Santos Surreal

Brazil excels in superlatives, and Santos is in a category of its own. It boasts the longest tree lined urban beach park in the world, is the most verticalised city in the country, and tops the rankings for urban heat islands, thermal sinkholes created by the canyons of high-rise towers that prevent sea breezes cooling the interior. [1] Despite this unwanted accolade, the city also proclaims to possess the highest standard of living in the country in terms of education, health and infrastructure. This is big news for those on the periphery living  in the continent’s largest stilt built favella, the “cidade palafita”, that straddles the Rio dos Bugres, a stretch of tar black river that is the most polluted in the world. On a visit to the community in 2025, Lula described the precarious living conditions of the twenty thousand inhabitants as utterly degrading. In a parallel universe on the other side of the city, the colossal new ‘luxury’ towers of the Ilhas Resort loom over the entrance to the Port, which yes, is the biggest in Latin America. It was my sixty-seventh birthday, and as a special present, friends organised a visit as prospective buyers. As an urban critic reared on Marxist analyses of urban land speculation it was a gift that I could not refuse. For a moment I felt as if I was in a demented school of architecture end of year exhibition, surrounded by a perverse celebration of the capitalist building industry.  I was treated to an immersive video tour of all that urban paradise has to offer followed by a walk around meticulously built illuminated models of the thirty-five storey sentinels that have been designed to reinforce the benefits of living in a fortified condominium. Like a set from a dread film about urban claustrophobia they are intended to represent the joy of complete isolation and exclusion from the rest of the city. The Ilhas Resort has everything that you could possibly ever want. An exclusive artificial beach, whisky and cigar club, a shopping plaza, hairdressers, bars, restaurants, and armed security patrols. Best of all, you can avoid all contact with ordinary working-class folk except when they enter through the service lift to clean and walk the dogs. With strict codes of conduct, such places have a peculiar carceral quality, a voluntary form of imprisonment for the aspirant upper-middle class who wish to shut out the rest of the world. My wife kicks me to be respectful. It is difficult, for this is a type of architecture born out of fear that spells the end of time. An aberrant environmentally destructive vision of the future, such urban developments are a global phenomenon and a symptom of the crisis of contemporary capitalism in which ecological catastrophe and grotesque forms of socio-spatial inequality are normalised and made concrete.

[1] According to the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics. See https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/cotidiano/2025/12/verticalizada-santos-lidera-em-ilhas-de-calor-no-litoral-de-sp.shtml