Can cities kick ads? Inside the global movement to ban urban billboards
First it was São Paulo, then Chennai. Then Grenoble, Tehran, Paris and now even New York have spawned movements to replace or ban outdoor advertising. Are we entering the age of ad-free cities – or is this just an eyecatching distraction?
Safe for eyeballs ... in a single year, São Paulo removed 15,000 billboards, many of which were replaced by street art. Photograph: Adam Hester/Corbis
This means far more than simply tearing down billboards. São Paulo is proof. Nazia Du Bois, who was an advertising executive in São Paulo at the time of the ban, noted that when the ads first came down, the city went through something of an identity crisis. “São Paulo is a pretty ugly concrete jungle, and the lack of outdoor advertising made that hard to ignore,” she says. “It was made particularly unfortunate by the fact that many of the former sites of advertising were simply left bare ... collecting grime over the shadow of what they’d been. That was always a bit sad to see.”
It was also instructive: tearing down ads helped uncover previously hidden inequality within the city, exposing favelas that had previously been blocked by billboards. Without the perma-glow of advertising, people were forced to confront public space in a new light.
Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/11/can-cities-kick-ads-ban-urban-billboards#img-1. Accessed on April, 28th 2017. Adapted.
Based on the text, there are the following statements:
I. Taking out the outdoor advertising, the city went through a kind of identity crisis.
II. In spite of having the outdoor advertising come down, São Paulo is still a pretty jungle.
III. Billboards were torn down and consequently the slums were exposed in São Paulo.
It’s correct only what’s affirmed in: