Financial Times, Londres – 13.3.2018
São Paulo offers blueprint for what Brazil could achieve
The motto of this urban powerhouse is ‘non ducor, duco’: I am not led, I lead Sao Paulo's matamorphosis is evidenced in it's imposing skyline
Marcos Troyjo
São Paulo is the most global of Brazilian cities. Its skyline is more imposing than that of Shanghai and its inhabitants’ use of cell phones is greater than that of the people of Mumbai.
While Saint Petersburg may attract more museum-goers, in São Paulo you can enjoy cuisine that can be matched in variety and quality only by the restaurants of New York.
The city’s global character owes as much to its historical roots as its cosmopolitan business profile. Italian, Japanese and Lebanese immigrants made their way to São Paulo in the first half of the 20th century.
The city offered great opportunities — first as the epicentre of a booming agricultural hub, notably in coffee, and later as the cradle of Brazil’s vigorous industrialisation. The architecture of Avenida Paulista, São Paulo’s main thoroughfare, reflects the city’s transformation. It was once the home of rich coffee barons who hired Italian and French architects to design their hôtels particuliers (of which only a few examples survive). Later it became the business avenue, the prime location for banks and the headquarters of the Federation of Industries of the State of São Paulo (FIESP).
São Paulo has been described as “Japan’s largest city outside Japan” and is said to have as many Lebanese descendants as the population of Beirut. According to an Italian diplomat, 3m people (roughly the population of Rome) in the greater São Paulo area have Italian family names.
The roots of Brazil’s nascent industrialisation in the 1930s lie in the city, where immigrant European entrepreneurs introduced much of the machine-intensive manufacturing, and some leading members of the city’s economic elite changed from being coffee growers to drivers of what was, up until the 1970s, the most dynamic and comprehensive industrialisation process in the southern hemisphere.
In his opening remarks in a lecture at the University of São Paulo in the late 1980s, the Swedish ambassador in Brazil said it was “a pleasure to visit Sweden’s most industrial hub”.
By then, most Swedish, German, French, Japanese and US manufacturers of home appliances, textiles and especially automobiles had a significant presence in São Paulo and its outskirts.
No country in the world grew as much as Brazil in the 20th century — until the 1980s, when the country’s foreign debt spiralled out of control and the model of industrialisation based on import substitution ceased to produce the levels of economic growth that a demographically young country needs.
São Paulo’s global character has also evolved as most of the industrial plants of the multinational corporations have moved to more cost-effective locations in the country’s interior. A deindustrialised São Paulo, like other cities in the world, depends on an expanding service sector and reinventing itself as a platform for entertainment, tech-intensive companies and the creative economy.
The city has succeeded in its metamorphosis. Its complex of hospital centres make it the leading destination in Latin America for health services, its theatres are a small-scale Broadway and it is a centre for fashion, design and technology. All major multinationals have their Brazil offices in São Paulo.
Despite being the most global of the country’s cities, São Paulo is also “the most Brazilian of cities” — with both the flattering and derogatory connotations that may imply. Some of the traits of the so-called Brazil cost — the increased operational costs that come from doing business in Brazil — are found and magnified here.
Whereas Shanghai features more than 600km of subway lines; in São Paulo there are roughly 80km. While in Paris, you may go fishing or boating in the Seine; in São Paulo, the urban portions of the rivers Tietê or Pinheiros are still largely open sewers, despite recurrent efforts to clean them up.
The street signs are presented in Portuguese only and very few people outside of those that work in hotels can give you directions or entertain a basic conversation in English.
São Paulo is also very Brazilian in its contrasts. In Rio de Janeiro, the symbols of mixed socio-economic fortune sit side by side; a $10m dollar beachfront apartment in Ipanema is just 300m away from the Cantagalo slum.
But in São Paulo there are additional distinctions. It still has very deficient public transport while also having the world’s largest fleet of armoured vehicles and more helicopter pads than New York.
It has negligible ethnic or religious strife, no terrorist threats, while some areas such as Jardim Paulista are said to be as safe as Sweden. But districts such as Jaçanã, with 23 murders per 100,000 people, are as violent as crime-ridden Mexico City, although the murder rate in São Paulo is about half that of Rio’s.
Yet, were the city of São Paulo to be an independent country, it would have the world’s 49th largest gross domestic product, while being the best example of Brazil’s inability to overcome some of its most basic problems.
The motto of this urban powerhouse is non ducor, duco (I am not led, I lead).
The city’s great achievements stand as an example of what Brazil’s potential can accomplish.
The author is co-director of BRICLab at Columbia University, where he teaches international and public affairs
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