In January, South America’s largest city officially banned outdoor advertising.

Forget culture jamming, let's just get rid of all outdoor advertising.

This is amazing!

Billboards, neon signs, bus-stop ads, even the Goodyear blimp - all were suddenly illegal. Folha de Sao Paulo reporter Vinicius Galvao describes seeing his city as though for the first time.

http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2007/04/20/04

VINICIUS GALVAO:They uncovered a lot of problems the city had that we never realized. For example, there are some favelas, which are the shantytowns. I wrote a big story in my newspaper today that in a lot of parts of the city we never realized there was a big shantytown. People were shocked because they never saw that before, just because there were a lot of billboards covering the area.

BOB GARFIELD: No writer could have [LAUGHING] come up with a more vivid metaphor. What else has been discovered as the scales have fallen off of the city's eyes?

VINICIUS GALVAO: Sao Paulo's just like New York. It's a very international city. We have the Japanese neighborhood, we have the Korean neighborhood, we have the Italian neighborhood and in the Korean neighborhood, they have a lot of small manufacturers, these Korean businessmen. They hire illegal labor from Bolivian immigrants.

And there was a lot of billboards in front of these manufacturers' shops. And when they uncovered, we could see through the window a lot of Bolivian people like sleeping and working at the same place. They earn money, just enough for food. So it's a lot of social problem that was uncovered where the city was shocked at this news.