On a Friday afternoon some fifteen years ago, following a conference that I organized on the “crisis of the image,” one participant, Horst Bredekamp, attempted to travel the 35 kilometers to São Paulo's international airport during rush hour. The trip took almost four hours, the ten-lane highway divided by the biologically dead Tietê River literally blocked with cars and trucks. The next day Bredekamp commented, “This is like Dante's Inferno!” Particularly for the European gaze, the megalopolises of South America, Africa, and Southern and Southeastern Asia are completely unusual. By way of their scant but revealing inclusion of natural spaces like gardens and parks, they invert the progressive aspirations of urban life.1
Any natural environments that may have previously existed on the periphery of such cities have since been annihilated, and are now being covered with shantytowns (favelas, comunidades) and industry. The living conditions in these huge metropolitan areas...
University of California Press