I have blogged about public transport in São Paulo before and i have made someobservations while traveling on the subway (called metrô by the locals) but being back in town i have realized that i have not really given enough credits to the metrô system itself.

The system is absolutely amazing. at the moment it has 4 lines among them two (the red and the blue line) which are mayor ones and two others that act as feeder lines. both main lines run at 2 minutes intervals off-peak and at 60 second intervals during peak hours. apparently the whole system transports about 3.8 million passengers a day and employs a number of sophisticated measures to avoid this massive amount of travelers on a relatively small system to end up in absolute chaos:

Most station have painted waiting corridors on the ground (something that the Brazilians seem to love) which mean that you are supposed to queue up between white lines painted on the ground. Some of the bigger stations enforce structured queueing-up by metal barriers (like at the slaughter-house) and the most busy ones have separate platforms for getting on and off the trains (the doors facing the disembarking platform open before the doors on the embarking side so that passengers can get off before new passengers get on).

The most amazing station in the whole system is ‘Sé’ where the red (east-west) and blue (north-south) lines connect. it feels like as if about 50% of the passengers on either line change for the other one or exit at Sé station. in order for this massive amount of people to flow without interruption the flows within the station have been completely separated: passengers leave the subway cars towards an inside platform that is directly connected to the outside platforms on the other line’s level. at rush hour there is an almost continuos flow of passengers from the blue line to the red line and vice versa, which is quite an amazing sight.

Apart from this extremely well-choreographed handling of masses the fact that they have a station called ‘imigrantes‘ (on the green line) is another reason to love the planners of the São Paulo Metrô…

More panorama shots here and here.

I am in Rio right now, which is anything else than a shrinking city. I have no figures ready but i guess there is a table which shows Rio’s growth in the last decades somewhere in Mike Davis’ excellent ‘Planet of Slums‘ which i finished reading just before coming here.

Now the lonely planet for Rio mentions that in Rio gas stations are one of the favorite places for party-goers to hang out as they sell beer all-through the night. This particular bit of travelers advice reminded me of one of the posters for the shrinking cities exhibition in Berlin a while back which showed an gas station that apparently served as the hang-out place for youngsters, supposedly because gas stations are the most exciting places to hang out in shrinking cities or something like this (I can’t find a single copy of the poster/image on the entire internets, but my sister has one hanging in her kitchen so go there if you do not know what i am talking about…).

Anyway, being in Rio we were of course looking for nocturnal excitement ourselves and the most exciting thing in town these days when it comes to going out are funk balls. The guardian has a fascinating article about the whole baile funk thing online (o.k. – if it has been in Guardian it is probably not the most exciting thing anymore for the locals but the whole thing still sounds quite exciting for visiting white boys). The only problem is that these funk balls take place in the Favelas and it does not seem like a good idea to venture out there in the middle of the night when you are drunk. However at some point we found some brazilians who had the same urge and took off to a ball in two cabs.

Of course being all slightly tipsy we did not really notice that it was 3A.M. and when we finally arrived at the venue the party was over and we did not get to dance at all (it was sunday night hence the early end). Instead we got some more drugs and gave some money to the 12 year old begging kid in an Osama bin Laden t-shirt (pictures of more OBL t-shirts here, here and here) and then descended from the hill to hang out at the gas station in shrinking city style:

p.s: Good thing to know that the USAF is giving $450K for ‘Automated Ontologically-Based Link Analysis of International Web Logs for the Timely Discovery of Relevant and Credible Information‘ – i wish them good luck making sense out of this post…

Rana Dasgupta has just published an essay of the same name on his site in which he explores the devellopments behind the recent rise to media stardom of cities like Johannisburg, Bombay, Caracas, Lagos and Nairobi. from the essay:

Dismissive talk of Chinese “sweatshops” that would never meet EU regulations does nothing to dispel the sense of a stupendous fertility, for the contents of every western household are “Made in China”, and most Europeans and Americans are so entirely ignorant about how things are made that the production of the objects in their lives seems a kind of Asian alchemy. There is more: the Third-World city has many economies, not just one, and even this they are exporting. Large parts of western cities are now gleefully given over to an international pirate economy of CDs, DVDs, computer software and branded goods manufactured in Lagos or Shenzhen at almost the same time as the Parisian and Californian originals, and almost to the same quality.

[…] The happy fiction of Europe’s robust liberalism is in severe doubt as it fails even to accommodate a single group of dissenters: politically articulate Muslims who wish to assert a different vision of social life and law. Compared to this, my adopted city of Delhi, which has its own disputes and violence, seems positively tranquil when one reflects that it must balance the life demands of 15 million people with so many languages and cosmologies, and such varied notions of commerce, law, healthcare and education, that they are not a “population” in the European sense at all. “When will all the camels and cows depart, when will all these strange human varieties finally be banished and India become modern?” tourists ask. They forget two crucial truths - first, that Europe’s centuries-long project to banish all life forms it could not understand or empathise with was a destructively violent process; second, and most importantly, that Delhi already is modern, and this - all this - is what it looks like. It is an alternative kind of modernity: a swirling, agglomerative kind that seems, at this point in history, to be more capable than the western version of sustaining radical diversity - to be better equipped, perhaps, for the principle of globalisation.

This brings us to the most perverse suspicion of all. Perhaps the Third-World city is more than simply the source of the things that will define the future, but actually is the future of the western city.

Go read the entire text here.

If you happen to live in Shivaji Nagar, Bangalore and you get your cable tv from Devya Satellite Vision you can watch the first installment of world information city tv tonight from 1830h to 2100h IST. World Information City TV is a project of Bombay based artist Shaina Anand and is part of the World Information City event. Apparently they have made a movie out of my camera misfortune a couple of days ago.

I have mentioned it before, but the thing that impressed me the most so far is the facts that people actually travel by helicopter within the city. There are lots of heli-pads on buildings in the city and if you find yourself placed high enough to oversee a bit of the city you actually see helicopters taking of somewhere and landing elsewhere on a heli-pad. Of course this is kind of sick (someone told me that you can actually commute by helicopter from the north-zone to downtown for R$ 5000 per month (the minimum income is something like R$ 500)) but it is also poetic in al its shabby futuristic-scenarions-have-come-true glory.

We went on top of the Edificio Italia building yesterday afternoon. It is one of the tallest buildings in the city and located smack in the middle of it. They have a ridiculously overpriced executive bar on the 41st floor with the worst piano player i ever had to listen to. The whole thing feels distinctly 80-ties, but if you want to have access to the outside gallery you have to order drinks in this bar.

The view from the bar an the gallery is absolutely breathtaking. Tthe Sao Paulo metropolitan agglomeration extends to the horizon (and probably beyond) in all four direction. The city seen from above is a collection of high rises of all shades of gray all states of decay and pretty much any architectural style imaginable. extremely beautiful if you ask me.

Being in a cities of this size always make me lament the fact that i was raised in a provincial nest where you could cycle to the country side in 5 minutes and to the ‘city center’ in another 15. places like that should be called what they are: villages. That place also prides itself in having the largest inside the city forest in germany which is even more stupid. since when does a forest belong into a city? If you ask me people should either live in places that are so big that you cant see the end of it when you are standing on a 45-story building in the middle of it or they should live in villages and raise cows and chickens. Most stupid thing is this idea of living in the green and commuting into the city to work at the sparkasse or some similar place every day.

Yesterday i seriously thought i would not like São Paulo. It seemed empty for a city with 16 million-or-so inhabitants. And the people who where on the streets where either selling incense, crystals and other hippie-shit (on the Praça Republica next to my hotel) or the seemed to be a bit too fond of tattoos and body manipulations for my taste (all the kids i ran into on the subway on their way to some kind of tattoo convention). But mostly they were simply absent.

The lack of people on the streets was apparently also due to the fact that it was sunday AND referendum-day and brazilians seem to take both their sundays and there referendums rather serious. As far as the latter are concerned it even seems that the police is not allowed to arrest anyone 3 days prior to any election/referendum as this would mean that the arrested cannot vote. apparently this law is a relic from a past when politicians would get supporters of their opponents arrested so they could not vote. As far as i understand this it is not that crimes in this period go unpunished but rather the arrests will be delayed.

Anyway i have changed my mind about the city. This place is absolutely mind boggling. It is pretty much what i would have imagined a 21st century megalopolis when i was a kid. The city center is an anarchic chaos of high rise buildings which seen as a whole has a heterogeneous beauty that surpasses the clinic beauty of places like Amsterdam by orders of magnitude. Combine this with science fiction attributes like heli-pads on top of lots of buildings (that people actually seem to use for helicopter travel within the city), lots of satellite dishes and other aerials, private properties surrounded by electric fences and churches that have their own parking garages underneath them (pay by credit card!) and i am sold to São Paulo.

Tonight on Avenida Paulista there was a open air screening of Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey‘. This is probably the most appropriate places to screen this movie i have seen so far.