A Neighborhood on the Edge of the City
In 1997 I spent two months in the state of São Paulo on a mission internship, and something about Brazil got under my skin. I learned Portuguese there. A few trips later, in 2001, I moved to the country, got married, and started a family. Brazil has been part of my life ever since. Years later, I found myself living in Uberlândia — a city of more than 680,000 people in Brazil's interior, the fourth largest in that part of the country. It's a place with a genuinely good public bus system, a federal university, and private schools at every level, and it has a distinct character: a blend of urban ambition and rural roots that creates its own particular mix of ideas and culture. Within that city, though, there's a neighborhood that most visitors to Uberlândia would never see: Shopping Park. It's home to roughly 40,000 people, and it's been forming since the 1980s — largely without the basics that most of the city takes for granted. For years, residents had no reliab...