Saturday Photo: Dog-Walking Women Mean Safety in São Paulo--and Elsewhere

As I may have mentioned here, when I visited São Paulo a few years ago to work on Green City: People, Nature and Urban Places people gave me lists of places I shouldn't go and things I shouldn't do. It was unsafe to take the Mêtro, to walk alone, to enter parks, to take any taxi but ones from a certain number of companies... Their well-intentioned warnings were enough to give me shivers.

But I couldn't let them stop me. It's true that the city had one of the highest crime rates in the world (the murder rate, at least, has fallen dramatically since, it seems) but there was no way I could learn what I wanted by following the warnings.

What to do? First, I realized that the Mêtro is filled every day with hundreds of thousands of middle-class people going about their business peacefully. All I had to do was look like I belonged, and I could blend in safely. That wasn't hard, actually, because the ethnic mix of the Mêtro riders is not unlike what you find in Montreal: in other words, there were many people who looked like me.

Second, I went out early in the morning and walked around as honest folk were going to work. The scariest people were more likely to be off the street then, and once again I blended in as I got a glimpse of what ordinary life was like.

And, third (an outgrowth of those early morning walks,) is the observation that any place frequented by women of a certain age walking their dogs is going to be safe. The ladies know local conditions and are going to look out for each other. This photo was taken about 9 a.m.in Parque Trianon, which one internet trip advisor says "can be dangerous especially for tourists and at night. Pickpockets are known to frequent that park." While it might be a place to avoid after dark, these ladies didn't seem concerned. Nor was I.

As Jane Jacobs said, you need eyes on the street to make a city work, and that is particularly true in cities like São Paulo.