50 years on, Brazil’s utopian capital faces reality

The dream was big. In just a few years, Brazil would build a modern capital in the middle of a savanna, an experiment in egalitarianism that would also shift power toward the center of the vast country.

As Brasilia turned 50 years old on Wednesday, vestiges of that dream live on in Oscar Niemeyer’s soaring architecture, the uniform residential apartment blocks, and the plane-like city shape that legend has it was meant to signal the Latin American giant’s take-off.

While its sterile atmosphere is not for everyone, some are drawn here by its relatively traffic-free streets, its large open spaces and a feeling of security compared to other big Brazilian cities such as former capital Rio de Janeiro and its business capital, Sao Paulo.

Brasilia’s economy has grown briskly in recent years, spurring a new class of rich whose members face a daily battle to keep the city’s iconic red earth off their designer clothes.

But hopes that the modern capital would engender a new Brazil have largely fallen by the wayside as development has brought with it the plagues of other Brazilian and Latin American cities: overpopulation, inequality, violence and corruption.

“The development was very unequal. The plan for Brasilia did not foresee such uncontrolled demographic growth,” said 35-year-old waiter Raimundo Nonato who lives in Arapoanga, one of the many poor neighborhoods on Brasilia’s outskirts.

A real estate boom priced many poorer residents out of central areas and drove the expansion of satellite cities populated by many of those who work for the capital’s wealthy civil servants. The city, home to about 2.5 million people, was judged to be among the world’s most unequal by the United Nations’ housing agency.

Niemeyer, a famous architect and communist, said he is disappointed at the huge wealth gaps that now scar the capital, home to his soaring cathedral and twin dome Congress building.

Arapoanga, about 50 minutes drive from the center and a world away from the gated homes of politicians and civil servants, suffers from violence, precarious infrastructure and a lack of sanitation. Mud from dirt roads ruins the paved streets during the rainy season and ditches meant for sewage are clogged with trash.

Plans to pave more roads and build a sewage system were put on hold this year after the state governor was jailed for corruption charges, residents said, the latest in a long line of graft scandals that Brasilia has seen over the years.

“God only knows when we will have sewage,” said 54-year-old Terezinha de Jesus Santos, pointing to the debris.

PIONEERING DREAMS

Brasilia’s modern problems hardly diminish the audacious political and construction feat of building a capital city from scratch in less than four years, something that will be the focus of celebrations this week.

President Juscelino Kubitschek, riding a period of rampant growth, industrial development and national confidence in Brazil, succeeded in his goal of shifting the center of power from the traditional elite in Rio.

An army of workers and thousands of trucks worked at a furious pace, removing millions of tons of red earth as the city rose from the middle of Brazil’s empty central plateau.

“He was a magnet of optimism and a generator of self-confidence,” said civil engineer Luiz Carlos Botelho Ferreira, whose father was transferred to Brasilia to work at Novacap, the company created to build the city.

Roads such as the one built from Brasilia to the city of Belem at the mouth of the Amazon river connected what at the time was little more than farmland to the rest of the country.

Poor workers seeking money and a better life, known as “candangos,” briefly found a new land of opportunity.

But hopes that the construction of Brasilia would be a source of development for the center of the country have only been partially met.

Gross domestic product in the federal district jumped around 25 percent in the five years to 2007, but it only represented 3.8 percent of the economy that year in contrast to 11.2 percent for Rio state and 33.9 percent for Sao Paulo, government data show. The central-west region around Brasilia only made up 8.9 percent of GDP in 2007.

“I have no doubt that Brasilia really is an enclave in the central west with little multiplying effect for the region,” said Carlos Alberto Ramos, an economics professor at the University of Brasilia.

“You have an economy with high income — one of the highest in the country. So it generates a lot of demand for sophisticated products (from the south),” he added.

The city’s construction is said to have costs billions of dollars, although Brasilia public archive officials say the cost is unknown and impossible to calculate.

Critics say Brasilia was a Pharaonic dream that hurt the country’s public coffers and undermined Rio, which has struggled to reinvent itself ever since the capital moved.

Either way, Brasilia is evidence of the power of political will. Out of the savanna grew a city that is now beginning to develop its own culture and is home to some of Brazil’s most famous rock bands.

If politicians today adopt that same will to solve Brazil’s social problems, some hope it could yet become the nation that Brasilia’s construction was meant to represent

“Brasilia doesn’t have a future on its own,” senator and ex-federal district governor Cristovam Buarque told Reuters. “Brasilia will only improve if Brazil improves.”