Alison Handel
Instituto Pólis
São Paulo, Brazil
I thought I would be prepared to take on São Paulo having lived in New York the past two years and having extended family here. I couldn’t have been more wrong. São Paulo is an entirely different beast. It is the largest city in the Southern Hemisphere and the twelfth largest city in the world, with 11 million inhabitants. Thank goodness for my research partner Anamika, because I would have been in way over my head.
The second half of this week was the Feast of Corpus Christi, which is a national holiday in Brazil, celebrating the tradition and belief in the Eucharist. Consequently, there wasn’t much to do at Instituto Pólis, and Anamika and I had the opportunity to explore our new home. And explore we did. Don’t worry, I am not going to recount all the touristy things we did (although there was some of that) but rather our observations of the city and how it relates to our research on gentrification in the context of a developing country.
In a class we took last semester on gentrification, the first thing our professor asked us was, “What do you think of when you think of gentrification?” People immediately began citing hipster coffee shops, vegan and or fusion restaurants, chic modernist apartment buildings, influxes of young (usually white) professionals, and so on and so forth. Obviously this is a very simplified view—it was the first day of class, after all—but that is not to say that these assertions are false. In fact, we found an abundance of those things.
The São Paulo (SP) of today is very different than when my grandmother grew up there. It is much more cosmopolitan. It is the economic center of Brazil and exerts a strong influence on international commerce. Nowhere is this more evident than in SP’s increasingly upscale neighborhoods. I often joke about how coffee shops of a certain aesthetic are the ultimate sign of gentrification/globalization, but I’m realizing more and more how true that is. Most places we go in SP, we see botecos (traditional Brazilian bars/cafes) alongside artisanal coffee and sandwich shops that could easily be in Brooklyn. I was worried about being vegan in Latin America, but my fears were unfounded. I have seen a plethora of vegan eateries that, again, would blend into the fabric of any hip New York neighborhood.
While this is all fine and good for people like Anamika and me, how does it bode for the average Brazilian? We might not have yet started our nitty-gritty work at Instituto Pólis, but I feel as though some work has already begun.