A foto da favela de Paraisópolis

This is a blog post about a famous photograph by Brazilian photographer Tuca Vieira, but also about how emotion and imagery can often be much more powerful than 'data'. I'm just posting it here as a round up of various tweets on the topic I have posted previously so that they have a more permanent place on the web. But first, here's the photo. It was taken from a helicopter above São Paulo in 2004 as part of a newspaper piece on the 450th anniversary of the city. The favela of Paraisópolis is on the left, with the much more affluent area of Morumbi to the right.

Tuca Vieira's famous image

The photo has been used to illustrate many different things, but usually it serves as an exemplar for urban inequality. I have used it to highlight how in spatial analysis near things are not always necessarily more alike (i.e. Tobler's First Law of Geography doesn't always hold) as well as to talk about inequalities. I wanted to use it in a new GIS book so I got in touch with Tuca and he agreed that we could use it (for a very reasonable fee). He also sent some of the other images he took from the helicopter that day, from slightly different angles. Very powerful stuff.

There is a separate story here about how the image took on a life of its own, detached from the photographer, and how hardly anyone credited Vieira or even acknowledged how much effort taking an image like this is. There isn't too much about the image or Vieira's thoughts on it online but see this short interview for more. By the way, Paraisópolis means 'Paradise City'.

Anyway, once I discovered that the city was on street view, I spent quite a bit of time trying to find the exact spot, and I eventually found it. It's taken from a spot roughly above Avenida Giovanni Gronchi, which you can see on the ground in this Google street view image.

My original tweet on this from 2016

 

The little street to the left separates the areas

You can also read a bit more about it on Tuca Vieira's website, though more recently I have only been able to find this via the wayback machine. The page tells a story about an exhibition in London in 2007 where he was invited, but apparently not so much included. This is how Google translates what for me is the key statement in his piece:

"this photo may make me achieve what should be the great goal of an artist: to provoke a reflection on the world and not on the work and its author".

You can of course now see the scene in 3D in Google Earth, as shown, below. Nowhere near as interesting or as powerful as the original picture but still pretty useful.

Direct link to this 3D view on Google 

Anyway, what really prompted me to look again at this recently was the arrival of Google Earth Studio, a fantastic new tool for creating pretty realistic, smooth animations of 3D scenes around the world. I decided to make a fly-to and orbit type animation of this in Google Earth Studio. The full resolution version is on my web server but I've also embedded a version below (which may not look so crisp).

Notes: as I said at the start, I'm posting this here so that all the information is in one place and not spread between various tweets. This also makes it easier for me to find the information as I'm always forgetting where I put stuff. The image itself also prompts wider questions - e.g. are we only outraged/impacted by this kind of image because the contrast is so stark and so geographically close together? Is it the proximity of wealth and inequality that is so shocking, and if so, would more distance make it more 'acceptable'? Is it only so alarming because we can see it? People will have different answers to these questions, and many more, but it is clear that the image continues to have power and relevance. Type in terms like 'urban inequality' and look at the images and this will probably still be at the top, or very near. Finally, it looks like there is another, newer version of this image on a different Brazilian website. The original seems to be this iStock one by C_Fernandes from 2016.

Deprivation and affluence, cheek-by-jowl

As part of some work I'm doing for a 'fracturing societies' seminar this summer, I've been thinking about the spatial manifestation of inequality in England. Some places will always be rich and some always poor - if we're defining it relatively - but the location of these places, their characteristics and their wider neighbourhoods may all differ significantly. That's one of the reasons I made a 10% most/least deprived interactive map last week and shared it online.

You can explore the map online here

This then raised the question in my mind of how many of the 10% most deprived areas in England neighbour areas among the 10% least deprived. In part, this was inspired by the famous image of São Paulo rich and poor taken by Tuca Vieira in 2007 and widely circulated since then (see below). The photo shows the favela of Paraisópolis on the left, right next to the upscale Morumbi neighbourhood over the wall. You can't really imagine a more stark divide. For more on this, see Teresa Caldeira's article from LSE Cities.

Credit: Tuca Vieira, 2007 - original here

In England, things are not quite as extreme as this example, but there is quite significant socio-spatial inequality nonetheless, as documented over the past few years by many observers, including the SASI research group here in Sheffield. It matters for many reasons, but life chances, health, opportunity and education are just a few of the major advantages/disadvantages experienced by people on either side of the rich/poor divide. 

The answer to my original question of how many of the 10% most deprived areas in England have a neighbouring area in the 10% least deprived is, I found, 75. I set about investigating further and here's what I found. You can see all the maps here but below I've provided a few examples to illustrate my points.

The most deprived area in England with a 10% least deprived neighbour is in Birmingham. On each map I've added in the LSOA name at the top, in addition to the LSOA ranks of the areas in question - as you can see here the one in Birmingham is ranked 38 out of 32,844 so it's right at the very most deprived end of the spectrum. But you can also see that the relationship with the neighouring area isn't like the example from São Paulo above. It's just more a feature of the way the boundaries are drawn. This is the case in quite a lot of the areas, but not all.

Just Google the LSOA name to see an interactive map

One area that's a bit different and where the most and least deprived are almost literally next door is in Gateshead. On one side of the road we have one of the most deprived areas in England right next to one of the least deprived over the other side. Mind you, the location of people within these is still not exactly of the 'cheek-by-jowl' category we see in São Paulo. Most local authorities don't have any areas with 10% most/least neighbours, but Kettering has three, one of which you can see below.

Not many most/least deprived are like this

This is partly an artefact of how the boundaries are drawn

More striking examples of areas where people live next door but in opposite ends of the deprivation spectrum can be found in Leicester, Norwich, Nottingham and Swindon - see below.

You can see this contrast on Google Maps

The Indices of Deprivation 2015 which I used to map the 10% most and least deprived areas do not measure affluence but the areas in the least deprived 10% are significantly wealthier, healthier and have lower crime rates - among many other differences - so it's a pretty reasonable proxy for affluence in many respects. 

All of this raises the vexed 'so what' question once more. Is spatial inequality worse when you can see it? Is it worse, or somehow more grotesque, when rich and poor live side-by-side? Wasn't that what the 'mixed communities' policies of the 2000s were all about? Well, sort of but not really. 

There is a mix of things going on here to create these patterns - sometimes it's housebuilding on brownfield land, sometimes there are physical or artificial features dividing neighbouring areas such as rivers, roads or railway lines, sometimes it's a boundary effect and the people in households aren't really neighbours. Either way, I find it very interesting and troubling at the same time. The plan is to keep working on this. I know it's not exactly São Paulo levels of contrast, but the big gaps between places - and particularly the life chances of young people - are really important.

Click on the image below to see all the maps.

Here are all 75 '10% most' areas with a '10% least' neighbour