USES OF SPACE, FREEDOMS AND CONSTRAINTS: São Paulo, Clean City: a case study

Abstract

The sensible forms that stand the daily experience of movement through urban space in outdoor advertising are one of the most conducive to the exercise of social life. However, outdoor advertising imposing on a dialogical relationship is not always peaceful, perceived as a threat to the order (disorder) of the city. Can the ads stop wanting to affirm the place of persuasion, seduction and poetics in the context of contemporary urban life? On September 26, 2006, the Municipality of São Paulo, Brazil, approved the Clean City Law, seeking a ban on outdoor advertising. Since then, a fierce controversy has occupied citizens, politicians, architects, planners, publicists, and artists, among different types of actors in defense of views sometimes radically irreconcilable. It is our belief that underlying such a discussion there are different notions of happiness, individual or collective, in its particular application to space and culture of the city, in preparation of the World Cup 2014 (in São Paulo).