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 London's Selfridges has a lot to answer regarding the re-branding of Brazil. Last year the Oxford Street department store spent a month promoting and retailing various Brazilian-made products, from beachwear to sandals.
This publicity, coupled with various cultural events and favourable media comment propelled Brazil to the heady heights of 'cool'. Soon Brazilian chic was seen everywhere in London, with the exception of one redoubt: the scholarly community.
That was until yesterday. Last night it was the turn of dark-suited public intellectuals and their letterbox-shaped glasses to get their hands on a piece of Brazil.
Around the corner from London Bridge in the IKEA-furnished and stripped wooden floored office space that is New Labour's think tank of the moment, Demos, a conversational salon took place on the issue of Brazilian urban creativity.
Over cranberry juice and vodka, presentations were shown of low-tech and hi-tech solutions to particular challenges facing Brazil's cities. In Recife the re-colonisation of an abandoned dockyard and the creation of 5000 jobs had been achieved through the establishment of an ICT cluster in what is now called the Porto Digital.
Meanwhile in Curitiba its municipal authorities were encouraging recycling entrepreneurship. With only two recycling trucks available, Demos associate Charles Leadbeater noted that Curitiba's officials had promoted incentives to encourage individuals to organise their own waste collection, producing a recycling rate of 35% - a favourable level compared to many British cities.
The lessons were self-evident from the presentations: Brazilian cities were using government and its inhabitants in imaginative and creative ways to self-organise.
The question for the salon's participants was whether there was any way this more organic and grassroots form of organisation was possible in Britain - especially given the current top-down, bureaucratic approach which dominates most public services and official thinking.
As if to reinforce these points, attention was also drawn to other successful examples of Brazilian urban life, including the use of participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre and the urban planning of Brasília.
In the discussion though, some concerns were raised. Several participants questioned the Recife experience. In particular they asked to what extent its knowledge base was primarily university-based and if it had links with the wider urban and regional economy.
From this perspective the slide show images of the Porto Digital as set on an island, separate from the city was unfortunate: it emphasised the degree of disconnection between the new hi-tech cluster and the larger, poorer economy of the Northeast.
Another participant, reflecting the cultural images presented through Brazilian cinema and in particular the internationally-acclaimed City of God, questioned whether the urban space was as optimistic as that portrayed.
Was it not the case that this portrayed a section of urban life which was 'out of control'? If so, how were we to square that with the positive images portrayed by Curitiba's recycling project?
Disconcertingly, Leadbeater fell upon cultural explanations. He emphasised the idea of Curitiba as a melting pot, both in terms of the city's European heritage as well as the willingness of its political leaders to borrow ideas regarding community and citizenship from Europe.
He gave examples of this, including the creation of shared spaces such as parks, libraries and a comprehensive bus network. This caused some awkwardness among a few of the participants, because it seemed to implicitly reinforce notions of Northern superiority in a setting which was supposed to be about learning from the South.
There was also an absence of consideration paid to the fuel which drives Curitiba's recycling project: the city's informal sector. With informality now making up around 50% of Latin American economic life, a vast army of unemployed and underemployed people are struggling to find work.
Programmes like Curitiba's, whereby small sums of cash or payment in kind is offered to individuals to collect rubbish may benefit a few, but it certainly wouldn't transform the fortunes of the majority, tied as they are to predominantly insecure, low paid and subsistence-level forms of work.
Furthermore, the sheer size of the informal sector meant that while small-scale solutions could be tried in cities like Curitiba, it would be impossible to replicate in Britain with its predominately formal-based economy.
But Leadbeater claimed he wasn't concerned with that observation; what he drew from the example of Curitiba were lessons which could be applied more generally.
In particular he emphasised the need to break away from a traditional top-down solutions in favour of those which are more collaborative, colloquial and conversational with the public.
To assist that process of creativity and self-organisation, Leadbeater argued for political leaders who were willing to listen. Egotistic and charismatic politicians were not the answer. In his experience Curitiba's mayor and officials personified the ideal, being both willing to listen and receptive to new ideas.
With those thoughts in mind the meeting broke up, leaving the question hanging: how on earth is that to be achieved throughout Brazil, a country whose politicians are renowned for their flamboyance and characters?
The failure to grasp the reality of Brazilian political and economic life only emphasised the limited nature of the debate. In terms of providing a forensic examination of the Brazilian body politic and cultural creativity Demos's event was sorely lacking.
As an exchange of ideas it relied too much on too few examples, lacked sufficient public awareness of Brazil's urban reality and resorted to questionable cultural explanations as a result.
Consequently, the discussion was more froth than substance; a charge which is more often levelled against the luvvies associated with New Labour than the supposedly intellectual Demos.
Yet it wasn't all negative. As a theme, Demos's decision to organise an event around Brazil's cities is to be applauded. It has set down a marker for future discussion of the country at a public intellectual level outside of the rarefied air of academia. Hopefully next time the focus will be just a little bit sharper.
Guy Burton was born in Brazil and now lives in London. A postgraduate student at the Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London, he has written widely on Brazil both for Brazzil and on his blog, Para Inglês Ver, which can be read at http://guyburton.blogspot.com. He can be contacted at gjsburton@hotmail.com.
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