Citizens map a mega city: as Sao Paulo celebrates its 450th anniversary, public leaders and residents unite to develop a comprehensive plan for this fragmented, vibrant metropolis.

• Author: Mamoser, Alan

There are no great mountain ranges, there is no beautiful bay. Its densely crowded streets, filled with frenetic human activity, cover hundreds of square miles, Sao Paulo, Brazil, the hemisphere's largest metropolis, is simply a city. Just in the last decade its growth has finally slowed, allowing its people time to catch up to address its many needs, and to create plans for the future. Paulistanos are engaged in a wide ranging dialogue among themselves, reaching for creative solutions, seeking a new flexibility in government, and searching for ways to prepare the city for the great challenges of the twenty-first century.

This year Sao Paulo celebrates its four-hundred-fiftieth birthday, marking an interesting moment in the mega city's history. On the anniversary day, last January 25, Mayor Marla Suplicy was dancing to samba rhythms at the head of a parade leading to an enormous open-air concert downtown. Marta (as she is affectionately known), heiress and soxologist, who once hosted a popular television show, wants people to embrace the city, to reorient their perceptions, and recognize the great assets Sao Paulo already has. The basis of tier policy is to build upon these assets--from the city's old downtown to its teeming periphery.

At first glance, the challenge looks overwhelming. The city is beset with polluted rivers, vast slums, excruciating traffic, and horrific, spectacular crime. One wonders what keeps people there, what invisible force holds the huge place together.

"Sao Paulo welcomes everybody," says Mariana Carvalho, enjoying a late supper with friends one evening in a bar in the gentrifying Vila Mariana neighborhood. She came front a small city of the interior to study and find a job in the travel industry. "Here are the best jobs, the best opportunities, the most companies and civic organizations. The best schools are here, and great restaurants, and all kinds of people. Sao Paulo is linked to the whole world in a way that's not so for the rest of Brazil."

While Sao Paulo's history goes deep into the colonial era, the city really came of age in modern Limes. Like Berlin, Osaka, or Chicago, Sao Paulo rose to prominence in the industrial age. Coffee was the catalyst. Planters from the old families of Rio de Janeiro and the Paraiba Valley expanded westward into new territory in Sao Paulo state, a movement that picked up in the 1880s just as slavery ended. Planters were compelled to seek immigrant workers, and thousands of them came from Europe and later from the Middle East and Japan.

All great cities are made by immigration. By 1900, the city of Sao Paulo was an economic fulcrum fried with a diverse mix of energetic people. And something quite remarkable occurred--rare in history when an entrepreneurial planter class arose. Many planters became industrialists, joining their capital to the businesses of newly arrived entrepreneurial immigrants. In time a new elite emerged, a fusion of coffee planters and immigrant bourgeoisie, who made Sao Paulo into the premier industrial center of Latin America.

This background placed Sao Paulo on the forefront of modernity in Brazil. It gave the city quite a different feeling from Brazil's other great metropolitan pole, Rio de Janeiro. Rio is known for its characteristic Portuguese and African heritage, for its long history as a colonial capital. Paulistanos see themselves as more cosmopolitan, energetic, and entrepreneurial, and less rooted in traditions. They have led the nation's struggle to modernize economically and in the arts.

Modernism in art began in Brazil in one remarkable week in Sao Paulo during the 1920s, at a multidisciplinary exposition held in the city's Municipal Theater. Until that time, aesthetic taste in Brazil was dominated by classic French influences. All of this changed during the days of February 13, 15, and 17 of 1922. On the thirteenth, the writer Graca Aranha delivered opening remarks in which he denounced academicism, criticized the Brazilian Academy of Arts, and spoke of the need for artistic liberty. On the fifteenth, the poet Oswald de Andrade read from his works (he would later make the case for indigenous cultures' central role in the development of modernism by famously saying, "Tupi or not Tupi, that is the question"), and writer Mario de Andrade gave a lecture entitled "The Slave Who Was Not Isaura," referring to the horrifying beauty of modernism.

The prescient moment inspired a profusion of new artistic endeavors, all of them standing against the alien values then in fashion and proclaiming the strength of a Brazilian culture based upon the nation's unique mix of peoples. A number of Paulista intellectuals were in the forefront, among them painters Tarsila do Amaral and Anita Malfatti, poet. Guilherme...