Mediacology

Photo by Tony de Marco

I have only been to one place in the world where there is no advertising: Cuba. But if you include propaganda in that category, it’s in ample ample supply. Still, you have no idea how refreshing it is to be in a place without ads because in cities like New York the competition for your eyeballs is dizzying. Now it’s possible to enter another ad free zone: São Paulo, Brazil. As the article below indicates, the “Clean City” initiative took the concept of clean to the extreme. Accompanying the story are some really nice photos by Tony de Marco. You can see Tony de Marco’s flickr set of the adless city here.

São Paulo: The City That Said No To Advertising:

In September last year, the city’s populist right-wing mayor, Gilberto Kassab, passed the so-called Clean City laws. Fed up with the “visual pollution” caused by the city’s 8,000 billboard sites, many of them erected illegally, Kassab proposed a law banning all outdoor advertising. The skyscraper-sized hoardings that lined the city’s streets would be wiped away at a stroke. And it was not just billboards that attracted his wrath: all forms of outdoor advertising were to be prohibited, including ads on taxis, on buses—even shopfronts were to be restricted, their signs limited to 1.5 metres for every 10 metres of frontage. “It is hard in a city of 11 million people to find enough equipment and personnel to determine what is and isn’t legal,” reasoned Kassab, “so we have decided to go all the way.”

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