Sunday, January 6, 2008

Urbanism, Architecture, and The Use of Space

By far the most important demographic change in Brazil's recent history has been its shift from a predominantly rural to an urban society. As recently as 1940, more than two-thirds of Brazilians lived in rural areas, but by 2000 the proportion of rural dwellers had dropped to 22 percent. The "urban designation," however, includes many small cities as well as the large population centers of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

With urbanization has come a number of intractable social problems. The large cities of southern Brazil have long attracted migrants from the impoverished north, but the economies of these cities have not expanded rapidly enough to absorb all these migrants. Unemployment, underemployment at subsistence wages, poverty, and crime have been the result. So, too, have been the growth of shantytowns, such as the famed hillside favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Favelas are extralegal settlements consisting of makeshift dwellings that lack urban services.

Until the late 1970s various municipal governments dealt with substandard housing through urban renewal, demolishing it to make way for "modern" buildings and thoroughfares and building public housing—often miles from the city center—for the displaced poor. Such benighted attempts to solve the problem were largely replaced in the 1980s with efforts to regularize the status of favelas by providing them with electricity, sewage, paved streets, schools, and clinics, a sign of the growing political clout of their inhabitants.

The desire of many of the urban poor to live in centrally located shantytowns stems from the fact that most Brazilian cities are ringed by miles of working class suburbios (suburbs) that necessitate long commutes to jobs in the city center. In other words, unlike in the United States, poor people in Brazil are more likely to live at the outskirts of urban areas—the suburbs—while the middle class and well-to-do tend to live in more conveniently located neighborhoods in the heart of the city.

Cities, especially big cities, have movimento—a quality of liveliness and bustle that most Brazilians value. And some Brazilian cities have a great deal of movimento indeed. São Paulo, a metropolitan area of sixteenth million people and one of the fastest growing cities in the world, is Brazil's New York, Chicago, and Detroit all rolled into one. Rural zones, in contrast, are generally viewed by urbanites as backlands, as dull places of unrelieved poverty.

Cities have played an important role in Brazilian history. After all, few other countries have had three national capitals. During the colonial period when sugar was king, the nation's locus was the northeast coast and Salvador was the colonial capital. Then with the eighteenth century gold boom centered in the state of Minas Gerais in the southeastern part of the country, the capital was moved to Rio de Janeiro where it remained until the founding of Brasília in 1960.

Urban architecture in Brazil owes much to the legacy of Portuguese colonialism. Cities such as Ouro Prêto and Rio de Janeiro grew in importance long before industrialization had brought the factory or the automobile to Brazil. These cities, which influenced patterns of urban construction throughout the country, were largely modeled on Portuguese cities. The neighborhoods built during colonial times have narrow streets with continuous building facades that converge on central plazas. These open areas are often the sites of churches or government buildings, constructions imbued with symbolic power by being set off from the solid mass of private dwellings that line the streets.

Brasília was designed to be the ideal modern city and its architecture and planning were meant to transform Brazilian society. But in Brasília today the distinctions between haves and have-nots are all too apparent, concrete reflections of the nation's social and economic divisions. In planning Brasília no provision was made for housing the thousands of workers who built the city or the thousands more who would service it. The only provision for them was the inclusion of tiny maids' rooms in apartments built for the middle class. As a result, jerry-built satellite cities ringing the urban core grew up to house the workers the planners forgot.

The complaints of Brasília's residents illuminate the customary use of urban space in Brazil. Many express dislike for Brasília's traffic circles which replace the intersections and street corners found in most Brazilian cities. This highlights the importance of the street in Brazil as a site of social encounters and public activities.

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