The sun burns from the sky.
A man kneels on the sidewalk, leans forward, bangs his head
versus
the ground, again and again.
Next to him is a box of white cleaning rags.
"God, please help me," he pleads, "I'm not selling anything, absolutely nothing." He sobs;
his forehead hits the cobblestone.
It's lunchtime in central São Paulo.
People weave their way between cars that are stuck in traffic, offering chewing gum or handkerchiefs.
Children hold up cardboard signs to motorists that say “Fome”, meaning hunger.
"São Paulo is to Latin America what Rome was to empire," says another man.
He sinks into a velvet sofa inside a palace, with a Picasso hanging on the wall.
In the kitchen, a cook prepares shrimp and duck.
Nelson Wilians owns one of the continent's largest law firms, and his wife Anne runs the charity division.
Without bodyguards, the couple can hardly go out on the street.
But that doesn't bother him.
»I love the city with all its virtues and vices.«
With more than 22 million inhabitants, São Paulo is the largest metropolis in the southern hemisphere, the richest in Latin America - and one of the most unequal in the world.
Hardly anywhere else do misery and luxury exist in such monstrous simultaneity, and the desperation of the poor and the aloofness of the rich collide so brutally.
Thousands of multimillionaires live in São Paulo.
Life expectancy in the rich, white Pinheiros is more than 80 years, compared to just 58 in the poorest, black neighborhoods. The wealthy Paulistas like to call it the New York of the southern hemisphere.
For the poorer, the city is a relentless monster that threatens to devour them at any moment.
The helicopters take off in São Paulo every minute.
The city is said to have the largest private fleet of helicopters in the world for those important people who need to get from A to B quickly.
Star restaurants are close to the leafy villa districts, where the streets are called Alemanha, Luxemburgo and Áustria, Bentleys and Rolls-Royce drive around.
You hardly see the white people who live here, only the security guards who wait in small huts in front of meter-high walls, and black staff in copper-colored, shiny brushed work clothes
running labradors.
From time to time a delivery boy comes by, wearing flip-flops and riding a rented bike, delivering what is probably his weekly wages worth of food.
São Paulo is a dystopia, the society here has failed to enable everyone to live in dignity.
She overcomes the resulting dissonance through radical dehumanization.
The Catholic priest Júlio Lancellotti, an icon of the marginalized, speaks of »aporophobia«, a phobia, a hatred of the poor could.
Can such a perverse place be transformed into a city worth living in for everyone?
Paraisópolis, the favela next door
At about six years old, Ester Carro, a little girl with curly black hair, began to look out the window and feel that pain.
It was the window of a small house with a corrugated iron roof.
It was dark inside, the walls were unplastered, there were bugs, she says.
She could hear the rats digging in the piles of garbage outside.
During the summer rainy season, she was afraid of water coming through the holey ceiling.
Again and again the heavy rain in the favela tore away houses.
When she opened the window and looked out, she saw a different world, high-rise buildings, safe and clean, with large windows and balconies.
The people there had swimming pools, tennis courts and gardens.
Sometimes, when she came home from school or before falling asleep, the girl imagined what it would be like to live in this other world.
Then she became sad.
And angry.
Ester Carro is 27 years old today.
She still lives in Jardim Colombo, a community in the illegally built slum of Paraisópolis, right next to rich Morumbi with its gated communities and glass office towers.
By the time she was 12, Carro was reading architecture magazines her grandmother brought home from cleaning for a wealthy woman.
For her studies, friends and acquaintances of her father, who has been campaigning for the rights of the community for years, got together.
Carro became an architect and founded an organization that teaches Paraisopolis residents how to remodel their homes to keep them safe.
She shows photos on her mobile phone of black, moldy walls that they tiled white together.
"Everyone here wants to make it out," she says, "I can't blame them." Nevertheless, she went a different way: she made it – and stayed anyway.
Down at the entrance to the favela, two excavators from the city administration are digging next to a stinking pool, a success of her father.
"After 15 years of fighting, we're getting a sewage pipe," says Carro.
She sits on a staircase made of brightly painted tires at the foot of a slope amidst the rectangular houses and narrow streets.
The free area of about 1000
square meters, she calls the first park in the favela, "the little farm," her biggest project.
Debris is still lying in the grass, a few plastic tubes in which cocaine was transported.
Someone planted watermelons and bananas.
The area used to be a rubbish dump, organic waste piled up meters high
Waste next to old mattresses and plastic.
Carro convinced the city council to take away a total of 100 truckloads of garbage.
"The smell is gone," she says and smiles.
But she has much more in mind: she finally wants to build a children's playground here, a climbing wall and a communal vegetable garden.
To do this, she needs permission from the city that owns the land.
She has been auditioning there for more than three years, so far without success.
The center as a democratic place
At the end of the 19th century, São Paulo was a city with around 200,000 inhabitants and picturesque colonial-style houses.
More than two million people lived here in the 1950s.
In the 1960s and 1970s the city began to grow like an ulcer, rapidly, uncontrollably and exponentially.
Today, large parts of it resemble a concrete desert of high-rise buildings, stinking rivers and multi-lane elevated roads, so-called viaducts, which stretch through the city like the tentacles of a giant octopus, but without any logical connections to one another, resulting in daily traffic chaos.
Fernanda Barbara, 55, is standing on a concreted area in the city center, surrounded by viaducts. It smells of urine, garbage and exhaust fumes.
Dozens of families settle under a viaduct;
Laundry dries in the sun.
Parents with children cook meat scraps over fires, burn garbage.
These are images reminiscent of refugee camps in war zones.
"As city planners, we have to believe that there is a way," says Barbara.
She has big plans here, the area should become green again, like in the 1950s.
The construction of a cultural center has already begun.
"We want to move that bus station over there, that scar in the middle of the city," she explains.
She wants to tunnel under the viaducts or shut them down completely, "redirect traffic in a sensible way."
Although Barbara also designs villas, she has set up her office in the run-down heart of the city, for her location is a kind of key to transformation.
"The historical center is democratic and inclusive, many poor people live here," she says.
Barbara's project, called Park Dom Pedro II, is approved, but she knows that doesn't mean much.
The city has already approved many projects that were then dropped again because of a lack of money or simply the will - such as the conversion of Avenida Paulista, an almost iconic ugly car and shopping street, into a green pedestrian zone.
The construction of a new subway line was recently delayed when the company digged through the sewage system and literally flooded the shaft with shit.
"In São Paulo there has never been any consistent urban development," says Barbara, "instead they operate in a constant emergency mode, repairs are made where there is a fire." She walks over a bridge in the direction of the historic market hall, with a canal below it with polluted, brownish water with garbage floating in it.
"But the biggest obstacle to the transformation of São Paulo is the blatant inequality," says Barbara.
Without the problems of the periphery
to solve, the city can never really become healthy and worth living in, for anyone.
It is estimated that almost half of the people in the metropolitan area of São Paulo live in precarious housing conditions, with millions without access to sewage systems and in designated nature reserves.
Every day of the week they commute from the infrastructure-poor favelas on the outskirts to the central districts, where there is money to be made.
São Paulo is one of the most polluted cities in the world.
The environmental damage is so great that even the isolation of the rich, their flight to penthouses and helicopters, is reaching its limits.
It's hard to escape from an ecosystem.
The New York of the South
It's quiet in the Jardim Europa district.
Trees line the streets.
Security guards in black suits with walkie-talkies guard the three-story mansion.
The half-open garage door reveals a collection of luxury cars.
A naked man lolls in the lobby, a larger-than-life statue of Rodin.
Her make-up artist has just finished, Anne Wilians will be receiving guests this evening;
the table is already set.
Wilians, flawless skin, indefinable age, takes a seat in the hall.
An attendant pulls up a small cart and serves freshly squeezed cupuaçu fruit juice.
The daughter of an entrepreneur always knew that she belonged here and not in Belém in Pará.
»I told my father when I was five that I wanted to go to São Paulo.« For her, the city is a place of opportunities and networks, a »pioneer«.
Things happened here and they happened fast.
She gets up early, works a lot, but she loves that, the beat.
"It's crazy," she says.
Then she adds: "I'm not the only one who thinks that, everyone says that."
Wilians is a mother of three young children and president of the Instituto Nelson Wilians, a kind of foundation that belongs to her husband's law firm of the same name, one of the largest in Latin America.
She talks a lot about »human rights« and sees herself as a »social worker«.
Someone hacked her Instagram account that night.
She needs to call tech.
Instagram is also a big topic for the Wilians, they regularly post family pictures there, their vacations on luxury islands, celebrate their love with large diamond rings.
They hired a photographer for it.
Because the couple flaunts their wealth so aggressively on the platform, the São Paulo State Bar Association has already sent a warning, which they have since carefully ignored.
"I've got the houses, the cars, the helicopter and the private plane," says Nelson Wilians, who has just returned home. "People want to know how I live." He compares himself to a firefly, that of a snake will be persecuted - because they disturb its shine.
Then he laughs and thinks it doesn't really matter, he has a huge fan base.
Coming from a rural and poor background, Wilians has worked his way up.
"I didn't like working in the fields." When he was eleven, he came across a Marvel comic, the character Daredevil, a lawyer who he thought resembled him.
"I used to have hair," says Wilians and laughs out loud again.
As a result, he read a lot, studied, worked hard and slept little, he says.
Today, Nelson Wilians Advogados has 25,000 clients, including many international companies;
450,000 lawsuits are currently being conducted, he says.
"He's hyperactive," says his wife.
A moment ago, Wilians was in the center.
He likes cities, the bigger the better.
Crime and violence are all part of the package.
Poverty is sad, yes.
He has more empathy than others, after all he knows what it means to be poor.
He quotes - in a modified form - Machiavelli, only a beggar can understand a beggar and only a prince can know how a prince thinks.
He knows both.
But he can't solve all the problems in the world.
As a farewell, Nelson Wilians hands over a gift bag containing Nelson Wilians in the form of a small statue and a comic about the history of law, in which Nelson Wilians also plays an important role alongside Ramses II, Moses and Voltaire.
He had them printed in the country's two largest daily newspapers.
Anne Wilians asks not to be described as an it girl.
Periphery and Rebellion
When Jânio goes out at night, he wears black.
He pulls his hoodie up from his chin to over his nose, he wears a baseball cap on his head, so he's no longer afraid of the surveillance cameras.
With his colleagues, he climbs buildings, scales motorway bridges, climbs into apartment buildings and leaves his signature in a kind of secret language in huge letters at lightning speed.
Sometimes he bribes security guards with pizza and beer, sometimes he injures himself on broken glass that homeowners have strewn on walls, then again he leans from roofs dozens of meters unsecured
above the ground.
Jânio, whose real name is known to the editors, grew up on the outskirts of western São Paulo.
He only saw his single mother on Mondays, every other day
she had to go to work to support the family, he says.
Jânio started with Pixo as a nine-year-old boy, and as a teenager relatives had to pick him up from the police station all the time.
He was once sentenced to six months of community work.
Jânio is now 46, sits on a skate park and smokes.
"Once a Pixador, always a Pixador," he says.
He used to paint everything, now he's more selective, it's all about quality.
Pixo, as he understands it, is rebellion, defending the periphery against being forgotten: »We have no security here, no good health care or education.
Your son can become addicted to drugs, shot by the police or your daughter raped by the neighbor at any time.
You can't enjoy your life.«
The "playboys" in Jardins or Pinheiros would look down on people like him, think they're better off in their fancy, bulletproof cars.
"We want to show them that we can outsmart their system," says Jânio.
All the security services, walls, cameras and electric fences were of no use to them.
"We warn them that we could fuck their lives, but we won't do it."
Pixadores hit a sensitive nerve: In São Paulo, people hardly dare to honk their horns even in the worst traffic jams - because you could get caught in the wrong person and be shot.
Although the murder rate has fallen dramatically in the past 20 years, many parts of the middle class are considered safe, at least during daylight hours – if you disregard smaller raids to steal cell phones.
There is a kind of Pax Mafiosa, due to the fact that a single gang dominates the city, the Primeiro Comando da Capital.
But the fear of the past is still in people's bones.
And it's that fear that the Pixadores play with.
"We want respect, want to be seen," says Jânio.
"I want them to know we're still breathing."
Ciudade Matarazzo, the utopia
The armchairs are made of dark tropical wood and caramel-colored leather, and natural crystals and wine bottles stand on the shelves.
All guests are white.
Ladies with expensive handbags and faces drink coffee to soft piano music.
Madeleines are served under small glass hoods.
The terrace opens into a green palm garden.
The menu includes 125 grams of caviar for 4,600 real, four times the monthly minimum wage.
The bathrooms on the ground floor of the new Rosewood luxury hotel "Ciudade Matarazzo" are lined with Brazilian marble.
Alexandre Allard, 53, billionaire, creator of this total work of art, strokes a plate.
The French team visited more than 100 different locations in Brazil for this optic.
"An incredibly high quality," says Allarde.
"It drives people crazy because they always thought they had to import their marble from Europe."
Allard leads via elevators, which he had artist Walmor Corrêa to paint with hallucinogenic mushrooms and aphrodisiac plants, through another restaurant, where framed indigenous feather headdresses and weapons from various Amazon tribes hang on the walls, to a turquoise-blue infinity pool on the roof where he reveals his plan: to show the Brazilians how great they actually are.
Or, in his words: »To change the energy.«
For Allard, Brazil is a country of the future, the country with the greatest biodiversity in the world, with immense fresh water deposits, Amazonia as a CO₂ storage facility, inevitably soon the leading green economy on the planet.
São Paulo, the most diverse of all cities, a place of creativity, the state with a gross domestic product almost twice that of Hong Kong - and yet everything goes wrong: "This city is a perfect example of the aberrations of our society," says Allard , »we destroyed everything and now we are destroying humanity by acting completely stupid.«
For more than 500 years, Brazil has not recognized where its own inestimable value lies, exploiting instead of preserving, denying its own cultural roots.
Allard thinks that's why people hate each other inside.
»São Paulo is the fourth largest city in the world and nobody here talks about their own culture.
That would be unthinkable in London, Paris or New York.«
Allard, who created the consumer database Consodata almost 30 years ago and later sold it for 500 million euros, never thought small.
At the same time, he subversively confronts them with, for example, a huge, golden sword of Damocles by the artist Artur Lescher hanging from the ceiling, or the »Small Guide to Racism«, a book by the Afro-Brazilian philosopher Djamila Ribeiro, which he had laid out in all the rooms .
"People steal it all the time," he says with a grin.
Allard points to a vine-twined concrete building designed by architect Rudy Ricciotti, which he named after the herbal drug ayahuasca.
"Ayahuasca is what indigenous people use to connect with Mother Nature, and that's what we all need," he says.
"AYA" is to become a co-working space in which green technology companies and NGOs will settle, so that "soon no one in this country will be able to cut down a single tree without consequence: they will never be able to borrow money from a bank again".
Third, Allard is planning some sort of training center on the site, where he spends nearly a million every month
welcome normal Brazilians and bring them closer to a sustainable lifestyle.
He dreams of »a place of empathy where everyone can meet«.
Allard wants to create the opposite of São Paulo in São Paulo.
The homeless on nearby Avenida Paulista could be over Allards
Sentence, according to which the most beautiful things in life, such as a smile or a sunset, are free anyway, just shake your head tiredly.
In winter they sometimes freeze to death, because the weather in São Paulo is also extreme.
But even if the boundaries between vision and self-promotion are fluid at Allard, he has recognized that São Paulo is a key location of transformation whose importance extends far beyond the city limits.
A place worth looking at, investing in and fighting for.
As do favela architect Ester Carro, priest Julio Lancellotti and urban developer Fernanda Barbara.
São Paulo is the actual center of Brazil. The fate of the country, of the Amazon, some would say the global climate, depends on the city.
If change can succeed here, then everywhere.
Collaboration: Letícia Bilard
This contribution is part of the Global Society project
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