Chaotic Sao Paulo : Change Is the Only Constant

In a popular Brazilian novel, 21st-Century Sao Paulo has become an urban nightmare of overpopulation and decay. Garbage piles up in 77 mountains, all teeming with impoverished people, and a putrid stench fills the hot air. The streets are jammed with bicycles. A freeway stretches lifelessly into the distance, clogged with the bumper-to-bumper carcasses of cars that were caught in a final, permanent traffic jam.

Like Los Angeles in the science fiction film “Blade Runner,” the Sao Paulo imagined by novelist Ignacio de Loyola Brandao is a surreal city of the future, a grim vision of a mega-metropolis that could not stop growing.

Leads Hemisphere

And Sao Paulo, in reality, has grown like few other cities in the world. The population of the metropolitan area has increased from 2.7 million in 1950 to an estimated 16.4 million in 1988, making this the most populous city in the Southern Hemisphere and, according to the U.N. Population Fund, the third largest in the world, after Mexico City and Tokyo.

By the year 2000, Sao Paulo will overtake Tokyo as the world’s second-largest city, with 24 million people, according to the U.N. report. Only Mexico City, with 27 million, will have more people, the report said, while Tokyo will lag far behind in third place with 18 million.

Already Sao Paulo is a massive concentration of problems, where millions of residents suffer the daily miseries of inadequate mass transportation, monumental traffic congestion, oppressive slum housing, pollution and poor sanitation. At the same time, it is a mighty economic dynamo, accounting for one-fifth of Brazil’s gross domestic product, supporting a large and affluent middle class.

Change and Confusion

It is a city of constant change and confusion, buoyed by the immigrant’s spirit of resilience and resourcefulness but burdened by a lack of organization and resources that is common to large cities in Latin America. A controversial mayor is demonstrating that Sao Paulo can be administered with a measure of efficiency, but he also is being accused of doing more for his own ambitions than to anticipate inevitable growth of the city’s population and problems.

Despite that continuing growth, however, Sao Paulo seems to have been saved from its worst urban nightmares.

In the 1970s, demographers estimated that the metropolitan area would have more than 35 million residents by the year 2000. But as that year draws closer, Sao Paulo’s growth rate is dramatically declining.

A government planning agency now estimates that the metropolitan population will be 21.4 million in 2000, considerably lower than last year’s U.N. projection and vastly below the alarming predictions of the 1970s.

One reason for the decreased growth rate has been a sharp decline in the urban birthrate. Another has been the rapid development of several new urban centers in the state of Sao Paulo.

Those cities are acting as magnets for migrants from the poorer states in Brazil, drawing off much of the migration that might have further swollen metropolitan Sao Paulo.

“This is the salvation of the city,” said Mauro Salles, a Sao Paulo advertising man. “It is something that Mexico, for example, does not have. Mexico City is still the only magnetic force attracting people from the provinces.”

Salles is bullish on Sao Paulo. He portrays it as a developed country within a developing country, a thriving enclave of industry and commerce that has broken the mold of Third World poverty. Thirty-five percent of the city’s population lives as well as the middle-class in Western Europe, he said.

It is a perpetually unfinished city, he said, where new construction is a way of life. Scanning a broad horizon of skyscrapers from the rooftop terrace of his office, Salles counted 24 high-rise buildings under construction.

“That means employment,” he said. “That means investment.”

Quality of Life

And despite continuing growth, Salles contended, the quality of life in Sao Paulo has improved recently. The core city is cleaner, traffic flows better and crime is down, he said. The man Salles credits for much of these improvements is Mayor Janio Quadros.

Quadros is an eccentric politician who was president of Brazil in 1961 until he resigned after a mere seven months in office. As mayor of Sao Paulo since the beginning of 1986, he has forcefully cleared slums from the inner city, improved garbage collection, brightened the streets with red buses and launched a parking ticket drive in which he personally has issued thousands of tickets.

The ticketing campaign has created a flood of publicity and helped clear congested streets and sidewalks. Quadros also has begun freeway and tunnel projects that are expected to cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

Critics say the mayor is favoring private automobiles over mass transportation, a policy that does not help two-thirds of the population. In general, they say, his urban policy is better at attracting attention than solving Sao Paulo’s long-term problems.

‘Game of Political Marketing’

“It is a spectacular game of political marketing,” said Walter Feldman, a city council member who has been Quadros’ most outspoken critic.

Feldman said Quadros, 71, is trying to use the office of mayor as a steppingstone back to the national presidency. Quadros denies that he will be a presidential candidate, but his aides predict privately that he will.

Sao Paulo straddles the Tropic of Capricorn on a terrain of rolling hills and shallow valleys. It is a haphazard patchwork of clustered high-rise buildings, middle-class neighborhoods with carports and hedges, rundown rows of tenement houses, ramshackle slums and gritty industrial districts.

The metropolitan area is made up of 28 municipalities. The biggest, Sao Paulo, accounts for about 10 million of the total 16 million population. Much of the rest is concentrated in a south-side industrial belt, called “ABC” because its three main municipalities are Santo Andre, Sao Bernardo and Sao Caetano. (Santo and Sao mean saint in Portuguese, Brazil’s national language.)

Center of Industry

ABC is the center of Sao Paulo’s metallurgical and automotive industries, which fed the city’s spectacular growth during the 1950s and 1960s. Immigrant tradesmen from Italy and other European countries helped build the industries, supplying parts to automobile factories established by Volkswagen, Ford and General Motors. Low-wage labor came in droves from northeastern Brazil, the country’s poorest region.

Great industrial fortunes were made and huge labor unions were established. Real estate boomed and commerce thrived.

Some Sao Paulo residents, called Paulistanos, live in palatial mansions. Many others live in ethnic neighborhoods--Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, German, Japanese, Arab, Korean. Their customs and their foods give Sao Paulo a cosmopolitan flavor found nowhere else in South America.

The city is famous across the continent for the variety and quality of its restaurants. It is also known for its art museums, with collections that include such masters as Picasso, Rubens, Van Gogh and El Greco.

Disorder of Fast Growth

What is most striking, however, is the vast disorder of a city that has grown too fast with too little planning. Its untamed vitality has helped make Sao Paulo interesting and exciting, but much has been lost in the process.

“It was a shame what happened to our green spaces, to our water sources,” lamented Roberto della Manna, a prominent industrialist who is the son of an Italian immigrant.

Street layouts are often disjointed and maddeningly indirect. To drive to a point a block or two away sometimes requires a roundabout trip of a dozen blocks or more. Freeways are few, and rush-hour traffic jams are colossal.

Sao Paulo has a subway system, but after 20 years of sporadic construction, its lines will total only about 25 miles when a new leg is completed at the end of this year. Planners say an adequate subway system for Sao Paulo should have more than 80 miles.

Most mass transportation is by underdeveloped networks of privately owned buses. Many workers travel four hours a day or more by bus to get to their jobs and back.

Slums Lack Schools

Slums have mushroomed wherever unused space has been available. Many slums lack schools and health clinics, electricity and paved streets.

Authorities say half of greater Sao Paulo’s residents have only sumps or ditches for sewage disposal. Untreated sewage from slums drains into the Billings reservoir, a major source of Sao Paulo’s drinking water.

Daunting as Sao Paulo’s problems may be, Paulistanos never stop looking for solutions. And sometimes they find them.

Jorge Wilheim, the Sao Paulo state secretary for environment, said that 10 years ago, Sao Paulo smog was 50% factory smoke and 50% motor vehicle emissions. Today, he said, only 10% of the smog is from factories, thanks to clean-air regulations imposed on industry by the state.

This year, the state is cracking down on vehicles, ticketing more than 300 buses and trucks a day for spewing dark exhaust fumes. A law requiring emission control devices on all vehicles built in Brazil will not take full effect until 1997, but Wilheim said much can be done by better regulation of motor vehicles.

Sewage Experiment

Wilheim is also working on a solution for Sao Paulo’s sewage problem. An agency in his department is experimenting with a new “biodigestor” system that will collect sewage from a street, a block or a neighborhood and treat it locally with specially cultivated bacteria in a large concrete tank.

Testing has been completed successfully on a biodigestor that will handle sewage from a population of 5,000, Wilheim said.

“I believe that this is a breakthrough for the problem of sewage in the Third World,” he said. The next step is to seek international help in developing genetically engineered bacteria that will make the biodigestors even more efficient, he added.

Paulistanos also are looking for more federal funds after successfully fighting for a new law that requires a greater share of tax revenues to be made available to municipal governments. And Sao Paulo is hoping for better urban planning under new constitutional provisions, approved by the national Congress, that will permit states to establish metropolitan authorities and require all cities to adopt long-range development plans.

Population Rise Slowing

But the biggest boon to Sao Paulo planners is the decline in urban population growth. Marcio Pinto, director of a state agency for statistical studies, said the metropolitan area’s fertility rate has decreased from 4.2 children for each woman in the 1970s to 3.4 in the 1980s and will be down to 2 at the end of the century. The declining birthrate is typical of industrialized urban societies everywhere, he said.

Migration of workers into Sao Paulo has slacked off as it has increased into other cities in the state’s interior--such as Campinas, Riberao Preto and Sorocaba--where new industries have boomed.

“That growth in the interior of Sao Paulo state has been one of the most important things that have happened in the 1970s,” said Pinto.

He said that metropolitan Sao Paulo’s population growth rate has declined from nearly 6% a year in the 1950s to an estimated 3.3% in the 1980s. In the 1990s, growth is expected to decline further to 2.2% a year, he said.

Even so, the city is growing by hundreds of thousands of people a year. New neighborhoods suddenly appear and old neighborhoods yield to high-rise development. As novelist Paulo Dantas said, “Everything changes. The next day, it is another city.”

For five years, Dantas has been trying to write a novel about Sao Paulo, but he said the constant change makes it difficult for him to bring the city into focus.

“It might be that this book will never be finished--like Sao Paulo,” he said.