Judging by the clothes of the young people gathered in the hall, the scene could be set in any bar in Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo in the 1960s and 70s. However, the stone masonry wall, typical of colonial period Brazilian buildings, reveals the actual location. It is Paraty. Shot in 1968, the documentary Vila Nossa Senhora dos Remédios, directed by Pedro Rovai, screenplayed and narrated by Paraty-born poet José Kleber, reveals a unique moment in the city, when it began to open up to visitors – generically called “Paulistas” [people from São Paulo] –, who would arrive day after day, after long journeys by sea or practically non-existing roads.
It is hard to think Paraty without remembering that period. At that time, the Brazilian Cinema Novo movie directors, actors, plus writers, painters, artists of the most varied languages and countless other young enthusiasts of the city flocked there. Paraty was attractive because of the picturesque buildings, the preserved traditional festivities and way of life, but mainly because it was open to exchanges. The lapse of time between the mid-19th century and the 1970s – when the BR-101 highway opened, connecting the town to São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro – preserved sociability networks that have always existed there. A decentralized intelligence that maintained cohesive ways of life within the territory, but that also knew how to welcome and integrate with visitors.
It’s an apparent contradiction. While preserving, consolidating social rules and traditions, Paraty knew how to open up through exchange layers. For example, the bars portrayed in the movie Vila Nossa Senhora dos Remédios, Abel (displaying an emblematic painting by Yoshiya Takaoka on the wall) and Valhacouto, served as exchange layers in those years. Permeable yet resistant, these layers ensured a spontaneous, decentralized exchange that did not depend on intermediaries of any kind. They allowed exchanges while protecting Paraty’s subtleties and specificities.
Historian and sociologist Richard Sennett has championed the idea of open city versus closed city. The first proposes encounter, exchange, dissonance. It is essentially decentralized. The latter seeks to restrain circulation to controlled environments; foreseen situations rather than exchange; pasteurization rather than dissonance. It has a centralizing principle “in suburban middle class growth, main streets replaced by monofunctional shopping malls, gated communities and schools and hospitals built as isolated campuses”, as stated by Sennett.
Open systems, as future cities should be thought of, welcome differences and combinations. The territory, however, should not remain wide open, as proposed by a neoliberal logic. The city of the future, in this sense, should be inspired precisely by the type of exchange that took place in Paraty, in the period just before BR-101: in which the global, the exterior, contacted the local without harming it. This gradually began to change as the road opened, when Paraty was exposed to mass tourism and the principle of vacation homes, which consume a lot – opening of new neighborhoods, security, infrastructure etc. – and leave little or nothing for the actual city.
Some features, however, are not so easily lost. Paraty remains a socially and culturally vibrant territory as a whole. Today’s youth in Paraty never ceases to be interested in their own roots. And festivals, such as the International Literary Festival of Paraty – Flip, retrieve the idea of the open city, defended by Sennett. In this sense, until now Paraty has resisted a territory occupation principle that could have been deadly for its own spirit. Nevertheless, it is undeniable: for this small seaside town, and for the world, it is time for inflection. The covid-19 pandemic made the contemporaneity dilemmas more evident than ever: environmental degradation, social inequality, the exhaustion of a strictly Western and rationalist way of seeing the world.
The solution to this crossroads may be found in the most important open system in the world, which, incidentally, represents most of the territory of the city of Paraty: the forest. Now is the time to leave behind the classic division between culture and nature. It is the beings of the forests, humans and non-humans, who must be a guide for the city of the future. How many mistakes would have been avoided if the knowledge of the native peoples of Brazilian territory had not been neglected? How many innovative solutions would have emerged if plants, with their decentralized system, without any organ resembling a central brain, had been studied more thoughtfully?
Small, medium and large cities as they are today are only viable if they consume a huge amount of resources that necessarily come from outside their very well-defined borders. Urban spots are true resource-draining vampires that proudly put to waste non-consumerism-related knowledge. This was even more evident during the pandemic: billions of people around the world confined in apartments, completely disconnected from life essentials. In Paraty, in its parties, in the forests that surround the city, in the communication network that exists between plants, people and animals, there is a source of hope and inspiration.
As Sennett points out, “For science, open systems are familiar companions. Random events, changing forms, elements that cannot be homogenized or are not interchangeable – all these phenomena distinct from mathematics and/or the natural world can, however, form a pattern, and it is this set that we refer to as an open system”. The communication network established between the trees through their roots, something that guarantees life and balance among all forest beings, is the open system per excellence. Here, exchanges achieve the most powerful dimension possible, balancing all life that exists.
Are there safe, clear paths to follow from now on? No. But today it is necessary to give it a side look and see what has been ignored to this point. The traditional Western model is no longer enough. Hence the need to learn from forests and their beings, to look back and seek logics like that of 1960s and 70s Paraty, where it was possible to establish healthy exchanges through permeable, flexible layers. The city of the future, to remind Sennett once more, seeks not only to solve problems but to welcome and learn from problems. For this, it is also necessary to take a new look at all knowledge and art.
Mauro Munhoz is an architect from the School of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo (FAU-USP) and holds an Urban Environmental Structures master’s degree from the same school. His thesis – Sustainable urban revitalization of Paraty from its waterfront public spaces – led to the foundation of Associação Casa Azul, with works in architecture, urbanism, education and culture. He is an artistic director of the Main Program of the International Literary Festival of Paraty (Flip), of which he was one of the founders. In 2012, he won the São Paulo Art Critics Association (APCA) award in the Urbanities category, for the requalification of Matriz de Paraty square. He signed his first public work in 2008: the Football Museum, in São Paulo, which earned him the prize from the Institute of Architects of Brazil (IAB) in the Restoration and Requalification category.
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