Billboard ban in Sao Paolo seen as victory by urban planners and a blow to advertisers!
In December, 2006, the mayor of Sao Paolo, Brazil banned all outdoor billboard advertising, citing advertisers' unwillingness to comply with the city's rules on what sort of billboards can be placed where.
The outsized billboards and screens that dominate the skyline, promoting everything from automobiles, jeans and cellphones to banks and sex shops, will have to come down. All other forms of publicity in public spaces, like distribution of fliers, will also stop.
City planners, architects and environmental advocates have argued that the prohibition, through a new "clean city" law, brings São Paulo a welcome step closer to an imagined urban ideal.
The law is "a rare victory of the public interest over private, of order over disorder, aesthetics over ugliness, of cleanliness over trash," Roberto Pompeu de Toledo, a columnist and author of a history of São Paulo, wrote in the weekly newsmagazine Veja.
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Read about it in the International Herald Tribune
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