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8. Fifty Years’ Progress in Five: Brasilia—Modernization, Globalism, and the Geopolitics of Flight
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8 Fifty Years’ Progress in Five: Brasilia—Modernization, Globalism, and the Geopolitics of Flight Lars Denicke The airplane approaches Brasilia, after flying for some minutes over a ondulating tableland [sic], cut by low groves of trees. Then, at a distance, the reflection of a lake surprises us for its vast dimensions; the city, shaped like an airplane, rests near the shore. . . . The plane lands and the passengers are exposed to their first terrestrial contact with the city. The peninsula of our airport acts as a promontory, a terrace from which to admire Brasilia. 1 This was one of many enthusiastic voices commenting on the inauguration of the new Brazilian capital in 1960. The shift of the political center from Rio de Janeiro to the new city in the country’s less developed interior, more than 600 miles from the coastline, was central to Juscelino Kubitschek’s presidency from 1956 to 1961. The construction of Brasilia, accomplished in only three years, marked the technopolitics of development at high speed, titled, in Kubitschek’s government program, “Fifty Years’ Progress in Five.” As I will argue, Kubitschek’s program reveals the spatial logic of two central concepts of Cold War technopolitics: modernization and globalism. I use the term modernization to indicate the attempt of a nation, in this case Brazil, to upgrade its infrastructure to achieve a status that would put it on equal terms with the great powers. In one of the most prominent theories of modernization during the Cold War, W. W. Rostow propagated a model of linear progress, the “Stages of Economic Growth.” Here, the turning point is that of a “take-off into self-sustaining growth.” As I will argue, this metaphor is bound to the spatial logic of the connections made by an airplane as it moves from one airport to another. In examining this logic in the context of Brasilia, I will introduce the concept of reversed development.2 The concept of modernization is inseparable from that of globalism. Rostow’s political goal was to diffuse the conditions of modernity throughout the world, and he was influential in doing so as advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.3 The two concepts are also interwoven from an 186 Denicke analytical perspective. Bruno Latour ascribes lengthened technical networks to a modernity that has been projected into “global totalities.” According to Latour, these networks are “composed of particular places” and “are by no means comprehensive, global or systematic, even though they embrace surfaces without covering them, and extend a very long way.”4 This is striking in terms of the technology of flight. With its bird’s-eye perspective and the speed that it takes us to far-off places, flight revitalized the fantasy of a global sphere and the coherence of the whole earth. Airplanes transcend the division of sea and land that governed geopolitical thinking for centuries .5 At the same time, their routes are not continuous but are connected by isolated nodes on the ground—airports. The construction of Brasilia was intended to represent a center of the imagined global sphere of modernization. This technopolitical strategy was configured within the context of the legacy of World War II, in which Brazil provided essential nodes in the network of allied logistics for air transport . Before examining this genealogy, I focus on the relevance the airplane had for the conception of modern architecture and urbanism, following a thread from Le Corbusier to the very architects who created both Brasilia’s urban plan and its most iconic buildings. Brasilia—Doomed to Modernity Brasilia is “doomed to modernity,” as one author has recently put it.6 No attempt to tell the story of the city can avoid contextualizing it within the discourse of an architecture and urbanism that originates with Le Corbusier . In the 1920s, the Swiss-born architect emerged on the European scene with his radical visions of a new era. His utopian city, detailed in his 1929 publication The City of To-Morrow and Its Planning, was a clear break from the history of the city as a continuous development starting with the medieval village. Le Corbusier drew a regular grid in which 24 skyscrapers were placed in open spaces with parks, museums, residential units, and commercial areas. Each skyscraper was linked to the city’s underground system and served as the center of a district. In this way, Le Corbusier wanted to free the city from its fate of continuous density and overlaying. “We must build in the...