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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

I had always dreamed about a city without advertising, and couldn't wait to visit São Paulo. And when I did, I was completely shocked to discover... I hated it.

Until you experience a lack of advertising, it's hard to imagine quite how gray and boring and non-vibrant a city looks without it. Turns out billboards and panels full of dramatic movies and TV shows, beautiful smiling faces selling makeup and phones... actually add a lot of character to a city and make it feel like things are happening and going on.

Imagine if books no longer had graphic covers anymore, just all solid gray and beige and black covers, and you walked into a bookstore. It feels kind of like that.

If you're going to get rid of advertising, at a minimum you've got to replace it with something -- like a lot of murals, like murals everywhere. (The Bushwick neighborhood of NYC has some areas full of street art, which works pretty well.)

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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 mean, of course -- my comment really only applies to very large cities I think.

A historic village of 5,000 people is small and beautiful. Of course advertising would be out of place.

But the endless concrete jungle of São Paulo is obviously nothing like that. My only point was that advertising can give color and vibrancy... when there isn't any to begin with. It most certainly does not apply do Assisi. :)

I think the point is that if you were to scale Assisi up to ~20m, with a similar population density as Sao Paulo, it would still be ugly. It's a problem of population density.

It's a problem of poverty & investment - Vienna or Zurich are not that drastically sparser than Sao Paulo & are for the most part beautiful cities.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The law carves out an exception for business signage (which it calls "indicative signage")

But severely restricted its size, which I think was the better part of the change.

Discerning between the two cases is arbitrary.

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.

> 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.

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