São Paulo is a city that’s proud of its scale. A leading entrepreneur tells us that he had returned to São Paulo from living in Paris after he struggled to make it through a grey French February. “Look, Paris is fine if you want to live somewhere provincial and eat cheese but São Paulo is a real city,” he says. Plus, in winter, you can savour 23C temperatures and big blue skies.

The above is an excerpt from a recent Monocle article covering 10 observations about São Paulo. I have only been to Brazil once, and it was to visit Rio de Janeiro. But since then, I have had São Paulo high on my list. This is partially because I'm fascinated by Brazil and partially because I love big cities — and São Paulo is one of the biggest and most frenetic.

But one of the areas where, in recent history, it has not been frenetic is signage. In 2007 a new municipal law was put into effect called the Clean City Law (or Lei Cidade Limpa). The law was simple: It introduced a near-total ban on billboards and public advertising, while imposing strict storefront limits on signage.

In the first year of the law, the city collected nearly C$30 million in fines and then, seemingly overnight, the city transformed itself from a wild west of signage into an ad-free megacity. The results were fascinating. Historic buildings that had been entombed by ads were suddenly rediscovered. Architecture became front and center.

But interestingly enough, the city is now looking to relax these laws to a certain extent and allow four buildings at the intersection of Avenidas São João and Ipiranga to be covered with LED panels and displays, akin to those in New York's Times Square or Tokyo's Shibuya Crossing. Here's the promo video.

If you watch the video, you'll see that it says something along the lines of "the world's largest cities have all transformed their streets into living experiences." It then shows clips of New York, London, Doha, and others that all have similar LED screens and brightly illuminated buildings. In other words: All the best cities are doing it, so we need to do it too.

There are naturally some people who like São Paulo the way it is today. But regardless, it raises an interesting question: Are these kinds of highly-visual urban displays just a new form of advertising, or are they something else, something more elevated? And is it really table stakes for the largest global cities to have something like it?

Cover photo by Thandy Yung on Unsplash