Public and private, traffic and open space, planned and spontaneous - our idea of a city is characterised by opposites. However, the contributors to this bilingual book show that these poles can also be consciously connected. The urban building blocks from S o Paolo present surprisingly idiosyncratic city scenes: People dancing along the motorway, strolling through the stone archipelago, splashing around in front of the city skyline...
Many of the case studies are linked to the ideas of the Brazilian urban planner Francisco Prestes Maia. As early as in the 1930s, he developed concepts that combine traffic, open space and architecture - a surprisingly contemporary approach.