São Paulo, a mosaic as viewed from Paim Street

Abstract

Todd Lanier Lester is a founding member of Lanchonete.org, and Paula Van Erven came onboard in the last two years of its five-year project, which questions the Right to the City. They consider urban artistic intervention and community organizing in São Paulo against the backdrop of their respective experiences. Lanchonete.org is an artist-led, cultural platform lasting for five years and focused on how people live and work in, navigate and share the contemporary city with the Center of São Paulo as our outlook. It gets its name from the ubiquitous lunch counters—con-
vivial, fluorescent-lit, open-walled, laborious, points of commerce—that populate almost every street corner. Lanchonete.org is about the issues that big cities face, the different forms of ‘urban power’, and the Right to the City, but not insomuch as to define these construct, but to stretch the ‘platform’ as far as is necessary to consider diverse viewpoints.