This City's Vibes are Off

^{Originally written in Jul 7th 2023}

^{(picture credit: Michael Wolf - Architecture of Density)}

I came back from a trip to São Paulo this week, and I've been trying to collect my thoughts regarding something I described to my GF as ,"this city's vibes are off".

As an artist, I am a bit enchanted by the megacity urban setting. The concrete jungle, the densely populated buildings and cramped streets. The dirty corners, the concrete, the tubes, the wires. The building that doubles as a grocery store and an apartment complex. The half-forgotten park crossed by streets in which car traffic is never gone. And the noise of all the people going about their daily lives, trying to make sense and life out of a place that would be otherwise completely unfit for humans.

This... clash, between an overcrowded, ugly and polluted place with the obvious markers of living, breathing people, doing their best to survive and enjoy life in this place was always something that both inspired me, visually, but also triggers an immense melancholy.

I have lived in large cities before. While I'd never actually lived in a place as big as São Paulo or other megalopolis of that scale, I have lived in such cosmopolitan places before, where people from all over converge, live, work and play. And my experiences in those cities served to add to this "mystique" that huge urban centers cause on me.

However, the real and the imagined are almost never aligned, and even though I knew that, it had never been shoved in my face so aggressively as when I spent some time there.

What set it apart from my other experiences when living in bigger cities, was just the sheer indifference people seemed to have over one another.

I don't blame anyone for that though, for when you live in a city so huge, the size of it seems to push people apart by isolating them. And that might be my "small town" origins coming to light, but it felt as if even saying "good morning" to a stranger was something like you'd only do if you were stupid and were looking for trouble.

One would imagine, to the contrary, that the more people live in a city, the bigger it is, the more they would need to depend on one another, for they share such cramped living spaces, that befriending your neighbor would be the least you could do. And yet, talking to your own roommates was something that would only happen once in a blue moon. Self-isolation seemed to be the norm, and empathy was reserved to the ones you'd click as being "decent".

São Paulo has a very serious problem with crime, poverty and drug addiction. There are homeless camps all over the city, and some districts are overrun with crack addicts. For both populations there are little to no support nets, and the city pushes them around like trash.

And it seems like to a good chunk of the populace that's what they are. Trash. A bother.

We had the unfortunate opportunity to watch our own words of empathy be shown just how conditional they were to this city. Impoverished people asking for help in the subway were met with such raw prejudice in a way we'd never seen before. So out in the open, almost as if they were flaunting how proud they were to despise poor and non-white folk.

Of course, there are good people in the city, there are people who care. But we were there for one week. I've lived in cities with similar levels of the same issues for years and never saw such blatant indifference and lack of empathy. It's the kind of thing that even if someone *thinks* it, they'd never say it out loud where I'm from, because it's just a horrible way to see the world, and they'd be judged by that standard.

It was the first place I saw people showing off nazi symbols on their body as if it was something normal.

Once, I'd think that great urban centers showed the perseverance of people under capitalism, and how, even with all the crap, they'd live. And while visually, I can still imagine a great urban center that's founded on mutual respect and aid (and will keep bringing that into my work as best as I can) the reality of what a city of this magnitude actually is, scares me.

A place where people go to make money, try to survive, just to be crushed by the indifference of others until themselves become just another cog in the machine. Mechanical and apathetic to the world around them.