Advertising-free cities... what a concept

In an entirely unrelated student post discussing the Superbowl advertising and the huge stakes that attain to it (which I'm not linking to since the students have made it a private blog), a student mentioned advertising-free spaces.

Apparently, in 2006, the city of Sao Paulo banned all outdoor advertising. 'Fascinating idea', I thought. Being interested in urban planning in an amateur's kind of fashion and having lived in Sao Paulo many years ago, I was particularly interested in the experiment. I was a child when I lived there, so I don't recall anything particular about advertising, but I do remember being surprised by the density of everything in the city, particularly as it compared to the prairie city that I'd grown up in. But then of course my next thought was, 'I wonder if it lasted?'

It appears it has if The Cranbrook Guardian Blog is to be believed.To me, that's even more interesting. I spent some time virtually wandering the streets of Sao Paulo via Google maps and the city is indeed devoid of advertising, though one can find what appear to be sanctioned murals on some of the spaces.

Tony DeMarco's flickr stream documents some of the changes to the city immediately after removing the billboards. As he says, the city feels cleaner now that so much of the advertising (much of it illegal) has been removed. The only problem of course is that the empty signs are ugly while being less distracting. Today, it seems like many of those empty billboards have been removed.

Looking at DeMarco's flickr stream reminds me a bit of that advertisement that shows all the blank billboards waiting to be filled (I can't find it, but I believe it was for a design school). I've always thought they looked really nice as just white space.... Apparently I have to go to Sao Paulo to see something like that, though.