Jardins

This guide to the Jardins neighborhood in São Paulo opens with a grandfather's fall on a carpet of fallen blossoms decades ago, then traces why this ground turned out so lush. In 1915 an English company bought a stretch of land engineers judged too wet and flood-prone to build on, and British designers Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker made an unusual call about how to lay out its streets rather than force a grid onto it. Listen for it while walking the curving avenue named Alameda Campinas, where that old fall took place.