Professor Felipe Correa – São Paulo

Caitlin Morrissey 

Felipe, what do you see as being the DNA of São Paulo?

Felipe Correa 

Great. Well, thank you to both of you for having me here, and I’ll delve directly into the subject. For me, the DNA of São Paulo lies in its inherently kaleidoscopic quality. If you really look at São Paulo, it’s a city that has never had a major or dominant regularising plan at least not in throughout the 20th Century, 20th and 21st Century, the era of greatest growth for the city, which means that the city primarily grew through the aggregation of agricultural villages that became this very large tapestry of urbanisation. These villages, because of the way that infrastructure was built, have always been separated. These culturally affluent villages have always been separated by either major highways, rivers or channelised rivers, roads, giving them a certain degree of autonomy to develop their own identity. And for me, the greatest strength of São Paulo lies in the cultural value of these fragments. One might resemble Mumbai, the other one might resemble Milan, none might resemble what you would think São Paulo is but at the end this kind of 20th Century set of invisible cities is what, for me, gives São Paulo an incredibly pluralistic set of identities, and where its DNA resides.

Caitlin Morrissey 

What a terrific way to get us going Felipe. That brings me on to the next question then, which is, how many different São Paulos are there? Because you’ve begun to describe a few. But is there anything else you’d like to say about what makes São Paulo São Paulo?

Felipe Correa 

I think there are many different São Paulos. I think as many as you might be willing to experience. In a city, right, that in the 1860s had a population of approximately 40,000 people and today is a metropolitan region close to 25 million people, right? So it went from being a-- I always say it went from being a large American university campus to being one of the largest metropolitan regions in the world. And for me, in this massive growth throughout the course of 120 years you can find pretty much every form of urbanism. It’s sort of a Noah’s Ark of urbanism. You will always find two of anything.

Greg Clark 

Let me come in with a question there, Felipe, if I may. I love this idea of a ‘Noah’s Ark of urbanism’, I hope you’ve already trademarked that idea. But given all of this pluralism that you’ve described, this amazing diversity, is there a tapestry? Is there a mosaic here? Is there something that unifies this huge diversity and heterogeneity as you see it?

Felipe Correa 

I actually think there is. And to explain what unifies São Paulo, I think it’s important to also explain the fact that São Paulo is not a centre-based city. It is a nodal city. It is a city that grew at the intersection of two major axes, one east-west, that connected the resource-rich interior of the state of São Paulo with the port of Santos, connecting those resources to global markets, and another one north-south that connected the cities along the coast with sort of the old capital of Brazil, Rio de Janeiro. And I think this nodal condition became the ideal point for many different social groups with a mindset of progress to come together. To come together and develop a singular vision of urban prosperity. I think what ties all of this tapestry together is a certain ambition that sort of says that no matter where you’re coming from, the city will open a better and more prosperous future. And I think that that’s condition that São Paulo has that is very unique to the city. You feel a sense of optimism, regardless of how luxurious or precarious the conditions, the urban conditions, might be.

Caitlin Morrissey 

Can I just ask Felipe, are there any antecedents to that sense of progress and ambition in São Paulo’s history? Or is this something current? Where can we understand that sort of mindset has sort of come from?

Felipe Correa 

No, I think that this is actually something that is primarily historic and has sustained over time. I think a lot of it, for me, has to do with this notion of a city that emerges at the crossroads but also a city in a region that put a lot of investment in different forms of infrastructure to guarantee its success. Perhaps one of the most important ones was the transformation of the southern Paraná River in the state of São Paulo, and farther south, into a major hydroelectric Eden in the 1940s, a project very similar and modelled after the TVA, the Tennessee Valley Authority in the United States. The transformation of these rivers into hydroelectric Eden provided a steady source of energy to the city of São Paulo that gave confidence to industrialists to invest in manufacturing. And this is what actually transforms a town that was primarily driven by coffee growers into what became the industrial capital of South America that later became the financial services capital of South America. If you really think about it today, if the São Paulo metropolitan region would be a country, it would be the third country of Latin America after Brazil and Mexico. That is the magnitude and scale of the metropolitan region that we’re speaking about.

Greg Clark 

Felipe, your answers are absolutely fantastic, thank you. I want to ask you, was this transition from this clear kind of cross that you’ve described, this realisation of opportunity, was this a consciously and intentionally constructed project at certain times? Or was this, in a sense, accidental and incremental? Were there key moments like the, you know, the hydroelectricity? Did somebody have this in mind, that by doing this, they would create the potential for a huge city of global significance, or was that just a consequence of other things?

Felipe Correa 

I mean, the intersection is a consequence of geography, the east-west axis. That directionality happens at the point where the Serra do Mar, right, the mountains along the eastern edge of São Paulo are at its weakest. So it was the easiest spot to cut through the mountain to build a road and rail that would actually connect the upper plateau with the port along the coast. But that intersection has been picked up by many different visions for the city. Perhaps the most important one from the 1930s by Le Corbusier, where he actually used to develop cities at intersections with buildings above highways and so on everywhere. But in the case of São Paulo, it made sense. I think, the other point that I’ll make here, which, I think, is quite powerful about Le Corbusier’s vision, which is really a sketch, right? It’s not an incredibly developed plan. But something that, for me, is quite intriguing, more important than the intersection, is that if you actually look at Le Corbusier’s plans the rivers remain free flowing. He never channelises the rivers. Of course, São Paulo did exactly the opposite and that has raised a lot of the challenges that we’re seeing today in the 21st Century.

Caitlin Morrissey 

Thank you so much, Felipe. So, you mentioned there there’s a mindset you can read in São Paulo – this mindset of progress. It sort of brings me on to the question of who lives in São Paulo and perhaps your understanding about why they live there, what draws people to it?

Felipe Correa 

I think that is actually a fascinating question because all cities are cities of immigrants. All cities have sort of a certain amount of immigration. But I would say that São Paulo is, at a greater scale, a city of immigrants and a city of very proud immigrants. And through different periods of time, all the way from sort of Brazilians that came from the north to a very strong Italian immigration, to a very strong Japanese immigration, to a very large Lebanese community. You actually have this palimpsest of global cultures that over time have been very important in the DNA of the city. I think this paired with the fact that São Paulo has never really been a major capital of anything, right? Yes, it is the capital of the state, but opposite to Mexico City, for example, that has always been regal. It’s always been the capital of an empire. São Paulo has primarily been a city of immigrants that became industrialists, and these industrialists over time are extremely proud of the city that they actually produced and very cautious and interested in the city that their grandchildren will inherit. And I think this relationship between ambition and pride from industrialist groups has always been very important in the way the city has been sort of shaped and advanced forward.

Caitlin Morrissey 

You’re right, I think that this question is particularly resonant in São Paulo when you think about just how large some of its immigrant communities are. And you’ve begun to talk about location and geological features and geographical features, is there anything else you’d wish to say about climatic features? Anything else in terms of the environment, of where the city is that has shaped it and is important to understand in terms of the way it’s evolved and its DNA?

Felipe Correa 

Yes, I think that this is a very important point, which is that there are many ways that we can understand any city. There are an infinite number of ways that we can look at and understand São Paulo. But if we had to only choose one, if you pressed me here and said, you know, ‘you can only give me one way of understanding, São Paulo’, it would have to be through a hydrological lens. Just think about this. This is a city that’s approximately 100 kilometres from the Atlantic, but it actually receives all of its potable water from the east and drains to the west through the Paraná and through to the River Plata in Buenos Aires in Argentina. So hydrology and the way that water has shaped the city is extremely instrumental and this is directly tied to the growth of the city. Throughout the 1900s, throughout the 20th Century, the city of São Paulo as industry was growing embarked in a very important transformative project called the Rectification of the Rivers. And this actually meant transforming the Tietê and the Pinheiros rivers, which were free flowing floodplains, into a very tight, channelised figure to be able to dry land adjacent to it for the sake of industry, for the sake of industrial growth. Obviously, throughout the course of 100 years, this area did not only produce industrial land. It is the place where the first affordable housing projects for immigrants were constructed, where institutes and facilities that received migrants that are now museums were placed. So along this industrial landscape, a very important working-class landscape emerged that today is actually quite valuable and has to be preserved. Of all the cities in the world today, São Paulo has the greatest amount of inner-city post-industrial land. There’s no other city that has more vacant inner-city land than São Paulo, right? And part of the project that we were dealing with, and that is documented in this book, looks not only as to what to do with this post-industrial land, but also understand that this land and this industry plays a very important role in the evolution of the history and that this role has to be preserved.

The last thing I’ll say about hydrology is that, as we all know, the solutions of yesterday are the challenges of today. And in the same way that the solutions that we’re thinking about today will be the challenges in 50, 100 years, and the better the urban project is, the greater longevity that it has. Today, the rectification of the river and the straight jacket that was put upon it is the biggest challenge for the city. How do you transform that river, not purely from a recreational perspective, but from a hydrological perspective? The city can no longer deal with the amount of stormwater management, stormwater sort of volumes that it receives along its centre, and only a more-- the city cannot afford to build the tension basins in the way that they’ve been built throughout the 20th Century within this area, just the cost of land makes it prohibitive. So only a comprehensive urban vision that gives a new lease on life to the river can actually allow the city to have the hydrological project it needs for the 21st Century.

Greg Clark 

Felipe, if I may firstly congratulate you on a wonderful thesis. Let me just check I understood. So you’re saying that the natural endowment of water is the single most important element in the São Paulo context and that this has a number of enabling effects. On the one hand, it enabled, of course, potable water to be created or to be utilised, enabling settlements and agriculture and everything else. But eventually, it enables industrialisation and it enables a new energy system to be created which hugely increases the carrying capacity of the area which allows for major population growth and for migration. And then we get these twin or triple engines of migration and industrialisation and infrastructure, coupled with this natural energy supply that induces this big process of growth. And then you’re saying there’s a kind of a full circle dynamic here, where in order for the city now to replenish itself, it’s got to go back to the water and fix the water system all over again. If you like, the water is the kryptonite of the city in the way you’ve described it. Is that broadly right?

Felipe Correa 

Yes, that is exactly right. If I were to summarise my thesis it’s that throughout the 20th Century, the city had a very utilitarian view of water at the river, it was put to the service of something. In the 21st Century, it should have a more romantic one and make it part of the life of the city again, both through recreation, but also through larger ecological strategies.

Caitlin Morrissey 

We’ve been we’ve been talking about infrastructure, but I wonder if there’s anything you’d like to say about transport infrastructure in São Paulo, and how we can understand the DNA of the city, or the spatial patterning of the city, or the social sort of fabric of the city, through the way that people move around it?

Felipe Correa 

That’s actually a fascinating point that brings us back to water, by the way. Unfortunately, we cannot move beyond the water topic. And the reason I say that is because if you actually look at-- and this is drawn in the book, at the level of the neighbourhood, São Paulo actually has a very interesting system of local grids and urban blocks, but that grid system is extremely discontinuous at an intermediate and large and metropolitan scale, and that discontinuity primarily has been sort of compensated by large-scale viaducts and highways that followed the geometry of the rivers that made up the city, right? So part of the rectification project of the river, or maybe a little bit later, also involved the channelising of secondary and tertiary rivers and building roads on top of them. So today, there’s a very important project that might rethink daylighting streams. Giving them greater, not greater capacity, but greater flexibility in how water moves and in doing that, be able to move from a system that’s primarily driven by arterial spines into a more continuous and distributive grid. A project that would have to happen gradually over time and that it’s complicated to implement. But today, we’re seeing in cities all over the world that distributed systems are much more effective than spine systems and I would advocate for that in a city like São Paulo.

Caitlin Morrissey 

And coming now on to São Paulo and its role in Brazil, but also the region, the world, so what role does São Paulo play? How is it distinctive to other cities in its urban system, however, you sort of interpret that?

Felipe Correa 

Right. That is a very interesting question for me, because for me, São Paulo and Mexico City are two cities that couldn’t be any more different but they do share one particular characteristic that I find very powerful which is that they both, despite all the precariousness and extreme poverty that both cities have, overall they have been able to build a solid middle-class like no other Latin American city has. So you do have a middle-class that has access to theatre that is quite amazing in Mexico City, and it also happens in São Paulo. It has access to certain services that I think, for me, show a degree of, as I mentioned before, urban prosperity that is quite unique and quite powerful. And I think for me, the best example for this is to understand the SESC program. Many of you might understand or might know the SESC from the beautiful Lina Bo Bardi, project with the vertical gym, an incredible architectural masterpiece, which was the renovation of a factory in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s. But the SESC is actually a complex of approximately 40 social services campuses. This is a public private entity where it’s a Commerce Association, where any business that is part of the larger commerce of São Paulo has to pay a 1 percent, or maybe it’s even less, percent tax, so it’s privately funded. And this tax actually goes into this huge pot that manages these SESCs and then anybody that is employed or owns a business that deals with some form of commerce-- It’s a very abstract concept, right? What does not constitute commerce? There are very few things that don’t constitute commerce-- have access to these SESCs. What do these SESCs have? Recreational facilities, dental offices, doctor’s offices, daycare, curatorial programs, exhibitions, etc. And it is quite amazing to see the role that these SESCs play in providing an incredibly powerful social infrastructure in the city. One of my favourite things to do in cities, if I can convince somebody to pay for it, is to have helicopter rides. I love flying, and I love flying over cities in a helicopter. And I’ve had the opportunity to do this a couple of times in São Paulo. And one of these times, it was on a Sunday. And for me, some of the most breathtaking photographs I’ve ever taken of São Paulo is of some of the SESCs on a Sunday, where you cannot fit a pin in this landscape because it’s so packed with people and so stunningly successful as a public-private enterprise. So I think these are some of the things that São Paulo has achieved that I think make it not only a unique urban environment, but that also show very powerful lessons that São Paulo can teach the world.

Greg Clark 

Felipe, I’m absolutely fascinated by what you’ve just said. And indeed, I’ve been to São Paulo many times, and I’ve visited some of these SESCs, but I want to check my understanding with you first. So these are effectively social clubs, as I would see it, for merchants, entrepreneurs, people in the professional classes. They’re somehow subsidised by the levy that you described that the businesses pay. So it’s a little bit like a Chamber of Commerce that performs only leisure services, if I can use that language, and you’ll tell me if that’s right. And many of them seem to have a kind of an ethnic specificity. You might go to the Lebanese SESC or the Jewish SESC. Have I understood correctly what you’re talking about. Let’s just start there because then I want to ask you about social capital and about inclusion and exclusion.

Felipe Correa 

Right. I think that overall, I think your description is accurate. What these SESCs have-- I don’t think they’re just leisure, right, because they also have medical services, they have daycare, which is an incredibly important component of social services. But also, it’s not purely membership based. For example, if you have any form of disability, you’re automatically admitted. You get automatically a membership, right? So there’s a certain sense that-- the term, sort of perhaps underprivileged groups can have access to this outside of the typical sort of sponsorship model. So I think I agree with you that it is primarily private, but it is regulated by a public body, and I think it has a greater social ambition, especially in the way that they have actually evolved in the last 15 to 20 years. They generally build one or two more per year in the last 10 or 12 years.

Greg Clark 

What does it tell you about social capital then, in São Paulo, and how that is created and distributed and regenerated? And then, in your view, do the SESCs perform a kind of progressive function in enabling people who wouldn’t otherwise get access to those services or facilities to get more? Or do they, in the end, have an exclusionary aspect? How would you read that?

Felipe Correa 

I think that they’re incredibly beneficial for the social fabric of the city because they do act as a very strong social condenser. I think, obviously within ranges, but there are much more well-to-do people that are willing to go to the same SESC of people that have significantly less. And I think that that’s extremely powerful. I think there are limitations to what the SESCs do, and those limitations, for me, are very clearly geographically defined which is that most of them are within the larger, wealthier hyper-centre. If you actually go towards the periphery, and São Paulo has a very sort of strong pyramid, right? Centre, wealthy, as you go towards the periphery, significantly less affluent. I would say that both public space and the SESCs follow that pyramid.

Caitlin Morrissey 

Thank you, Felipe. I want to come on to this question now about what are São Paulo’s most world-changing inventions, innovations or discoveries? But perhaps also to expand that question, to ask if there are particular ways of governing or doing in São Paulo that you find to be worth mentioning in this context? Because I think some of what you’re describing to me across the conversation that we’ve had so far is a sense of investing in the city. I liked what you said as well about this idea that Paulistanos, certainly the immigrants, want to be seen to be active and contributing to a city that is better for their grandchildren to inherit, and that’s something I don’t think I’ve heard across the cities that we’ve looked at in terms of The DNA of Cities before, so that that feels to me very unique. And could I ask you to say a little bit more about that? But also, perhaps you’ve mentioned where that’s come from, but how else do you see that way of participating in the city emerging, I suppose?

Felipe Correa 

Yeah, I mean, for one, I think we’re talking about a city where the captains of industry are very willing to give back. And that is very clear, not only in terms of sort of some of the projects that I mentioned before, but also in the way of sort of cultural institutions that are sprinkled throughout the city. Like São Paulo really has banks with foundations that actually do a lot of great stuff for the city, that actually support the arts, like very few other cities do. So I think that there’s a direct involvement from the private sector in a way that at least I’ve never seen in any other city.

I do think there’s another aspect I think here that is extremely important, that is perhaps a little more related to my field, which is the field of architecture, which is that in a city like São Paulo public works have a very strong civic dimension. And I think that that’s extremely important for any city. That’s an incredibly powerful lesson. And perhaps my most favourite space in the city, or one of my most favourite places-- there are many, I never like to choose just one. But one that I admire enormously is the Centro Cultural São Paulo. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, but it’s a beautiful cultural centre built as a library in the 1970s. Originally, this was a residual piece of land between a highway and a major avenue where one of the subway lines went by. And at this particular point, they couldn’t tunnel. It had to be cut and cover. So they had cut, put in the subway line and then just left this little residual space. Real estate developers went crazy over this residual space and wanted to build a new downtown. This was the ‘70s, so what do you do in the ‘70s? A new downtown with mixed use office space.

The city, along with the Colégio de Arquitetos, the AIA went crazy, and they were like, ‘not on public land. This is just not happening on public land!’ and they were able to bring down that project and develop a competition for a new library. Because, of course, when you’re going to build a civic project, what do you do? A library? A park or a library. Wasn’t ideal for a park. They decided to go for a library. But the architects that actually won the competition, who had actually worked for the Pompidou Centre with Rogers, had just gone back to Brazil, and they actually proposed that it should be a library but it should be a new model of library. It should be a library without books. And the space is this incredible series of ramps in the interior built in steel, which, in 1970s, something that was not built in concrete in São Paulo was heresy. This was built in steel, with this beautiful landscape on top, which is like a beautiful public lawn, and then a series of programs where youth can go and check out film equipment, they can actually go and lease spaces for performances, their exhibitions, etc. Until this day, this is the most visited public library in the city of São Paulo. It’s up for a renovation. It’s been a while since it opened. But it is an incredibly successful space. And what I find extremely powerful is that this was not just a solution to an infrastructural problem. What do you do with a leftover space of a metro line between a highway and an avenue? It was, how do you actually give a civic dimension to the space that’s generally occupied by infrastructure? And that, for me, is an extremely powerful lesson from the city.

Caitlin Morrissey 

And who are São Paulo’s most influential leaders, as you see it? And that can be in any sphere. But there’s a follow-up question that’s sort of emerging for me based on everything that you’ve been saying, which is, is that a question that even makes sense to ask in São Paulo, or is this more of a sort of collective influence? Is this the place where you think in groups, rather than pinpointing individual leaders? What’s your sort of take on that?

Felipe Correa 

Look, I think who are the leaders of any particular sort of city is going to depend on the interests of the stakeholders that are asking the question, right? So I think that we could come with an endless list of leaders. What I would say is that São Paulo as a city has throughout its urban history confronted a lot of challenges. It’s grown very fast. It was very aggressive with the way that it primarily built monofunctional infrastructure in the 1950s / 1960s, primarily road mobility and so on. It’s also made a lot of mistakes. But at the same time, it has also developed urban fragments that are incredibly powerful and offer very powerful lessons to the world. I mean, very few people know that in 1915 Unwin and Parker actually built the first, one of the first garden city prototypes in São Paulo. In fact, Unwin lived in São Paulo for two years, I think, from 1917 to 1919 to see the development of Jardim América. In 1950 a suburb of São Paulo. Today, that garden city project can be redefined as one of the most powerful urban lungs in the middle of São Paulo. Private houses, low density, circled by a ring of high-rise towers. So I think if you also look at a project that’s extremely admired – Lina Bo Bardi’s MASP, the Museum of Art of São Paulo. Everybody always see sort of the bar with the two slab columns on the edge. But what people actually don’t know is that that building is just the top of a series of infrastructural layers that actually connect Avenida Paulista with a series of gardens with a tunnel that cuts Avenida Nove de Julho and so on, where the building actually becomes a pivotal piece of a much larger negotiation between the scales of regional mobility and the scales of-- in the human scale. And I think the ability to bring these scales together is quite a powerful lesson that we can also learn from São Paulo.

Greg Clark 

Are there particular individuals that you’d want to highlight who maybe were not elected leaders or politicians, but people whose fingerprints you see in São Paulo, people who made a difference at a certain time that you think are noteworthy from your perspective or not? You’ve already mentioned Corbusier, which I thought was very interesting. Are there others you want to highlight?

Felipe Correa 

I think that there’s a great number of figures. I mentioned Le Corbusier. I mentioned Lina Bo Bardi, which is really quite an incredible figure in the city. Generally, only architects are fascinated with other architects as much. But in the case of São Paulo, Lina Bo Bardi does have an incredible presence in the larger collective memory of the city. If you ask any taxi driver to take you to Lina Bo Bardi’s house, they’ll know where they’re going. But I think I would mention a couple of other figures that I think are important. One is Saturnino de Brito, who did one of the first projects for Parque Don Pedro II. And my pronunciation, by the way, always mixes Spanish with Portuguese, so not the best Portuguese pronunciation. But Saturnino de Brito actually produced quite a beautiful plan, a contemporary to Le Corbusier maybe a little bit earlier, that also argued for the preservation of the rivers. Really the figure, the international consultant that gets brought to São Paulo that drastically transforms the rivers is Robert Moses, who actually had a very strong presence in many cities in Latin America; Caracas, and, of course, São Paulo. So I do think that there has been, of course, a very large, sort of important set of figures that have actually shaped the city. I would just bring one more person that I think, for me, is extremely important, Fernando Haddad, who is now-- who was the Mayor of São Paulo, I think from 2013 to 2017 then ran against Bolsonaro for President, lost, and now is the current, I think, Secretary of Finance for Brazil. And the reason why I bring him up is because during his administration, he oversaw an incredible program of municipal affordable housing, not federal, not state, run by the city where I think incredibly well-designed affordable housing projects were built in extremely undervalued residual land and it was actually city centric land but terribly poorly connected to the rest of the city. And through the design strategies of these projects, they were able to give a site that had no value in the city, an incredible value in how it then linked back to the city created a new centrality. And I think for me, that opened a very powerful way of looking at the role municipalities can have in building affordable housing, which is not that common. It’s generally either at the state level or at a federal level.

Caitlin Morrissey 

We’re going to move on now Felipe, to myths and the stories that are told about the city and myths songs and what you see the essence of those myths and stories being, what they’re attempting to capture about the city.

Greg Clark 

We’re looking here for stories that you think are true, or ones you think are not true, aren’t we, Caitlin?

Caitlin Morrissey

Either or both.

Felipe Correa 

Let’s see. I was trying to think, what are some of the myths that we could come up with about São Paulo, I think for me, one that’s very powerful, and I believe this one is true, is that in the early 1900s before the hydroelectric projects of the Paraná were actually built, the city reversed the course of one of the rivers, I believe, the Pinheiros River, to be able to sort of drain the river to the Atlantic and use the difference in elevation from the plateau to the lower grounds to produce hydroelectric energy. And the reason why I think this myth is important, I believe it’s true, but it was such a heroic piece of engineering at the time that it became mythified. And the reason why this myth, I think, is important is that it created an ethos that anything was possible in the city. If we can reverse the course of the river, we sort of, it’s a very early 20th Century vision, but it’s like we can dominate nature in a way that we can achieve anything. And that, I think, gave an incredible sense of momentum to the city. I think it has also proven to be extremely problematic once things started to be-- once questions of environmental impact came into the conversation. But I think for me, a lot of the most fascinating myths that revolve around São Paulo have to do with the way that an environment can be put to work in the name of progress.

Caitlin Morrissey 

That’s fascinating. And a slightly different question, but when you are travelling, or when you’re discussing or talking about São Paulo, or, of course, the incredible book that you’ve written, do you encounter misconceptions about the city that sort of frustrate you or do you tend to find it to be a fairly well-understood city?

Felipe Correa 

No, I think there are a lot of misconceptions about São Paulo and part of it has to do with the fact that São Paulo as a city is not easily consumable. If you actually look at Rio, we have a common language that is about a city in between beach and mountain. It doesn’t matter where in Rio you are, you understand that you are in a city between a beach and a mountain. São Paulo does not have such a singular identity. And what singular identities generally do is they’re a form of type, they unify people, they give us something that’s shared among all. So I think misconceptions of São Paulo are actually abundant because you don’t have these kind of features. I think one of the strongest ones that you would see today, and one of the things that I was shocked when I was doing this work there, was that people would say, ‘Oh, São Paulo doesn’t really have rivers’. But in reality, it does. They just were completely-- nobody who’s alive today ever witnessed them, per se, or if they did, they don’t remember. So most people say, ‘Oh, we don’t really have like a river in the traditional sense that a city would have a river, like they don’t have the Seine or the Hudson’. But in reality, there’s an incredible history of water and water management that makes the notion of river much more difficult to comprehend in a city like São Paulo than in many other cities.

Caitlin Morrissey

Well, thank you Felipe. We feel very privileged to learn from you this evening, this afternoon for you in New York, what an incredible hour.

Felipe Correa

Thank you and I've enjoyed enormously the conversation.