Urban Brazil: Visions, Afflictions, and Governance Lessons By Iva ...

One wag described São Paulo as the “Pitanic,” comparing the city to the famous sinking ship. Pitta’s legacy was to leave the city with an astonishing debt of US$9 billion without relevant public work projects to show for it. His most promising project—an elevated bus corridor—remained for years an amorphous piece of concrete, supported by rusty iron rods. It was, in effect, a white elephant crossing a central area of the city linking nowhere to nothing.

How could the country’s wealthiest city, with a fine educated middle class and world-class urban planners, fall so low? To those who live, work, and study in São Paulo, the deterioration in and neglect of basic city services are not related to the size of the city or an alleged lack of financial resources. During my interviews, there was never a single word to suggest that São Paulo is simply ungovernable because of the size of its population. Many observers have expressed amazement at its gradual urban decay, which should be unthinkable in a metropolis that accounts for a significant chunk of Brazil’s gross domestic product (GDP). There is a kind of mantra in São Paulo, suggesting that the city can be governed better. This has led Paulistanos and many Brazilians to believe that the city’s problems are the result of an inexplicable sequence of dismal local governments. In the absence of a more convincing explanation, folk talk has attributed the situation to an improbable bout of bad luck.

Of course luck, either good or bad, cannot explain the contrasts in governance strategies between São Paulo and Curi­tiba. Jaime Lerner, one of Brazil’s most popular mayors (he was Curitiba’s mayor for three terms) used to say “tendency is not destiny.”