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Eduardo Moises Penalver & Sonia Kaytal Property Outlaws: How Squatters, Pirates, and Protesters Improve the Law of Ownership
Barbara Ehrenreich Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy
Lewis Hyde The Gift, Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World
Geoffrey Miller Spent: Sex, Evolution, & Consumer Behavior
Friday, August 14, 2015
Can cities kick ads? Inside the global movement to ban urban billboards
My friend Dennis over at Ban Billboard Blight sent me this article from the Guardian. Many of the issues that I find most interesting about advertising and public space are addressed in the article, if only briefly. It is after all a short news story. I was particularly happy with fact that the author addresses the tone of the OOH industry towards thier occupation of our public environment, and what that means about thier overall goals and appreciation for the public to which they subject thier business.
And then there is the mention of a Zadie Smith essay in the NY Review of Books, which all of my smart friends failed to alert me of. I guess all of thier constant pressure to subscribe was not only well intended, but also a good idea.
Something seemed strange. Staring out of a hotel window in São Paulo, my eye was caught by an oversized digital display crowning the top of an undersized skyscraper. Steadily flashing the time, then the temperature, the display was incongruous in a way that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. More [HERE]
We have long advocated that street art and Graffiti are a particularly potent force for public dialogue about issues facing our urban spaces. A recent post on Arrested Motion on the interaction between Pixadores and commercial street artists in Sao Paolo helps prove the point. According to the post, some Paolistas are angry that the city is funding beautification projects while the cities poor are overlooked. Taking this issue to the streets they defaced a city funded mural project with the following sentence. “R$ 200,000 in makeup, and the city is in calamity.” In doing so they have created an important dialogue about who the city looks after in a very visible way. Sadly their commentary was removed immediately as it was clearly not to the cities liking. I do hate to see such beautiful work buffed like this but I am happy to see that conversations through public works continue to push important social issues.
Proving that tensions between graffiti artists and street artists are not just a phenomena of the western world (see banksy vs. robbo),Pixacao artists in Sao Paulo have defaced a mural by Os Gemeos, NUNCA, NINA, Finok, and Zefix. They are probably angry that the mayor of Sao Paulo, after creating the project “Clean City” in 2006 (which erased much of the illegal graffiti) is using public funds for commissioning legal writers and famous street artists. This all at a time when the government is perceived by them as doing nothing to help the poor communities that were flooded after 30 days of non-stop rain, yet the mural was all cleaned in the same night, by a huge team of City Hall by using sponges and hydraulic cranes. [More Here]
It isn't news that Sao Paulo has been outdoor ad free since 2007. What I found interesting is that surveys had found an incredibly agreeable public.
"While advertisers weren’t too happy about the law – $8 million in fines were levied against those who dawdled in taking ads down, and Clear Channel launched an unsuccessful campaign to raise support for putting them back up – the citizens clearly approve. Surveys found that at least 70% are happy with the change."
Outdoor advertising is so ubiquitous in almost every urban setting around the world, it’s difficult to walk down a street, take an escalator or sit on a bench without getting slapped in the face with one product or another. But the city of São Paulo, Brazil is like an advertising ghost town: all of its billboards stand oddly blank and empty. [Full Article]
Sao Paulo banned all outdoor advertising in 2007 on the understanding that getting rid of the commercial blight was in "the highest degree of public interest, seeking as it does to promote the public good essential for a better quality of urban life".
Sao Paulo has banned billboards, and residents are using a hotline set up by the Mayor to report any and all offenders
By Hugh O'Shaughnessy
Sunday, 8 November 2009
Stealthily, cleverly, implacably, the officials of Sao Paulo – its 20 million inhabitants make it one of the world's largest cities – are after their prey. Since the first day of 2007, morning, noon, night and at weekends, Argus-eyed, they wait and watch for it on foot and in their vehicles. Their weapon is the Lei Cidade Limpa, the Clean City Law. [MORE]
Last week a law was passed in Brazil legalizing graffiti. But this doesn’t mean exactly what you may think. In Brazil, “graffiti” (grafite in Portuguese) refers not so much to the entire hip hop tradition of writing, but more specifically to colorful pieces, characters, abstractions, and other painted street art. In everyday speech, it’s often contrasted against pichação, which is Brazil’s home-grown style of tagging, so named because its first practicioners used tar (piche) stolen from construction sites. The semantic distinction echoes a sentiment I often hear here in the US: “I like the artistic stuff, but not, you know, those ugly scribbles.”
This distinction is part of what’s being put into law. What’s interesting about this law is that it appears to recognize the artistic and cultural value of the graffiti itself, not just the monetary value of the property it’s painted on. How will this play out in practice, I wonder?
Props and muito obrigado to Raquel Rabbit for the link, and for helping me out with the subtleties of Brazilian Portuguese. Read on for my poor (but better than Google’s) English translation of the first article above:
Author of the draft law 706/07, which decriminalizes graffiti, Mr. Geraldo Magela (Workers’ Party, Federal District) yet ruled on the request of the groups, Task Force FT Cruz and Recanto das Emas Crew who asked the mayor, Mr Arlindo Chinaglia (Workers’ Party, São Paulo) that the project be voted on as soon as possible.
Magela wants to see achieved this dream of young people connected to graffiti and recalls the need to separate grafite (graffiti) from what is a crime, pichação (tagging). “Graffiti is one of the elements of great importance for the Hip-Hop movement, whose actions raise the consciousness of many young people today,” he said.
The proposition amends Article 65 of Federal Law 9.605/98, which provides for punishment, without distinction, for whoever tags, paints graffiti on, or by other means harms facades of buildings or city monuments. In drafting proposed by Magela, the punishment will be increased in the case of crime against monuments that have landmark status due to their artistic value. Manufacturers of spray paint will have 180 days after the sanction of the bill to make changes in packaging, indicating the sale only for people over 18 years.
Another important point is the distinction Magela makes between tagging and graffiti. Graffiti will be recognized as “artistic expression” that seeks to enhance public or private property, as long as it’s done with the consent of the property owner, explained Magela.
I've wanted to make a comment on the Sao Paolo decision to ban all outdoor advertising all the way up to the goodyear blimp for some time. Searching the decision I found this interview with a Paolista reporter about that says some really compelling things about what happened after the billboards came down.
BOB GARFIELD: On January 1st, 2007, a funny thing happened in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The city of approximately eleven million people, South America's largest, awoke to find a ban on public advertising. Every billboard, every neon sign, every bus kiosk ad and even the Goodyear blimp were suddenly illegal.
The ban on what the mayor calls "visual pollution" was the culmination of a long battle between the city's politicians and the advertising industry, which had blanketed Brazil's economic capital with all manner of billboards, both legal and illegal. Within months, the city has gone from a Blade Runner-like vision of the future to a reclaimed past.
Vinicius Galvao is reporter for Folha de Sao Paulo, Brazil's largest newspaper, and he joins us now. Vinicius, welcome to the show.
VINICIUS GALVAO: Oh, thank you. I appreciate it. It's my pleasure.
BOB GARFIELD: I've seen photos of the city, and it's amazing to see this sprawling metropolis completely devoid of signage, completely devoid of logos and bright lights and so forth. What did Sao Paulo look like up until the ban took place.
VINICIUS GALVAO: Sao Paulo's a very vertical city. That makes it very frenetic. You couldn't even realize the architecture of the old buildings, because all the buildings, all the houses were just covered with billboards and logos and propaganda. And there was no criteria.
And now it's amazing. They uncovered a lot of problems the city had that we never realized. For example, there are some favelas, which are the shantytowns. I wrote a big story in my newspaper today that in a lot of parts of the city we never realized there was a big shantytown. People were shocked because they never saw that before, just because there were a lot of billboards covering the area.
BOB GARFIELD: No writer could have [LAUGHING] come up with a more vivid metaphor. What else has been discovered as the scales have fallen off of the city's eyes?
VINICIUS GALVAO: Sao Paulo's just like New York. It's a very international city. We have the Japanese neighborhood, we have the Korean neighborhood, we have the Italian neighborhood and in the Korean neighborhood, they have a lot of small manufacturers, these Korean businessmen. They hire illegal labor from Bolivian immigrants.
And there was a lot of billboards in front of these manufacturers' shops. And when they uncovered, we could see through the window a lot of Bolivian people like sleeping and working at the same place. They earn money, just enough for food. So it's a lot of social problem that was uncovered where the city was shocked at this news.
BOB GARFIELD: I want to ask you about the cultural life of the city, because, like them or not, billboards and logos and bright lights create some of the vibrancy that a city has to offer. Isn't it weird walking through the streets with all of those images just absent?
VINICIUS GALVAO: No. It's weird, because you get lost, so you don't have any references any more. That's what I realized as a citizen. My reference was a big Panasonic billboard. But now my reference is art deco building that was covered through this Panasonic. So you start getting new references in the city. The city's got now new language, a new identity.
BOB GARFIELD: Well, cleaning up the city's all well and good, but how do businesses announce to the public that they're open for business?
VINICIUS GALVAO: That was the first response the shop owners found for this law, because the law bans billboards and also even the windows should be clean. Big banks, like Citibank, and big stores, like Dolce and Gabbana, they started painting themselves with very strong colors, like yellow, red, deep blue, and creating like visual patterns to associate the brand to that pattern or to that color.
For example, Citibank's color is blue. They're painting the building in very strong blue so people can see that from far away and they can make an association with that deep blue and Citibank.
BOB GARFIELD: Now, the city has said, having undertaken this effort, it will eventually create zones where some outdoor advertising will be permitted. Do you expect Sao Paulo eventually to just revert to its previous clutter?
VINICIUS GALVAO: Not to revert to previous clutter, but I think like very specific zones, I think they're going to isolate the electronic billboards in those areas, in the financial center. I don't think they should put those in residential areas as we had before.
BOB GARFIELD: Now, the advertising industry is obviously not happy about this. They're complaining that they're deprived of free speech and that it's costing them jobs and revenue. But is there anyone else in Sao Paulo who's unhappy about this? Tell me about the public at large. What's their view?
VINICIUS GALVAO: It's amazing, because people on the streets are strongly supporting that. The owner of the buildings, even if they have to renovate a building, they're strongly supporting that. It's a massive campaign to improve the city. The advertisers, they complain, but they’re agreeing with the ban. What they say is that we should have created criteria for that to organize the chaos.
BOB GARFIELD: Vinicius, thank you very much for joining us.
VINICIUS GALVAO: Thank you so much.BOB GARFIELD: Vinicius Galvao is a reporter for Folha de Sao Paulo.
