Feias cidades: uma reflexão sobre as cidades a partir da feiura

Abstract

This thesis investigates urban ugliness as a central aesthetic category for understanding the production and experience of the contemporary urban environment. The research stems from a sense of unease regarding the Brazilian built environment: hostile, unpleasant cities devoid of vegetation, whose ugliness is often normalized or silenced. It seeks to understand why modernity has resulted in spaces marked by a functionalist and unpleasant logic, and by the erasure of nature and collective memories. Methodologically, the research adopts the format of the academic essay and the concept of the “enigma-city,” inspired by Walter Benjamin, which proposes analyzing the city through the dismantling and reassembly of urban fragments, intervals, and thresholds, to narrate what is not apparent. The investigation is structured in three parts. The first part explores the concept of ugliness itself, revisiting its etymology, its inherent characteristics, and its social history, from antiquity to the present day. Broadly speaking, ugliness is defined as a real property of the object, not an absence of beauty, and should be divided into inherent ugliness, capable of eliciting reactions of revulsion and discomfort, and relative ugliness, based on comparisons of the observer’s taste. The second part focuses on the relationship between the city and ugliness from four perspectives. The historical perspective analyzes London during the Industrial Revolution as the first Western metropolis to face large-scale urban disfigurement, based on literary accounts from the time. The collective memory perspective examines the traumatic renovations of Praça da Sé in São Paulo as cases in which judgments of obsolescence and ugliness served as a pretext for the erasure of entire historical layers of the city. The “urban landscape” perspective investigates the imprecise use of this term, suggesting that its origin derives from the British concept of “townscape,” which emerged precisely as a response to the blighting of modern cities; that is, the notion of “urban landscape” is not neutral, but emerges from aesthetic discomfort in the face of a degraded built environment, further discussing how its translation into Portuguese may have obscured this origin linked to ugliness. Finally, the philosophical perspective draws on the concepts of “environment” and “atmosphere” to describe extreme situations in which the built environment becomes toxic to the human experience. It is a form of ugliness that cannot be reduced to a matter of taste; it has a pure physical, sensory, and psychological impact on its inhabitants. The third part focuses on the photographic representation of urban ugliness. Beginning with the emergence in the 1970s of a photographic movement interested in the ordinary built environment, associated with the Düsseldorf School and the New Topographics exhibition, the thesis analyzes the Atlas fotógrafico da cidade de São Paulo e arredores, by photographer Tuca Vieira. The Atlas is interpreted not as an objective document of the city, but as a real-fictional narrative marked by the photographer’s subjectivity. The images are analyzed according to six categories of ugliness: monstrosity, humor, immorality, the relationship between old and new, otherness, and “inverdecer” (de-greening), a neologism proposed to designate the absence of vegetation in the urban environment, characterizing it as a form of ugliness that assaults the senses and mental health. It can be concluded that tackling urban ugliness requires the greening of cities in a fair and equitable manner, promoting the revival of aesthetic sensibility and memory as structural conditions for collective life.