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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.
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One Brazilian city has cleansed its streets of all advertising and billboards. Should we [UK] do the same or would an ad-free future leave us cold?
Gilberto Kassab, the mayor of São Paulo, passed a law last year banning all advertising from the Brazilian city. The place is now being held up by activists worldwide as an example to us all: an image of an anti-Orwellian future, where The Man is no longer in control of our day to day choices. But does the planet's first "clean city" really live up to the hype? Stripped of its flyposters and neon signs, São Paulo now resembles a war zone, with empty hoardings and rusting frames replacing the soft drink adverts and the blown-up faces of Brazilian actors.
Tony de Marco, a photographer and typographer, has put up a series of images of today's São Paulo on Flickr. To me it looks like Stanley Kubrick's vision of Saigon shot in a deserted London Docklands in the 80s.