Beyond Brasilia: Contemporary Urbanism in Brazil (review)

I welcome Beyond Brasilia as a book long overdue. For those who follow architecture and urbanism in Brazil, there is a consensus that too little was published between the 1960s and the 1990s. And although the last decade witnessed a renaissance in the scholarly literature on Brazilian architecture, the large majority has been about revisiting the outstanding achievements of mid-century modernism. Meanwhile, discussions of urbanism and planning have been rare and dispersed in journal articles.

This book has the merit of stitching together 12 articles that deliver a clear picture of what happened in Brazilian cities after the 1960s. The in-depth discussion of individual chapters is supported by a comprehensive introduction by Del Rio. Despite being a little too focused on the technocratic planning of the 1970s and a little too light on the changes in urban laws after 1988 (which are very important), Del Rio’s introduction is a resourceful text, one that should be read by anybody attempting to understand Brazilian cities.

For the sake of organization I will touch briefly on every chapter thereof, hoping to present a useful guide for the readers. The first one, by Frederico Holanda, discusses Brasilia and, as hinted by the book title, aims at what happened after its inauguration in 1960. It is absolutely worth reading about the discrepancies between Lucio Costa’s plan and the city inaugurated four years later. On the same note, Holanda measures the high level of spatial segregation and discusses how preservation exacerbates such exclusionary urbanism. The second chapter about the new city of Palmas in the northern state of Tocantins demonstrates the strong presence of modernism dogma as late as the 1980s. The developmental project keeps forging ahead, in this case building a new administrative city that continues the northwest expansion.

The third chapter on São Paulo’s verticalization, by Silvio Macedo, is one of the strongest in the book, empirically based and well framed theoretically. In the Americas, São Paulo makes for a dramatic example of verticalization and Macedo’s analysis is an important contribution for understanding such phenomena. The next two chapters, on shopping centers and cultural corridors respectively, are somewhat antagonistic. Together they reveal a dilemma of contemporary Brazilian cities: to resist the abandonment of traditional areas or to embrace the pasteurized comfort of shopping malls. This paradox is not resolved by the editors either since one chapter was placed under the section on modernism and the other under revitalization. In addition to Rio’s cultural corridor, the section about revitalization is completed with case studies about Pelourinho in Bahia, the riverfront in Belem and the redesign of brownfields in Porto Alegre. These were extremely different cities with similar strategies: commerce and tourism used as the magic wand to make the best of their existing built environment. In this case Brazil is not all that different from the rest of the world.

The last section on social inclusion is where the specificity of the Brazilian experience can be read more strongly. On Curitiba, much has already been written and debated, but Clara Irazabal’s contribution is strong in its discussion about the contemporary limitations of the technocratic approach. Chapters 10 and 11 bring us back to Rio and São Paulo, discussing local identities in a poli-nucleated city. Last, but by no means least, is the chapter in which Favela Bairro, a pioneer program of slum upgrade, is discussed. Given the extent of similar projects being carried out in Brazil in the last five years, I anxiously wait more scholarship evaluating the upgrading of informal settlements to appear. Issues such as participatory budgeting should also receive more attention, for they are innovative practices of social inclusion that have blossomed in contemporary Brazil. It is, however, understandable that no single book can cover everything, especially one that appears after decades in which so little was written about Brazilian urbanism. The omissions, I hope, will...