Ourgrations

Brazil: A history of urbanization

When considering some of the problems attached to our industrializing world, it is possible to ignore the history that has produced these modern misfortunes. The growing pains of urbanization, drug use, and other problems present in rapidly developing urban areas seem to be so closely tied with the modern age that looking to the past for an answer to the problems of the present seems almost naive. However, in the case of rapidly developing Brazil, this historical lens proves to be particularly beneficial in looking at the effects of urbanization on the country’s booming population. Although it is possible to view the current problems accompanying unregulated urbanization in Brazil as unique and self-contained, only through analysis of the historical impacts of colonialism, slavery, and modern-day marginalization of the poor are the patterned implications of Brazilian urbanization fully understood.

Brazil’s founding as a Portuguese colony in 1500 constituted its initial “urbanization” period (though on a much smaller scale than it is being carried out today). As was true of most colonies, Brazil was set up with a single purpose: to serve the interests of the mother nation. In the case of the Portuguese, this included monopolized trade and shipping natural resources back to Portugal. In a land relatively untouched by the “modern” societies of the west, Brazil was devoid of cities and thus required urbanization from absolutely nothing to accomplish this goal. Without any other model to follow in organizing their newfound territory, the organizers of Brazil sought replicate their beloved capital, Lisbon. “At no time did the Portuguese, who discovered the country in 1500 and held it until 1822, provide a code of rules for urban development. Their cities grew without being planned in a kind of picturesque confusion that is as typical of Luso-Brazilian cities as order and clarity are typical of the urbanism of Spanish America. Lisbon itself served as a model which was followed in various degrees of exactitude in different sites all over the Portuguese empire” (Smith 7). This initial haphazard stage of urban development would have a profound impact on the developing nation, one that wasn’t present in competing colonies established by the Spanish.

In contrast to the extremely narrow, curving streets of the Portuguese cities was the gridiron plan of urban development used by the Spanish consisting of broad, sweeping streets that formed blocks and squares. While this system may have produced a somewhat bland appearance, it was extremely conducive to the eventual urbanization of Spanish cities since the addition of streets simply followed the pattern already established by the original city planners. “In Portuguese America, on the contrary…[cities] developed without formal plans in strip formation at several levels, with narrow steep streets that rendered any communication difficult. The resulting plans [were] all different [and] disordered” (11). While the formation of these original cities may be viewed as some past, distant problem, their founding had very real implications when the nation was forced to deal with a large population of homeless persons seeking shelter: the end of Brazilian slavery.

Brazil’s current problems of urban ghettos (known as favelas)and “informal settlements are first associated with the abolition of slavery and the subsequent lack of official urban socioeconomic integration” (Huchzermeyer 86). The 1888 abolition of slavery in Brazil produced a large population of homeless people who quickly formed small “informal settlements” on the fringes of the existing cities. With these large groups of uneducated, unemployed, former slaves gathering in and around the city, many of the upper-class population left for safer, wealthier, suburbs (a movement writer Ney dos Santos Oliveira likened “to the initial abandonment of the inner city and the move to the suburbs by middle- and upper-class whites [in New York City which] facilitated the concentration of poor people, including blacks, in the inner city [following the Civil War]” (Oliveira 76)). This mass migration created very distinct class inequality that is still present in Brazilian society today. Furthermore, this clearly defined class inequality enabled the upper class to institute a series of reforms enabling continued exploitation of the poor. “This [exploitation] was made possible through class domination, reinforced by a limitation on the political franchise [including] the literacy criteria applied in Brazil until 1979 largely deny[ing] the rural peasant population and the urban and urbanizing poor a voice through the vote” (Huchzermeyer 87). Thus, through disenfranchisement, the upper class was able to maintain their control over the government and institutionalize their policy of inaction toward the nation’s poor. This ingrained sense of class inequality has permitted these unfair land policies to continue into today. Many of these institutionalized inequalities are the source of the modern-day marginalization of the Brazil’s poor.

Although it is possible to analyze the problems of a given situation separate from the history that has produced them, considering how the problems arose is vitally important in determining how they are going to be solved. Indeed, in the case of the modern problems of urbanization in Brazil, the problems can be seen as having been sowed in the nation’s founding. Due to the initially poor urban planning by Portuguese colonizers seeking to replicate their native Lisbon, Brazil was doomed to fail when confronted with an issue as overwhelming and complex and post-slavery racial and housing inequality. Furthermore, it was the mass migration of most of the city’s urban elite to safer suburbs and the subsequent institutionalization of disenfranchising government policies that removed any voice for active change from those suffering in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery. Finally, it is that codified inequality, subject to the whims and desire of big business in Brazil’s booming economy that is continuing the history of exploitation and inequality that lies at the root of the problems of urban Brazil. Yes, the psychological negatives of the urbanization movement are harmful. The drug problems, child prostitution, prevalence of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases are horrifically prevalent. But, before we can attack these larger issues, perhaps we should prevent any further damage by acknowledging their source. In the case of Brazil, this “source” is the nation’s history of urbanization, modernization, and industrialization at all costs but most often occurring at the expense of the country’s poor.

Works Cited

Godfrey, Brian J. "Modernizing the Brailizan City." Geographical Review 81.1 (1991): 13-34. JSTOR. 3 April 2008.

Huchzermeyer, Marie. " Informal Settlements: Production and Intervention in Twentieth-Century Brazil and South Africa ." Latin American Perpectives 29.1 (2002): 83-105. JSTOR. 3 April 2008.

Oliveira, Ney dos Santos. "Favelas and Ghettos: Race and Class in Rio De Janeiro and New York City." Latin American Perpectives 23.4 (1996): 71-89. JSTOR. 3 April 2008.

Smith, Robert C. "Colonial Towns of Spanish and Portuguese America." The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 14.4 (1955): 3-12. JSTOR. 3 April 2008.