The mayor of Sao Paulo, Brazil (with somewhere between 11 and 29 million residents depending on where you draw your city-borders) passed a “Clean City” bill last year that removed all public advertising, to get rid of visual pollution…

I know, I know, it’s not funny or anything. whatever. read the article on Design Verb, pretty durn fascinating.

From photographer tony de marco’s flicker set:

Excerpt from an interview with Vinicius Galvao (reporter for Folha de Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest newspaper):

BOB GARFIELD (interview): I’ve seen photos of the city, and it’s amazing to see this sprawling metropolis completely devoid of signage, completely devoid of logos and bright lights and so forth. What did Sao Paulo look like up until the ban took place?

VINICIUS GALVAO: Sao Paulo’s a very vertical city. That makes it very frenetic. You couldn’t even realize the architecture of the old buildings, because all the buildings, all the houses were just covered with billboards and logos and propaganda. And there was no criteria.

And now it’s amazing. They uncovered a lot of problems the city had that we never realized. For example, there are some favelas, which are the shantytowns. I wrote a big story in my newspaper today that in a lot of parts of the city we never realized there was a big shantytown. People were shocked because they never saw that before, just because there were a lot of billboards covering the area.