Photo: Tuca Vieira

If you were to ask someone who knows me well about my strengths and weaknesses, he or she might tell you (amongst other things) that I suffer from a chronic travel-related disorder. Which is this: more often than not, when I visit a new city, I fall in love.

In love with the city, that is. Istanbul, Chicago, Beirut, Barcelona, Tokyo, Shanghai, Montreal, Bogotá… The full list of cities in which I’ve spent less than a month, yet developed a rich fantasy about what it might be like to make them home, is much longer.

In each of these places, have imagined in considerable detail, and with what I like to believe was sincerity, transplanting my life there: learning its language, cooking its food, reading its newspapers, commuting to work in its metro or cycle lanes or taxis. Having not yet visited them, I suspect the case would be the same for Sydney and Cairo, Glasgow and Seoul. It’s rather like imagining what your offspring might look like with a charismatic stranger you’ve only just met. There may be a German compound word that sums up this response more concisely.

This way of thinking—that every place offers the potential to become home— is partially a result of the opportunities for constant mobility and heightened connectedness that are both a blessing and a curse of my generation. Perhaps it is also attributable in particular to my origins in the United States, that land of incessant (and fickle) mobility and irrepressible optimism.

As you may guess by now, I’m a softie for cities generally; many towns are ‘my kind of town.’ But if I had to settle on an ideal urban type, it would be big, busy, patchwork and ever-changing. I also judge a city’s appeal on its capacity not only to accommodate, but also to celebrate difference, its willingness to embrace newcomers, and its ability to change. The city I’ve visited that best exemplifies these characteristics, and because of this, claims a large piece of my heart, is São Paulo.

Friends of mine might also tell you that few years ago, before I committed myself to the unique rewards and special annoyances of London, I was in fact on the verge of moving to São Paulo. To do what? I wasn’t quite sure. The fact that I didn’t speak Portuguese? I would learn it there. How would I support myself? I would figure that out once I arrived and could sleep on my friend’s floor and survive on rice and beans until I did.

That generous friend was Raul. In my navigation of ‘Sampa’, I was blessed to have an expert guide in the form of Raul Juste Lores, who was (at the time that I met him) a journalist for Folha de São Paulo, advisor to the Mayor, and passionate aficionado of architecture and music. Born to economic immigrants from Spain and now a respected commentator on Brazil’s cultural and political dynamics, with a seemingly boundless curiosity and appetite for life, Raul personifies the Paulista newcomer’s success story.

One should not make light of its dangers and inequalities; the high crime rate, the traffic jams, the pollution, the gated communities vs. the favelas; these have all been so thoroughly documented and criticised elsewhere. Yet Raul, with infectious enthusiasm, showed me that his chosen city, whose elites infamously commute by helicopter, has much to reveal and in my experience, little to threaten to those travelling by foot and with an open mind.

It is easy to praise the city’s architectural masterpieces: Oscar Niemeyer’s sinuous Copan building (there is nothing frozen about this historic piece of architecture, the quotidian buzz of mom and pop shops still animating its ground floor); his pavilions set within Roberto Burle Marx’s Ibirapuera Park, inhabited by bats and black swans; Lina Bo Bardi’s SESC Pompéia, the refashioning of an old factory complex into a vibrant, democratic sports and culture centre; her pioneering Oficina theatre, where the stage is a dynamic street onto which audience members may be pulled from their seats at any moment; the bold procession of the Avenida Paulista; João Artacho Jurado’s eccentric and colourful modernism.

As a constitutional expatriate, it is perhaps the sense that São Paulo is a place of loosely defined yet apparent opportunity, that it is a city built by and for newcomers, that most appealed to me. Since its first major growth spurt in the 19th Century, São Paulo has had an enduring magnetism to newcomers, perhaps through combining the suggestion of possibility and the celebration of hybridity. As I first learned when helping Ricky Burdett research his 2006 Venice Biennale, this city of circa 11 million nearly doubled in size over the last half century. Historically, its growth was fed by successive waves of immigrants from sources as diverse as Lebanon, Japan and Italy. In recent decades the city has accommodated domestic in-migrants from poorer rural regions of Brazil, who build their favela homes wherever they can find space, alongside curious creative types from the cultural elites of South America and Europe colonising cheap studio space in the crumbling downtown. The resulting mix of people, and the places they build, inhabit, and constantly reinterpret is one of the most compelling elements of the city.

Like any city worthy of being called one, São Paulo is constantly adapting. Its public spaces are the sites of creative, and sometimes unexpected use by its citizens. Each Sunday, the Minhocão: a hulking elevated highway (named after a mythical giant worm) that cuts through the centre is reclaimed as public space by joggers and picnickers. The colourful, expressive graffiti enlivening the sides of other, sunken motorways sets a new standard for street art. Most recently, I’ve been curious to go back and see results of the mayor’s decision to remove all advertising from public spaces.

Many cariocas (Rio de Janeiro inhabitants) I’ve spoken with dismiss Sao Paulo as ‘too stressful’, but the things that most attract me to this city are its fast pace, energy and hustle. Brazil’s financial and educational centre thrives alongside and in spite of the negative elements so often reported about it is testament to its strengths. To Professor Jan Gehl, and the staff of The Economist, with deepest respect: Copenhagen and Geneva may be statistically safer and healthier places to live, but how do you quantify urban tenacity, creative friction, a celebration of multiplicity, the potential for spontaneity?

One hesitates to overstretch the metaphor of falling in love with a place, but I often suspect the high-ranking ‘quality of life’ cities, with their pristine streets and punctual trams as the equivalent of a date with biologically ideal hip-to-waist proportions, but no rhythm on the dance floor, perfect teeth but no sense of humour.

Despite my roving eye, the reasons I’ve settled in London, another city of Saint Paul, are perhaps similar to those that would attract me to take a gamble São Paulo: they each offer the next best thing to living in every city one would want to. Both offer the possibility of living in and amongst diverse groups, in the multi-layered cities they create, of experiencing a place always in the process of becoming, a destination where as a newcomer one is the rule, rather than the exception. A city that one chooses in spite of as much as because of, but loves all the more fiercely for this.

Sarah Ichioka is the Director of the Architecture Foundation, and co-director of the London Festival of Architecture.

AT215, February 11, p88.