Brazil: A Century of Change

13. Metropolises and the Far West in the Twenty-first Century

= 320 = 13 JorGe WIlHeIM Metropolises and the Far West in the Twenty-first Century At the beginning of this new century, Brazil offers a varied and attractive panorama . It is the proud home of nineteen metropolitan areas, of which two are highprofile megacities, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. There are thirty more urban agglomerations with modern metropolitan characteristics. At the same time, the country is opening up new lands and expanding its economic frontiers beyond the Central Plateau, entering fragile Amazonia, sowing new cities all along the new highways that have penetrated the region. In other words, this is a highly urbanized country that is dealing with large urban areas along with a necklace of new cities in the Northwest. This panorama is interesting and diverse because, on the one hand, it requires dramatic solutions in the metropolises, ingenious ones for the consolidation of the network of midsize cities, and innovative ones for the newcities.On the other hand, it offers the energy of a creative, mobile, culturally syncretic, and racially mixed people. This exciting picture is a counterpoint to one of chronically anemic urban planning and an odd omission on the part of the federal government until 2001, when a new national law—the Statute of the City (Estatuto da Cidade)—was drafted. Until then, no public policies for Brazil’s heavily urban reality had been implemented on a national scale. In fact, the federal government thought it had an urban policy because in 2000 it had established a somewhat coherent multiyear budget that dealt with health programs and urban transportation. At the same time, one cannot think of cities just in terms of their sectors and infrastructure . Cities are the stage on which nowadays we elaborate and display culture, s s MetroPolISeS aND tHe Far WeSt = 321 = basic decisions about development, the life of modern society, the fostering of citizenship, and the crucial global connection. They are the seats of innovation and critique. They are the command centers and interfaces among markets, producers , rural production, and global demand. They are the targets of financial interests that are based there as well as actions of organized crime, which is also globalized. It would be difficult for such a reality, crucial to any development strategy, to be understood or to be acted on through a vision limited to isolated issues. Other chapters of this book have described the social and political trajectories and other phenomena that have transformed the urban network in the course of the twentieth century. Previously, Brazilian urban centers were scattered along the coast, either because they were historically connected to the Portuguese metropolis as ports or because the Central Plateau that dominates the Brazilian interior ends in an escarpment above the narrow coastal strip, always presenting a challenging green wall to overcome. The larger colonial urban areas, all on the coast, were the successive capitals, Salvador and Rio de Janeiro, along with the provisional seventeenth-century Dutch capital of Recife. Several other urban areas, however, resulted from the need to create bases for trade and support services for agricultural and mineral exploitation or the need to establish solidly the military and symbolic values of colonial domination. Examples of these included Vila Rica do Ouro Preto in the heart of the mining region and the boca do sertão (literally “mouth of the hinterland”) pioneer towns that facilitated the conquest of new lands, such as São Paulo de Piratininga, at its beginning. The succession of economic cycles led by agricultural exploitation (brazilwood , sugarcane, coffee) and mining corresponded to territorial settlement that was not always marked by important urban areas. The huge size of the Brazilian territory was certainly one of the reasons that Brazil did not have the village life so typical of European urban centers in their early days. The daily going and coming of agricultural workers, conditioned by the rhythms of planting and harvest , with seasonal breaks dedicated to urban tasks, arose only recently, in the second half of the twentieth century, with the bóias-frias (migrant laborers; see chapter 2) and the wage-earning rural workers living on the outskirts of midsize cities in precarious preurban circumstances. In the earlier centuries, the rural worker was condemned to live on the farm or plantation itself, whether as a slave in the quarters or, later, as a tenant employee on the property. At that time, the autonomy of the farm or plantation was relative; it could not do without certain support services...