photo from spaceview.com

If advertising is an invitation to consume, what is left but advertising for those who cannot consume?
Advertising is a good of visual consumption available for everyone. The more we see, the more we fall into line, we feel reassured. Advertising is the enemy of the rainbow. Once upon a time the sandwich men were paid for carrying round advertising messages, today people do it for free, and if they could they would pay.
For how long have we been living without breathing immersed in advertising shit? It’s a brown mess that submerges the cities, the people in designer clothes from tip to toe, objects, the sacred and the beautiful. We pay because advertising is paid for with the product, to see our cities transformed into boobs and bums and great brand names. The Mayor of San Paolo has banned advertising. Renzo Piano has written me a letter. If any Italian mayor wants to imitate Gilberto Kassab let them knock once.

“Dear Beppe
In San Paolo in Brazil, Gilberto Kassab has decided to remove abusive advertising and to forbid it. And while he was at it, he has forbidden any form of advertising on the walls of the city. It’s a historic decision that goes in step with that adopted elsewhere to limit and forbid access by car to the historic town centres and to only build car parks in the periphery and in the green belt. Pollution in the cities is obviously in the atmosphere but it is also acoustic and visual and if the spaces of the cities are massively occupied with advertising stereotypes, they all become the same. Cities are places of diversity, of surprises, of discovery, of human and cultural curiosity. They are places of exchange, by decorating them with advertising their character is hidden, it makes them all the same, it flattens them under a single unique annoying stamp.
There are those who say that San Paolo has lost in vivacity and colour. I don’t believe that. I think that it is rather the addiction to the commonplace (that today is called trash) that plays nasty games. On the contrary I am certain that the absence of visible rubbish will help to gather emotions that have been a bit forgotten, those of the urban environment. We’ll see. IT’S A GOOD SIGN. Greetings.”
Renzo Piano

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