Post Covid-19 São Paulo:
Potential matches between Technology and Social Innovation for an alternative future.
Personally, this is the hardest moment to write about Brazil. Trying to be positive in this complex situation is almost impossible but we have to focus on this exercise - otherwise there will be no progressive tomorrow.
Brazil was on alert even before coronavirus. We are facing an extreme situation and irresponsible government as our recent “new normal”. To make things worse at this unseen pandemic planetary lockdown, we have a multiple scenario with the scary combination of: an institutional, political, sanitary and ethical crisis.
Reaching the limit of insanity, public protests clamming the Military Dictatorship and the denial of quarantine measures are being supported by the Government. The health ministry was fired-out by the president Jair Bolsonaro for applying the WHO quarantine recommendations. The fatal impact is clear dropping our isolation rates worsening the spread of the disease.
To talk about the future of planning in a post Covid-19 scenario we have to look at what we have: technology, structure and deep social problems. This article doesn’t want to precociously foresee future trends. It aims to be an honest list about our network of possibilities already in march.
By one side, Brazilian startups are leading technological innovative sectors, on the other side, we have social innovation and solidarity networks created to take up the new challenges, even more necessary nowadays to act in a pandemic without governamental support.
Couldn’t be this a good combination for a progressive and inclusive new reality?
Brazil is devastated and will get worse.
At the moment of this publication Brazil had registered more than 163,000 cases and more than 11,123 fatalities. The government is denying the pandemic, social distancing measures and the quarantine, giving ‘priority’ to economic factors over people’s lives.
Numerous reports demonstrate that the impact will be devastating on our country. Our structural (and sometimes intentional) limited data hide the reality due serious sub-notification problems. The reality is worse than the official numbers exposing the necropolitics always present in our unequal society.
The results of public healthcare services privatization and lack of social income support have created a desperate scenario. Extreme poverty, unemployment, absence of basic services marks the neo-liberal promises failure and the actual far right conservative government of Jair Bolsonaro inconsistency.
The socio economic catastrophe is evidenced in the pandemic path that starts in the upper class (travelling internationally) and ends being lethal in the most vulnerable communities that do not have access to health systems and have to keep working hard.
São Paulo: Two realities of the same quarantine.
São Paulo is the troubles core, it has decreed calamity status and now reached 45,400 cases and 3,700 fatalities. The infinite hyperdense peripheries present the biggest fatalities rates, hardest socioeconomic impacts due informal workers without a fixed job, great part of them working cleaning medium-high classes houses or driving for delivery/ride sharing apps without stable contracts or labour security. Their daily lives are threatened by financial instability that will get worse without gouvernemental guidance.
This is one face of our technology: at the same time a promising scenario built by the startups projecting domotic lives and on the opposite sides millions working in precarious conditions.
The social structure of extreme inequality and poverty is not only reflected in the reality of the unequal quarantine that you have to face, but also exposes the poor daily urban lives made by material misery of many families that are unable to comply with the hygiene indications. These differences reveal how our cities, public space and housing reality were shaped in the intimate of each Brazilian family.
In São Paulo, the quarantine has two different realities; the wealthy living in fully automated homes, meanwhile 18,4 million of Brazilians not having daily access to water.
“Isolation for the middle class is a reality, isolation in a slum, on the periphery is another reality. The government did not make a communication to the periphery (…) it is up to us, in this Brasilândia Solidarity Network to develop a different communication methodology”. Interview with Flávio Ivo Aureliano (Brasilândia Community Leader).
Realism as the only way out.
If we look at our actual most technological developed sectors, Brazilian startups are solving many urban problems, facilitating processes and services locally and globally.
At the same time, organized civil society and social entrepreneurship initiatives are showing not just a golden progressive future against inequality, but also helping our populations to survive in this critical moment.
The “Brazilian way” is historically marked by solidarity initiatives to help neighborhoods, communities, and promote the absent public space. Not as a tactical urbanism strategy, but as a possibility to survive. Without the capability to change the condition once for ever they are not just an efficient palliative care, but also an important instrument for change - showing effective answers for a more efficient and inclusive urban future.
Leading Initiatives Possible matches.
We have to work on possibilities. Let’s exercise with the following diagram that tries to anticipate the combination of existing initiatives already focusing on many important urban topics before coming back to our hard Present.
We see many social projects that have emerged as a way to change the structure and services of our city that are not available yet for a large part of the population. We have a strong base to be solidified and social investments can be a good way for a perspective change, different from the current one in which many technological advances are not affordable for the large number of low/no income citizens.
We need to shorten the abyss between possible solutions. Social movements are already responding to fill the lack of many basic services, as are some startups. Social technologies could represent joint solutions to many of our citizens’ problems and we have structure for it, we must make them available.
We need to climb a future of social innovation linked to technology, however, the moment is difficult for all sectors. Many individuals, small/medium-sized companies are and will be deeply suffering because of the sanitary/economic crisis, as well as many startups that until now had a progressive path and will need to rethink the way of doing business.
A positive scenario would be that this support network will remain after the pandemic representing for us joint solutions for a promising future for all.
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