Sao Paulo: A city with no outdoor advertisements (2013)
I've been visiting sp since 2005, i eventually moved there '09 and lived there till '23. I remember the pre-06 cityscape. You were bombarded by visual ads in the 100s every half hour. It was absurd. Most of the buildings were absolutely covered in low-effort graffiti, callef pixação or pixo (pronounced peeshu). Since then there really has been a flourishing of murals and street art. The quality and quantity are flabberghasting. It added a lot to the sense of discovery while out exploring a new corner of the city and sense of place for places one returns to. Many of the artists like veracidade became close to household names. Overall it was a wonderful change whose impacts subtly changed the atmosphere of the city, making it much more livable. The only problem was in the liberdade neighborhood, home to the japanese disapora of the early 20th century: their local business depended on kanji signs hanging off the facades of the buildings. After the law change the neighborhood's economy sorta collapsed for a while, but is now recovering.