Metropolis

Between 2009 and 2010, Ezio Ferreri photographed three major cities undergoing profound social, political and urban change. One was São Paulo, a South American city with a large community of Italian immigrants. From the early decades of the twentieth century, rapid economic development had transformed the metropolis into Latin America’s largest industrial centre.

In November 2009, the photographer stayed in Berlin. In the first twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989–2009), the city had already transformed its identity, evolving from a divided city into a vast laboratory for stitching its urban fabric back together. Whereas the East had been characterised by grey façades and dilapidated buildings in the early 1990s, much of its socialist-era housing stock had been modernised by 2009. In 2010, Ferreri travelled to Madrid, which was already living through the decade of the PAUs — Programas de Actuación Urbanística, launched in 1997 — that had radically transformed the outskirts of the Spanish capital. These years reshaped Madrid’s social and economic geography, creating ‘cities within the city’ intended to accommodate hundreds of thousands of new residents.