São Paulo’s Outdoor Advertising Ban (2016)

The change made our lives worse, as due to lack of proper light, several streets became too dark and violence increased. And no, nothing change about the way we eat.

Don't US cities already have laws around this?

In Australia I can't just stick a giant billboard in front of my house or shop without local government permission

Any signs need to be in keeping with the existing streetscape and usually kept to reasonable proportions

Santa Barbara does not have outdoor advertising such as billboards and has regulations on the size of business signage (approx 12 inches tall max).

It sounds like they removed both ads AND business signs attached to the actual businesses. I can understand doing the former, but for the latter, those signs are actually useful.

When I lived in Poland before the wall came down it was just like that: gray. Then a Texaco gas station opened in the middle of Poznan, a tiny little slice of the West. A friend of mine remarked that she really hoped that the world would not change like that because it was so much color it was hard on the senses.

Nuance is hard to observe in the face of being shouted at, both views have their fans and both have a point.

Some cities would improve without advertising, others would show how bleak and gray they really are.

Maybe that just means that we need to design more beautiful cities that better integrate art and nature, rather than the facsimile of it by way of advertising and sensory overload. These ads are the city equivalent of restaurants/pubs turning on loud music for ‘ambiance’ while unintentionally ruining the experience. After a while everyone just accepts that is the norm, and then people wind up staying at home (or retreating to suburbs) thinking its the whole act of going out that is unpleasant, when it’s really just a bad pattern that was settled upon.

My sense is a city - and people - needs time to adapt to these changes, like when the volume is turned down suddenly and the restaurant takes on an entirely different vibe. It’s at least a few minutes of some adjustment of lighting and people adapting with more hushed voices for a new ambiance to stabilize.

I think São Paulo is a city that takes time to discover. The only people who like it are those who've lived there long enough to be very familiar with it...since it obviously lacks the "postcard" sights of Rio.

I lived in both cities and I loved Rio, despite its problems. I found SP to be quite boring, grey and overcrowded (save for select places like Liberdade, Ibirapuera, the former Portuguese Language Museum, Serra da Cantareira, etc), yet I always thought that if I had lived there much longer, I could have grown to really like it. There's a feeling that something pulses under the surface and you can only experience it via serendipity, word of mouth and curiosity, if that makes sense.

> I had always dreamed about a city without advertising, and couldn't wait to visit São Paulo.

Go to Lao. One of the nice feelings after crossing the border from Thailand is that you slowly realize that this visual thrash is gone.

SP was not exactly beautiful before. Most impact on landscape was not from banning models on ads, but logos and name in front of street shops.

The places you saw in SP that were boring and grey were probably boring and grey when it had ads too. But with big boards with shop names in it.

Go to my hometown, Assisi [0], which is roughly 2,400 years old. A village of ~5,000 people sitting on a hill. Home of Saint Francis of Assisi. Walk around. There's almost no advertising, and yet, it's so beautiful to walk there. It's how a city is supposed to be.

The fact is, Sao Paulo is a brutalist city, not a beautiful one. I suggest you don't confuse the two. Of course you hated Sao Paulo. It's skyscrapers, it's car-centric, it's ugly.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisi

I remember when people were so conditioned on Web banner ads that even non commercial sites added graphics in the same place and size because otherwise it felt wrong. I see sugar and sweeteners added to anything edible in certain countries because the populations pallet is conditioned to expect it. I remember a time where teens were so used to low bandwidth overcompressed music downloads they actually started to feel that was the way music was supposed to sound and preferred it over the original recording...

Thanks, but no thanks.

Come visit Hawaii some time. It's one of 4 states that have banned billboards (Alaska, Maine and Vermont are the others), and it's wonderful. No incessant, demanding, constant bombardment of stupid messages for products you're not interested in. Bear in mind that even if you think you're ignoring them and not seeing them, they're still very likely to be having a subconscious impact on you.

It really says a lot about how we're conditioned that people would even actually miss advertising billboards when they're not there.

Advertisements have side effects, such as bringing lightning or hiding ugliness.

Don't confuse the side effect for the desired effect: if advertisers found out how to make ads cheaper workout reducing their effectiveness, but at the expense of secondary effects, they would.

From your description, it sounds as if the city is ugly and that advertisements cover that up.

That's not a reason to long for advertisements, that is a reason to long for a nicer city.

Good, you should hate it. Don't put cosmetics on it, fix the underlying true uglyness: Lack of plants, too many cars, bad architecture etc.

Just a counterpoint here - I spent 2 weeks in Sao Paulo and loved it. Never found it aesthetically unpleasing. Many areas look just as modern as NYC (where I lived prior to this) - but cleaner and less crowded. And they have some neighborhoods with a lot of beautiful street art. My only disappointment was the Little Tokyo - not much there, and marked only by fake looking street lanterns.

I didn't even know they had banned outdoor advertising until I read this article. I certainly never thought "you know what, this city needs more outdoor advertising." Readers - if you've never visited Sao Paulo, please don't take these negative accounts to heart and go see it for yourself.

It was.

I worked in advertisement and still can't ignore how terrible the city was with rampant billboards. Attempting to regulate it was not having any effect thanks to easy ways the law could be circumvented by the rich and (legally) powerful.

Banning them outright was a breath of fresh air.

It was and, generically speaking, "no one" thinks twice that it was not a good law all these years after it.

But HN attracts a lot of contrarian thinking people. Which is a good thing I think, even if in this matter I am with the majority

> destroyed our beautiful Japanese neighborhood

How?

Though even if what you say is true, it must be balanced by the many more neighborhoods destroyed by ads.

Paulistano here too, and nikkei (so pretty much every weekend went to liberdade and sao joaquim).

I find it easier to walk around Sao Paulo now. And Liberdade is still a special place with the asian lanterns in the lamp posts, the Bradesco building, and there are stores with Noren and signs.

Only difference is that the signs are now proportional to the store facade.

And we still have grafitti that helps to keep the city interesting, as well as our Portuguese stone pavement and other little things that make Sao Paulo beautiful even without all the billboards and ads.

Paulista too. _"Destroyed"_ is a term totally out of proportion here. You might have a subjective vision that the neighborhood got uglier with the ban (I completely disagree); but it is still a vibrant and touristic neighborhood to this day.

I think it is worth mentioning that in São Paulo people tend to use the word "grafite" for artful murals and drawings and "pixação" for the stuff that is seen as vandalism. (there are some grey areas but that is the jist of it)

Here is the current location image from Google Maps:

https://i.imgur.com/mHRamlx.png

They have some window signage and have added back a much more reasonably sized sign with their business name.

Wider shot:

https://i.imgur.com/RbhV4Ep.jpg

I agree. Having the name on the building makes sense. Maybe restrict it to ground level or something similar.

If certain businesses were impacted, where did the demand get displaced to? With restaurants, was it to other restaurants that were more visible or were people more likely to eat at home? If some of the demand for other goods or services, not being a necessity of life as food is, simply vanished, is that a bad thing? Perhaps GDP goes down but efficiency goes up? And what effect does this have on the happiness of the population? These aren't meant to be leading or rhetorical but are interesting to ponder.

In that image, the storefronts are still clearly identified with names and logos.

Business signs are still allowed. The only thing the law does to them is stipulate how big they can be.

For storefronts less than 10m, there can be a single sign of at most 1.5m².

For storefronts from 10m to 100m, there can be a single sign of up to 4m².

For storefronts above 100m, there can be two signs, each up to 10m², placed at least 40m apart.

maybe that was an easily avoidable problem to plan for, but i would humbly suggest that maybe a solution would be to install public lighting instead of return the advertisements in order to get proper lighting?

just to be clear, i’m not arguing for or against advertising in the open, just replying to the first point

Your message is full of allegations without citations and is one of the most intellectually dishonest comments I've seen in the subject.

Lights do not stop crime in the way you're saying. I've been robbed twice in well lit locations. And a tiny percentage of those billboards were lit. This whole point sounds like reaching at straws without any logic behind it.

Avenida Paulista never looked like Times Square. Thankfully, because Times Square is a halogen light hellscape only tourists can stand and for little amounts of time at that. Paulista looks great, and dare I say better than it could have ever looked had it had huge billboards blocking the little sky one can see.

This was NOT a politician decision on a whim. Come on. That makes me doubt you've ever lived in São Paulo. This debate was raging for years and only came to fruition after the inability of regulation to have any effect on rampant illegal advertising covering more and more of the sky.

What are T bar signs? A Google Images search yields equivocal results.

Assuming one might feel safe enough to walk on them.

A good number of old cultural signs were destroyed in the process specially in Bairro da Liberdade where Asian migration happened. All those beautiful neon kanji signs were removed. As someone who lives in São Paulo for decades I say that the city is uglier than ever.

Look at the business signage, rather than dig for it through all the advertising plastered around? Or use maps...

If there's one thing you can be assured of, it's that removed graffiti will be replaced by new graffiti. Only through prolonged removal each time it reappears do the new attempts stop (or at least get reduced to a trickle).

Or, option three, put something there that looks nice.

You'll get downvoted but it's true. Anyone who thinks a city is better off without the visual pollution of billboards and LED signs has obviously never been to downtown Sao Paulo.