Via Nathan’s rubbish blog i found this article, titled; São Paulo: The City That Said No To Advertising. As the title implies, São Paulo last year passed the so-called Clean City laws after being fed up with the “visual pollution” cause by the city’s 8,000 billboard sites.

I’m speechless. So refreshing. Who would have guessed any city would take this route.
A round of applause, to the mayor, Gilberto Kassab.

Definitely worth a read. The topic is even worth a google.

Below are some quotes from the article.

The law was hailed by writer Roberto Pompeu de Toledo as “a rare victory of the public interest over private, of order over disorder, aesthetics over ugliness, of cleanliness over trash… For once, all that is accustomed to coming out on top in Brazil has lost.”

Dalton Silvano, the only city councillor to vote against the laws and (not entirely coincidentally) an ad executive, was quoted as saying in the International Herald Tribune. “Advertising is both an art form and, when you’re in your car, or alone on foot, a form of entertainment that helps relieve solitude and boredom,” he claimed.

Oh, please. Common. What? Why would anyone say such a thing. Just because sex is pleasurable, doesn’t make sexual abuse a good deed.

In a lot of places, Piqueira says, this has led to the removal of posters but not the structures on which they were displayed. “It’s a kind of ‘billboard cemetery’. I guess they’re waiting to see if the law will really last. If the mayor keeps the law for a year or so, people will start to remove them and the city will, finally, start to look better.”

Photographer and typographer Tony de Marco has been out documenting this strange hiatus in a sequence of images published on Flickr.

The law also regulates the dimensions of store signs, and will force many well-known companies to reduce them substantially by a formula based on the size of their facades. example, example

It’s like design guidelines.

Meanwhile, according to Augusto Moya, creative director of ad agency DDB Brasil, the ban is forcing agencies to be more inventive. “As a creative, I think that there is one good thing the ban has brought: we must now use more traditional outdoor media (like bus stops and all kinds of urban fittings) in a more creative way,” he says. “People at all the agencies are thinking about how to develop outdoor media that do not interfere so much in the physical structure of the city.”

Moya takes an enlightened view of the law. “As a citizen, I think that future generations will thank the current city administration for this ban,” he says.