Conversations in São Paulo

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São Paulo has a big traffic problem. 12 million people and 5 million cars (not counting the entire metro area) make for nasty traffic jams, even on a Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning. One of the few positives of spending so much time in traffic is the opportunity for good conversation with car-mates or taxi drivers.

On our way from the Hípica Paulista to Praça Benedito Calixto, Laura and I had a really interesting conversation about the Green Building Council of Brazil and the green architecture and design movement here in general. She is doing a lot of preliminary research down here to see if it might be an area of focus for her PhD. I’m sure this point will elaborate as the two of us get more time to chat, but here are some standouts from her experience so far.

The Green Building Council of Brazil is an offshoot of the US Green Building Council, which is responsible for the LEED Certification program in the US. The folks who brought the GBC to Brazil were apparently neither designers nor architects but politicians or engineers (I forget which) who found the idea very cool. They developed the GBC of Brazil as more of a political entity and think tank instead of a certification and regulation entity. Also, one of the criticisms of LEED in Brazil is that it was not adapted for the local conditions; it was basically imported as is from the U.S. Laura was explaining that even getting points for using recycled materials is relatively hard in Brazil because, beyond FSC-certified wood, most of the building materials that are certified and qualify for LEED points would have to be imported. How not “eco” is that? Also, there are a lot of issues with designing for local climate and with local materials that LEED as it exists now does not take into account. So there is a great deal of criticism of LEED in Brazil.

At the same time, Laura was talking about the fragmentation of the Brazilian construction/architecture/engineering/design industries. As in the U.S. too, it is hard to get everyone on the same page from the project’s conception; similarly, it is hard to take an already-designed building and make a few changes to increase its eco-friendliness. The environmentally responsible design must be conceived from start to finish - so the engineers, designers, architects and materials/construction folks must all work together throughout all stages of the project. Apparently this is not the norm in either Brazil or the U.S. I wish I knew about this in more detail but I am sort of reporting facts. Hopefully as Laura learns more she’ll tell me, and I also want to talk to Juca about this. Last year he got LEED APA certified and is one of the few LEED certified architects in Brazil - so he is totally clued into the scene.

The other awesome and totally random conversation was Sunday morning on the taxi ride to the airport. I had called the same taxi driver who brought my dad and I into São Paulo on Friday morning. Jones (pronounced “JOH-neess” but not “Jonas”) is a taxi driver by day and a police officer by night. From what I gathered, he works in the dispatch section of the 911 calls. He was complaining that during the weekends, and especially holiday weekends like this one, crime is much higher because people are getting wasted, doing drugs, going home messed up and getting in fights with their parents. As he said this, he accidentally drove into a one way intersection, then backed up when he realized oncoming traffic had a green. Then he pulled over, chatted up the policemen who were about to give him a ticket, and hopped back into the car saying, “Well, they really didn’t see what happened.” Oh, and his taxi had broken down so he came to get us in his own car! The guy is seriously awesome.

He and I talked the whole way to the airport, about 45 minutes, about the police here and comparing the US and Brazil. The police here can be easily corrupted, he readily admitted. In his opinion, while the police could and should be paid a little more by the government, those who accept bribes do it because they are opportunistic, not because they need the cash to survive. And he also said a lot of police actively participate in crime, not just turn a blind eye. So that was rather disheartening. On the other hand, he was talking about police brutality and said that if a policeman were to even smack someone around during an arrest, that person could file a complaint with the department and the citizen’s word would be held higher than that of the policeman. It seems that in the U.S. policemen tend to stick together, and most of the time citizens don’t make accusations of brutality unless it is a serious offense that ends up in court. I’m not sure if this really stops the Brazilian police from smacking people around or if it just restricts the cases to a much more marginalized group that would never complain. That’s just my own two cents. Anyway Jones is super cool and hopefully he is going to drive my dad to the airport a week from Monday for his flight back to the US, and we’ll chat more about other deep and important issues.

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