands of the rich, the city would regain its force in no time at all. Imagine it was possible to plan the municipal economy a little. Only then would we stop being hostages to those who hold economic power. Ten years is less than a fraction of a second if you look at time from the perspective of eternity. In any case, at least it’s enough time for our city to elect a new government and council free of their commitment to Secover, the largest real estate syndicate of Latin America.
But—in the name of what God, would they do that? In whose name would they stop the city from “growing”? No, God needn’t be a socialist, nor an urbanist. It’d be enough to simply act in the name of a value present in all sacred, religious, or simply humanist perspectives: in the name of delicacy. It’d be enough to consider that cities no longer exist to impress or to oppress the people that live in them, but to expand their freedom and the possibilities of what we call urban life.
At this point, I’d like to invite the reader to swap this aerial view of São Paulo for a pedestrian view. Just get out of your car and walk along the city streets. If this sounds like a silly idea, pretend you’re Baudelaire strolling through Paris in the 19th century, trying to capture what was left of the ancient city after Haussman’s monumental reform, executed on behalf of Napoleon III. Or pretend you’re João do Rio, the chronicler of the Brazilian capital, reformed by Pereira Passos. The difference is, of course, that these two acts of destruction/reconstruction were planned with the aim to modernize public space while, today, civil construction buys public power and literally does what it likes in the interest of the people, that is, of the market. It may seem that the market is equal to the sum of people’s desires, but it isn’t. What we call the market is a device made up of a few, though prodigious, interests, which impose themselves on the people in order to determine what it is they should like.
What will become of a city that is destroying all its reserves of delicacy, of grace, of modesty? Walk for a moment along your neighborhood’s streets in search of those little nooks that haven’t yet been wrecked by grandiose and tacky construction work. What will become of a city without verandas? Without windows facing the street—without the cat peeking through one of its windows? What will become of our daily interactions in a city without the corner shop responsible for the collective space where people stop to say hello, to chat, and to get to know each other, little by little? A city without zones of familiarity? What will become of a city without those villas or old houses where the pedestrian can walk in to find a micro-oasis of silence and shade without having to go through a gatehouse? Without the tiny square that remains where they forgot to build something else? Search for those places where the private and the public, the intimate and the strange, the defiant and the welcoming, can still meet. What will become of a city that is pure arrogance, exhibitionism, efficiency? What will become of us—the inhabitants of a city that disdains urban life?
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Translator’s Note
Delicacy first appeared in O Estadão on May 15, 2010. The piece was later published in Maria Rita Kehl’s 2011 collection 18 crônicas e mais algumas (published by Biotempo Editorial and available here). I stumbled upon it on an acquaintance’s Facebook wall. Something in it felt familiar. And that’s not because I’m from São Paolo, but because virtually every city I have lived in has been guilty of the same crimes. Delicacy is an investigation into the possibility of a city no longer ruled by the capitalist impulse—the city is conducted instead “in the name of delicacy.” In light of the monumental changes undergoing cities across Brazil in preparation for the impending World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games, this article, though published nearly four years ago, is as relevant as ever.
Maria Rita Kehl is a well-known Brazilian psychoanalyst. She has written for Brazilian publications such as Veja, Isto É and Folha São Paulo, among others. In 2010, she won the Prêmio Jabuti de Literatura in the category of “Education, Psychology and Psychoanalysis” and the Prêmio Direitos Humanos in the category of “Media and Human Rights.” She is also a member of the National Truth Commission of Brazil. Her personal website can be found here.