São Paulo: Perspectives on the City and Cultural Production

9. Trekking the Urban: Eduardo Emílio Fenianos’s Expedições Urbenauta; São Paulo, uma aventura radical

122 9 Trekking the Urban Eduardo Emílio Fenianos’s Expedições Urbenauta; São Paulo, uma aventura radical Para mí la vida en la ciudad no es tan desagradable como se la suele pintar. • Clorindo Tosta, “Placeres del ser urbano” (n.p.) Astronautas vão para a lua / Urbenautas vão para a rua. • Eduardo Emílio Fenianos, Expedições (14) São Paulo is, by some accounts, the fifth-largest demographic concentration in the world, the second in Latin America after Mexico City, which in most accounts is the largest in the Western hemisphere and second-largest in the world.1 One is, therefore, to be excused for asking a rather clichéd question: “How does one ever grasp this sort of urban space?” Answers may vary with regard to Mexico City, but there can be little doubt that São Paulo is not a very user-friendly city—just read the accounts of what its citizens go through every day in going to or from work, or experience the city as an 123 average tourist who might attempt to stroll the downtown, facing pollution, overcrowding, and the threat of crime. Of course, the answer to the overwhelmed and naive tourist’s question is that most people do not experience the megalopolis as a whole; rather, most individuals, in the numbing routine of their daily lives, whether as domestic servants or university professors, merely live in little more than fragments of the city, fragments that they may control with some degree of efficiency as though it were their native—or near-native—language. This includes even the individual who has a two-hour bus ride to work: the point A of their residence may be one urban reality, and the point B of their workplace another. But those points in between are only a blur, since with any kind of luck they may get a seat and be able to doze, if not sleep, during the trip from A to B, although it is more than likely they will have to transfer at least once during that commute.2 But even the transfer points are blurs: under such transportation circumstances, could one possibly have the energy to stroll the area around the bus stop, given the crush of passengers simply trying to get on the next vehicle? Of course, some individuals do have a wide-ranging experience of the city—say policemen or real estate agents—although they may be confined to certain districts of it. Only taxi drivers and news reporters are likely to have really random access to the city on a daily basis. Even the individual who frequents cultural institutions or commercial venues exemplifies a patterned access: a series of points C, D, E, and so forth, that in short order begin to repeat themselves, with only occasionally a new institution or venue added as others are lost. Thus, the radical urban adventure of Eduardo Emílio Fenianos, who I will hereafter refer to by his self-assigned soubriquet as the Urbenauta, involves accessing São Paulo in a manner that is decidedly artificial, and it is perhaps this aspect of it that, in the end, is the most radical: rare indeed is the individual able to assemble the resources to undertake the Urbenauta’s urban expedition. Beginning on February 10, 2001, the Urbenauta—with a set of equipment every bit as complicated as the Abercrombie & Fitch kits described by Theodore Roosevelt in his famous safaris (and note that the Urbenauta’s commencement falls close to the hundredth anniversary of the redoubtable explorer’s South American undertaking, as recounted in Through the Brazilian Wilderness [1914, it describes an expedition in 1913– 14])—set out to map through his personal experiences the vast city of São Paulo. This was not the Urbenauta’s first such adventure: in 1997, he conducted a similar undertaking in his native city of Curitiba, the capital of the Trekking the Urban: Eduardo Emílio Fenianos’s Expedições Urbenauta São Paulo: Perspectives on the City and Cultural Production 124 state of Paraná, which is immediately south of the state of São Paulo (the air connection between Curitiba and São Paulo is less than an hour). This expedition garnered an enormous amount of attention, and, in addition to publishing his diary, O Urbenauta: manual de sobrevivência na selva urbana (The Urbenaut: Survival Manual for the Urban...