Spatial Effects

Abstract

Today, it is difficult to imagine a discussion of utopia and/or dystopia in Latin America that does not broach the topic of Brasilia, the capital city whose astonishing emergence on the formerly barren scrubland of Brazil’s interior central plateau transpired just over fifty years ago. An architectural project of unprecedented scale, Brasilia came into existence under the developmentalist ethos of then president Juscelino Kubitschek, working in conjunction with city planner Lúcio Costa and architect Oscar Niemeyer.¹ The confluence of a wildly optimistic idea, a master plan, and tens of thousands of workers resulted in the materialization of a new, interior capital city. Unlike the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia was projected as a utopia that would leave behind Rio’s urban entropy and social inequality, acting instead as a harbinger of “Order and Progress,” the ideals of modernization.² The rest of the story is by now well rehearsed. Utopian aspirations turned sour as inequality rivaling (if not surpassing) that of Rio and urban ills (shantytowns, crime, traffic, corruption, and unsightly decay) have become a permanent part of Brasilia’s landscape. Having just celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in April 2010, Brasilia has inspired a new wave of scholarly scrutiny across the disciplines with an expanding bibliography on the ramifications of the utopian vision that led to its construction. But while different aspects of Brasilia as an architectural, technological, and sociological phenomenon have been extensively researched, the spatial politics of the city’s original plan and the configuration of its material reality, especially with regard to other artistic propositions that it spurred, have not been addressed.

“Change life!” “Change Society!” These precepts mean nothing without the production of an appropriate space. A lesson to be learned from the Soviet constructivists of 1920–30, and from their failure, is that new social relationships call for a new space, and vice versa.

—Henri Lefebvre, La production de l’espace (The Production of Space)