São Paulo’s Continuous Present.

One of the many imponderable aspects of living in São Paulo is how fiercely proud its inhabitants are of their home-town. When you first move here, you can perhaps be forgiven for wondering why this is. Unlike its nearby cousin and arch-rival, Rio de Janeiro, it is miles from the sea, lacks an enormous fresh-water lagoon, retains very few of its picturesque old buildings and has almost no open spaces.

And yet Paulistas remain adamant: their city is not merely the equal of Rio, it is superior. The question, then, is how on earth can this be? Well, the usual suspects touted in response to this question are that it has a better night-life (Rio being best during the day), better food (not always true) and more culture (probably, but Rio seems to be doing alright on that score). All in all, then, not wholly convincing.

My theory for why Paulistas feel this way is that they don’t just see the troubled contemporary surface (and it must be said that São Paulo has acquired all the very worst traits of modern urbanisation and capitalism), they see the whole story. Making this possible is the fact that São Paulo grew faster than most cities in the world; in the space of 120 years its population rose from 77,000 to 9 million, and its landmass expanded proportionally. Inevitably, expansion like this occurred without proper planning and with a fair deal of corruption.

On the one hand, this explains why so little of the fabric of old São Paulo still exists. On the other hand, crucially, growth on this scale means that a lot of people still remember how the city was before it changed. They remember this or that neighbourhood when it was all townhouses or tree-lined or car-less, before the traffic and the pollution got so bad and skyscrapers massed on every horizon.

And here’s the point: because they can remember, because the city still holds this collective memory of what it was, its inhabitants rejoice in what it is becoming. They accept the pollution and the danger because they are grateful for the vitality and constant change. To them, this is not a faceless concrete monstrosity, it is their faceless concrete monstrosity, in which every part still retains its particular narrative; here is Higienopolis where the doctors and dentists first moved, here Liberdade where the Japanese emigrated, here’s Avenida Brasil where the coffee-growers once lived, and Vila Madalena, where the bohos go to look at each other, and Shopping Iguatemi, where the rich kids from Jardins and Pinheiros come to buy over-priced polo shirts.

Few modern day cities relish change on this scale, because most modern day cities succumb to the imperative to preserve and curate, to embody memory in physical structures. This is not a wrong instinct – cities like London and Rome are infinitely richer for the preservation of their patrimony. But they are not, perhaps, alive in the same way because the past remains physically contiguous, enforcing a dialogue with the present which is salutary but also, somehow, sad. Those beautiful white Wren churches lost among the City’s steel and glass, the crooked alleyways of Soho or the Regency rows of Holland Park: they make us remember other days and the other people who passed here before us, and so they make us remember how ephemeral we ourselves are.

Here in São Paulo, it is the past which is ephemeral, lasting only as long as it is held in the memories of the people who live here, and it is all the more precious for being so. Meanwhile, outside our windows, the present keeps on unfolding as fast as we can think it.