A day of ponder

Sao Paulo knows many parallel worlds. Some overlapping, some at great distance. Sometimes with great contrast, sometimes fading. It's a heterogenous monster.

There are some patterns in this heterotopia and one of them is the tendency of informal activities to cluster. On a first visit it is hardly understandable why things cluster and how and over how much time. It's obvious what the sowing machine stores and mannequin stores are doing in the same street as where the wedding dress stores have gathered, but why there near Luz station, a place which dirty and deterioriated buildings are such a contrast with the delicate white dresses.

I visited another world today, Villa Madalena. A happy place with some traces of a deterioriated past, street art, a transition into a professional art scene and then being followed up by food and now also architecture! In the case of Villa Madalena I stop wondering why it has clustered and just admire the great flexibility of the traditional houses there, with 3 to 5 meter space in front which can be transformed in endless ways.

Understanding how informality clusters might hold the key to using it as a city planning tool, which in the case of Sao Paulo isn't given to the municipality. It might be a developer's or a local community's interest to do city planning, to launch small projects that initiate larger changes. Architects can be great intermediates in these processes. The municipality might not be interested but hey.. that doesn't seem to bother 70% of the city.

That's the theory. Now finding a way to reflect this, to visualize in some collage-like way an infected Sao Paulo, where small interventions cause great changes.