Friday, March 2, 2012

Visual Pollution

I recently watched the movie The Greatest Movie Ever Sold and within the movie they went to Sao Paulo Brazil and it was shown there that there are absolutely no advertisings to be seen outside. Billboards, posters on walls signs, even ads on the sides of buses are no where to be seen. The only thing that is to be seen is the weather stained walls and the outlines of where ads used to be. Now I have heard of pollution before; water, air, noise, and soil, but I never thought of the idea of visual pollution.

The idea of visual pollution is that there is an increase of ads that block the landscape of our cities. You may think that one or two billboards are all fine and dandy, but what if you have upwards of 15 to 20 billboards and you can no longer see the beautiful landscape, or mountains in the distance. Even in urban cities some of them are architecturally to be eye catching and appealing. Big cities have often been called the urban jungle.

Now jungles have there own natural beauty and we would not want to hide that with a bunch of billboards and business signs. So why would we want to do this with our cities?

I have included a link at the bottom that shows Sao Paulo before and after the billboard ban images. Even though the images show a small area, I still believe that the images of no ads are more appealing to the eyes. I am sure that if you are to look at Sao Paulo as a whole the after pictures would show a beautiful landscape that had gone unnoticed and for so long.

This raises the question, what would our cities (namely our urban cities) look like if there was no such thing as outdoor advertising?

Eric Westcott


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