City clean-ups and chutzpah in Sao Paulo

Remnant of the ad city (photo Tony DeMarco)

Bureaucratic banality or Mayoral chutzpah? I recently learned about a remarkable urban experiment in Brazil.

Prior blogs discuss beautification and the CPTED strategy called image ("management and maintenance"). While image cannot stop crime, it can trigger positive change.

The town of Celebration illustrates how new urbanists and their form-based zoning take that one step beyond. Sao Paulo has another.

In 2007, Sao Paulo, one of the world's largest cities, instituted a radical experiment in beautification: a ban on unsanctioned, outdoor advertising. No billboards, no posters on buildings, and no brand advertising on busses. It is called the Clean City Law (Lei Cidade Limpa).

Rooftop garden, Sao Paulo (photo Eduardo Zarate)

Unlikely instigator of the law was conservative mayor Gilberto Kassab. Four years later, in spite of plans to reintroduce a few isolated advertising zones (and unsuccessful legal challenges by the advertising industry), the law is deemed successful.

They have removed 15,000 billboards and levied fines of $8 million for companies violating the new law. In a modern, free-market democracy a city without public advertising is an anathema. Yet, the law remains.

The difference between pointless and consequential in law is whether it works.

True, they are still working to clean up unsightly blank billboards. Sao Paulo remains poor and gang infested. None of that, of course, is what the Clean City Law was about. It was about visual pollution and civic pride in the public realm. Survey's indicate over 70% of Sao Paulo's population love the new law.

Beautification can make a place seem like someone cares. It's a small, consequential step to help residents feel pride in their city. And as we know, a sense of place and pride is the first step in the long journey to neighborhood engagement.

Central Sao Paulo. No ads (photo Eduardo Zarate)

Beauty, eh?

Walkways between streets and beaches in Pacific Beach, San Diego

A number of years ago I was asked to write-up a government study on CPTED strategies in US cities. The results were asymmetric. Lacking political gravitas, most cities did little to implement CPTED. Arguably, it seemed like one of the greatest failures of any prevention policy in recent history (three-strikes laws notwithstanding).

I say arguably because failure is a generalization and generalizations can be a cagey thing. For example, the study also revealed some municipalities had taken major steps forward, now described in Atlas's book 21st Century Security and
CPTED in a chapter titled "Implementing CPTED".

Simple and pleasant, no dividers needed. Successful street benches in Palo Alto

Interestingly, the government study did show one CPTED strategy proliferated - management and maintenance, what Newman called Image. That was probably because Image emulates planning trends like beautification, streetscaping, and the form-based zoning of new urbanism (a trend now at risk in places like Winter Park, Florida).

Though it cannot stop crime, it can trigger positive change. Beautification is not to be ignored. I recently took photos in San Diego and San Francisco showing how simple beautification can be. Then a Canadian CPTED colleague (and International CPTED Association board member), Steve Woolerich, sent me this fascinating clip of a street piano in his Alberta city. Check it out HERE.

Beautifying with planters. Nothing complicated