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As dusk settled one day last summer over a majestic graffiti-splattered avenue in the world's third-largest city, a truck slammed into a Honda motorcycle carrying two messengers. The "motoboys" died of head injuries a few minutes after the unidentified driver fled the scene, his truck fusing with the city's coagulating rush hour. Moments later, as news of the incident circulated throughout the city over cell phones and beepers, some 300 motoboys rushed to the scene to protest their colleagues' death. As their bodies lay crumpled on the shoulder of the avenue, already stalled traffic became worse, creating a bottleneck that stretched miles up the winding concrete tributaries. For those trapped in their cars or on overcrowded municipal buses, it was just another day of traffic in São Paulo, Brazil.

Hold a magnifying glass up to a city's traffic flow, it is believed, and you'll begin to understand its character. In São Paulo, what one sees is unmitigated, chaotic sprawl. One of the first impressions you have after touching down in this laboratory of urban-planning missteps is of the motoboys, weaving through the slow-moving traffic of São Paulo's canyons. Yet it is when one examines the vertical and horizontal breadth of this Los Angeles-on-speed that the magnitude of São Paulo's problems comes more clearly into focus.

"The first lesson São Paulo offers is that no city should grow so arbitrarily," says Oscar Niemeyer, the legendary 93-year-old Modernist architect and city-planner. "The second lesson of São Paulo is that its people, and the people of cities in poor countries elsewhere, should have the right to a habitat that is more graceful." Niemeyer has left his mark on São Paulo, with his curvaceous Copan residential building in the heart of downtown and with the Memorial da America Latina, an otherworldly, serene sea of reinforced concrete supported by a sculpture of a massive hand bathed in blood. But his works, together with the handful of other notable structures in the city, are overwhelmed by the multitude of drab high-rises that engulf them.

There is perhaps no better illustration of the dangers of sprawl than São Paulo. The richest city in the Third World (but too poor for the First) it contains some 17 million people, 4 million automobiles, and 10,000 miles of streets. The public-transportation system is woefully inadequate; its three small subway lines are saturated by 2.5 million passengers each day (New York's twenty-five lines carry 4.3 million) while an army of illicit minivans competes with municipal buses to transport twice that number along the city's crazy-quilt of streets. "No direct relationship between the activities of urban planning and intense population growth can be perceived in São Paulo's history," says Bruno Roberto Padovano, a professor of architecture at the University of São Paulo and president of the city's Institute for Advanced Design. According to Padovano, when a few serious urban-planning initiatives did get underway in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was too little, too late. By that time Brazil was in the throes of one of history's largest internal migrations, as millions of people from the country's hardscrabble, drought-ridden northeast sought a better life in the industrialized southeast. "By then, urban planning was unable to offer any consistent means to deal with the explosion of São Paulo's population," says Padovano. The resulting slash-and-burn growth permeates the city's entire aesthetic. São Paulo's hard edges have long fascinated its observers.

"The cities of the New World have one characteristic in common: that they pass from first youth to decrepitude with no intermediary stage," observed anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in the 1930s, when he taught inaugural classes at the University of São Paulo. Absorbing more than a million immigrants, mainly from southern Europe and Japan, São Paulo was a testing ground for the effects of diversity and growth during the first few decades of the twentieth century. The city's lust for wealth was articulated in the Modernist commercial buildings that sprouted at the intersection of its two rivers, the Anhangabaú and Tamanduateí. A glimpse of the feverish building spirit that gripped the city can still be seen in the imposing Martinelli building downtown, São Paulo's first skyscraper. Yet Lévi-Strauss, fascinated by the energy and diversity of São Paulo, could never bring himself to call the city ugly. He marveled at São Paulo's ability to reinvent itself, found charm and humanity in its rock and steel, and noted its similarities with Chicago and other great American cities. What might he think today?

Of course, Brazil is feverishly obsessed with being touted as the country of the future (and always will be, the cynical saying here goes). Throughout the city, residents are assaulted by a Blade Runner-esque barrage of neon signs, massive television screens, and garish billboards. In one of São Paulo's more exclusive districts, the Avenida Brigadeiro Faria Lima, where office buildings house investment banks and dot-com start-ups, an immense Reuters screen constantly streams real-time updates of news from around the world. "Two foreign journalists dead in ambush in Sierra Leone," it announces, followed up by images of a clash between police and public servants at a demonstration taking place a few neighborhoods away. If there is any city in the developing world that could be called "global," in the parlance of urban theorists, this is it. "We're the clearing house for the whole country," says Adhemar Altieri, an Internet entrepreneur, "so it's not surprising our advertising landscape is such a hodgepodge of things."

"On São Paulo's side is its enormous dynamism, its cultural level, and the considerable concentration of knowledge," says Jorge Wilheim, one of the country's most prominent urban planners. Yet while nearly everyone agrees São Paulo has the human capital*and probably even the financial means*to improve the quality of life of its residents, there are few indications that a concentrated urban-planning and architectural effort will emerge as an important policy goal. After all, this is a city where street-level problems like unemployment, traffic, and crime tend to obscure the big picture.

According to union statistics, unemployment in São Paulo has hovered around 20 percent during the last several years as the city's economy has shifted from an industrial base to a more varied services-oriented structure. Worsening traffic jams and violent clashes between the owners of unlicensed minivans and the police have reinforced the feeling that commuting in the city is almost always nasty, brutish, and long. And the crime rate is among the worst in the world with 11,500 homicides last year, compared to New York's 671. In an effort to literally rise above these problems, São Paulo's wealthy have assembled the world's third-largest urban fleet of helicopters after New York and Tokyo. Andreas Adriano, who works as a content provider for an Internet startup, jokes, "There's little to do, except to try to get rich enough to afford a chopper." Gilberto Dimenstein, a columnist for the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo, says: "The self-esteem of the Paulistano is so low that we believe we're destined for an irreversible urban collapse." Recent developments in municipal politics haven't helped the situation.

In a life-imitates-art series of events resembling one of Brazil's steamy soap operas, the administration of Mayor Celso Pitta has become the target of corruption charges, with many of the accusations originating from his estranged wife, Nicea. After Mr. Pitta was spotted in Paris dining with a blonde socialite known for her scandalous liaisons, Ms. Pitta responded with a barrage of interviews in which she alleged the mayor was involved in activities ranging from buying city council votes to receiving a generous monthly allowance from a wealthy businessman. Mayor Pitta was subsequently removed from office twice by court order*and his key aids were sacked*only to be reinstated in a game of musical chairs that left Paulistanos mystified. In the meantime, a series of strikes and demonstrations by public-school teachers and other civil servants began to gnaw at the city's dynamism. As the so-called "Pittagate" scandal unravels, the prospect of upcoming mayoral elections later this year doesn't inspire optimism, with candidates ranging from a deposed former president to a socialist sexologist to a crypto-fascistic medical doctor whose rallying cry is a terse recitation of his Christian name, "Eneas."

Enter Roberto Mangabeira Unger, a 53-year-old professor of law at Harvard and long-time political activist in his native Brazil. Earlier this year he submitted a list of proposals addressing some of São Paulo's most pressing problems in order to float the idea of his candidacy for mayor. The author of several books on legal theory and political thought, Unger is emerging as one of academia's most widely respected thinkers (he co-wrote, for example, The Future of American Progressivism with Cornel West).

"The only real tragedy of bourgeois life would be not to combine thought with action," Unger says, citing Hegel. In 1979, while the country was still under military rule, he put this philosophy into practice by travelling to Brasília and drafting the founding manifesto of a new opposition party. More recently, Unger, along with other Latin American politicians like Mexico's Jorge Castañeda, established the Latin American Alternative, a reform movement advocating the implementation of market-friendly policies as a means of creating a new brand of participatory democracy in the region. This strategy has come closer to fruition in Mexico with the July election of Vicente Fox Quesada, the opposition candidate whose victory ended more than 70 years of one-party rule. As a close advisor to Ciro Gomes, a firebrand politician from the country's northeast who is leading the polls for the 2002 presidential election, Unger is hoping for similar results for Brazil.

Unger's ideas for São Paulo are of a scale appropriate to its problems. His proposals include a hefty tax on car use within city limits, with the proceeds to be invested in public transportation. Instead of extending an over-burdened subway system, which would be unrealistically expensive, the revenue would go towards the funding of above-ground rail and an improved system of buses. Crucially, free parking lots would be created around city limits where commuters could leave their cars and transfer to extensive public transportation. "There is no solution without a radical circumvention of the automobile," Unger says.

Another of his proposals is the regularization of the favelas, or shantytowns, which spring up wherever squatters can gain temporary respite from the police. A previous city government attempted to solve São Paulo's housing crisis by embellishing favelas with the costly construction of drab multi-story buildings in an initiative dubbed the "Singapore Project." Unger's new plan would grant property titles to favela residents and offer training in popular methods of building construction. Home-construction materials would be made available under a financing arrangement in which the guarantors of loans would be family members and friends, thus forming a web of multiple parties with interest vested in their community.

Perhaps the most sweeping of Unger's proposals involves the re-zoning of the city's many various "pseudo-centers," as he calls them, to stimulate the creation of parks and plazas within these areas. "One of São Paulo's basic problems as a city is that it is drowning in bastard 'multi-centricism,'" he says with characteristic brio. "The historic center emptied out and the new centers that arose are little more than commercial avenues." This attempt to carve public space out of some of the most densely developed land in the world would surely make Robert Moses smile.

While Unger's recommendations have generated a great deal of discussion among journalists and intellectuals, polls showed that only one or two percent of the city's residents would have supported his candidacy. Perhaps the lack of public enthusiasm is due to Unger's refusal to pull punches. Previous mayors didn't share this quality. The flamboyant Paulo Maluf, for instance, used to claim that São Paulo's legendary traffic was a sign of progress because the desire to own an automobile represented the desire to better oneself. It also couldn't have helped that Unger cuts a strange figure wherever he goes: professorial, intense, speaking his elegant Portuguese with a thick American accent. In any case, in June, the leaders of Unger's party cancelled the nominating convention and Unger returned to Cambridge, where his family lives. He now spends about a week each month in São Paulo advising presidential candidate Gomes.

Not all of São Paulo's problems are social or political*some are aesthetic. Recently there has been a craze for so-called neo-classical apartment buildings, which developers have given names like "Place des Voges" and "Parc de Bordeaux." Equipping the buildings with pillars and white plaster finishing, their creators clearly hoped to convey an image of Parisian class. This effect is somewhat diminished when these buildings*some rising 20 stories*exhibit premature signs of aging as the city's corrosive air takes its toll. João Dória Jr., an advertising executive who owns an apartment in such a building, explains its appeal: "The fact that São Paulo is a city with such diversity means that we should all be able to choose what we like best. I think Europe, and in particular France, is the reference for high culture so that is why this style is so appealing." But isn't he concerned about the negation of things Brazilian? "This is Brazilian culture, the welcoming adaptation of foreign things," Dória says. "We don't live in huts in the rain forest here, you know."

If neo-classical apartment buildings capture the stratified underpinnings of São Paulo society then it is probably the gleaming crop of skyscrapers along the banks of the murky Rio Pinheiros that represents the latest stage in the city's reckless expansion. Nestled against a highway that runs along a river reeking of sewage, the buildings present an intimidating show of reflective glass, steel, reinforced concrete, and helicopter landing pads. The lobbies are occupied by pistol-wielding guards and suggestively-clad receptionists who, in a chilly corporate welcome, electronically photograph each visitor and log his or her vital information into a computer. Still, strangely enough, the skyscrapers are a source of pride for some Paulistanos, who see them as a symbol of the city's creative muscle. "They are so beautiful, though I'm not sure exactly why," says Juliana Costa, a 23-year-old psychology student. "Maybe it is because they are so clean, so new, that they could not be anywhere else." One complex, the World Trade Center de São Paulo (WTCSP), exemplifies the character of the buildings that have gone up along the Pinheiros. The WTCSP's high-rise office tower is wired with the latest telecommunications hardware, enabling its corporate occupants to keep track of the rest of the world, and it is complemented by a five-star hotel, food court, convention center, and extensive shopping mall. Theoretically, a visitor to the WTCSP need not leave the fortress-like building during his or her stay in São Paulo, the only inkling that a jagged metropolis engulfs the building coming from a glance out one of the high-rise windows at the sprawling wood and cinderblock favela a few hundred yards away.

Despite the dearth of big-picture proposals addressing São Paulo's sprawl, smaller-scale efforts are attempting to make the city a decent place to live. Organizations like Associação Viva O Centro, a non-profit group supported by corporate donations, have succeeded in getting legislation approved that provides tax breaks for the upkeep of the city's remaining historic buildings. In the old center, restoration advocates have been inspired by the success of the Sala São Paulo, an old British-built train station that was renovated by the state government and turned into a state-of-the-art concert hall. Or there is the nearby Pinacoteca do Estado, a public art museum designed by the architect Francisco de Paula Ramos de Azevedo at the dawn of the twentieth century that has managed to preserve its dignified brick exterior despite its proximity to a loud, polluted thoroughfare and a crime-infested district downtown. And most recently, the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo led a campaign to combat the virus-like spread of graffiti throughout the city, succeeding in keeping "taggers" away from the Ladeira da Memoria, an intricate fountain downtown that had nearly been scratched out of São Paulo's memory as it disappeared under layers of spray paint.

But these examples are a drop in the bucket compared to what the city needs. Creaking under political mismanagement and the apathy generated by decades of haphazard growth, São Paulo is a city in retreat. Its haves seek refuge in shopping malls or in the privatized public spaces provided by fortified office buildings and well-guarded country clubs, while the have-nots fend for themselves among their "sepulchres of match boxes," as Roberto Mangabeira Unger puts it. Above it all, an elite speeds over in their helicopters, seemingly oblivious to the vast, pulsating center of life that persists below. So in a democratic paradox that appears to define today's Brazil, this is where São Paulo's advocates deposit their hope. "Aesthetically it must be the ugliest large city in the world," says Unger. "Fortunately, for the patient among us, it is also the most alive."