Brasília, Brazil’s Modernist Capital in the Interior: An Unliveable Utopian Showcase?

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Built Environment, National politics, New Technology,, Society & Culture, Town planning

Brazil’s bold experiment in creating a new capital city from scratch in five years, Brasília, won much praise as a modern architectural marvel upon its inauguration in 1960. With project town planner Lúcio Costa’s radical, artistic urban plan (the Plano Piloto) for the central city in the shape of a bird in flight⦑a⦒, and the symmetry and spacing of architect Oscar Niemeyer’s stark white, curvilinear, futuristic structures with sculptural silhouettes⦑b⦒, Brasília was heralded as “a modern utopia (expressing) optimism and trust in the future” and a demonstration of Brazil’s capacity for modernising progress (Dr Steffen Lehmann, cited in ‘60 Years Ago, The Modernist City of Brasília Was Built From Scratch’, Stefanie Waldek, AD, 21-Aug-2020, www.architecturaldigest.com).

↟ Costa’s plan for Brasília (Source: nickkahler.tumblr.com)

Bland homogeneity?
Detractors of the futuristic urban ‘miracle’ in Brazil’s central west however have been many and varied. Brasília’s inner city residential zones comprising superquadras (“superblocks”) were characterised by French writer Simone de Beauvoir as all exuding “the same air of elegant monotony”. The city’s large open lawns, plazas, and fields have been likened to wastelands. Structures intended 65 years ago to represent the future, now crumbling, accentuate this sense of decay and obsolescence (‘Brasília, national capital, Brazil’, Britannica, www.britannica.com)

↟ Highway hell? (Photo: BBC)

The car is king!
In a city built for the automobile, Brasília is uber-pedestrian-unfriendly. “With long distances and harrowing six-lane highways connected by spaghetti junctions, Brasília presents challenges for walkers” (Lonely Planet) – which is good news at least for the city’s car hire firms! Transport options for the non-driver in Brasília have been meagre…the subway was basically an afterthought; footpaths are confined to a scanty few, where they exist they are dwarfed by the criss-crossing gargantuan highways; the first set of traffic lights in Brasília didn’t get installed until the 1970s (‘Lost and Found – Brasília’, Blueprint, ABC Radio (broadcast 21-Jan-2022).

Source: airshipdaily.com

A lack of a pulse?
Some critics point to the Brasília lifestyle’s deficit in “humanness”. The city centre is bereft of “the typical street life of other traditional Brazilian cities”. It is merely a place to work…night life is unstimulating, city workers tend not to hang around after hours, few stay to “live and play in the Pilot Plan” centre (Kobi Karp in Waldek). According to Prof. Ricky Burdett (LSE), Brasília flounders on the basics of what constitutes a city…no messy streets, no people living above shops, no mixed use neighbourhoods – rather it’s “a sort of office campus for a government” (‘Niemeyer’s Brasilia: Does it work as a city?”, Robin Banerji, BBC News, 06-Dec-2012, www.bbc.com). The scope for improvement is hamstrung as a result of restrictions on development and expansion in accordance with the city’s world heritage covenants.

↟ Taguatinga, one of Brasilia’s irregular satellites (Photo: Frederico Holanda/ Researchgate)

The creation of two segregated communities
Overpopulation is part of the Brasília problem…designed as a city for 500,000 people, it has five times that many residents today, hence the growth of satellite towns which the poorer residents of Brasília have been shunted into⦑c⦒. Allocation of resources is another…whereas in the centre everything was zoned, over-organised city blocks to the point of impracticality, the satellite towns have been neglected and left in a disorganised state without adequate infrastructure, services and civic spaces (Britannica; ‘Lost and Found – Brasília’). Accentuating the imbalance between the centre and the outliers, only 300,000 of the 2.5 million Brasiliense live in the Pilot Plan area where the jobs are!

Source: modern diplomacy.eu

”A monument to technocratic rationalism”
One of the biggest savagings of Brasília’s architectural merit came from trenchant art critic Robert Hughes who brutally summed up the capital city’s shortcomings: “a ceremonial slum…this is what you get when you think in terms of space rather than place and about single rather than multiple meanings, when you design for political aspirations and not real human needs. Miles of jerry-built, platonic nowhere infested with Volkswagens” (The Shock of the New, Ep. 4 (BBC documentary, 1980). The “utopian” city of Niemeyer and Costa, lauded at its onset as ilha da fantasia has acquired other, less glowing epithets such as “concrete carbuncle” (‘fast:track’, BBC News). For Jane Jacobs (Death and Life of American Cities, the failure of Brasília and other such utopian dreamscapes was in making the mistake of trying to substitute art for life – with unworkable consequences for the inhabitants. Brasília has also come under fire on environmental grounds, the impact of its footprint has contributed to the deforestation of the Amazon region.

↟ Niemeyer’s Alvorada (Presidential) Palace, Brasília (Photo: wikimapia.org)

Postscript: the whole purpose of Brazil’s new capital in the interior for President Kubitschek⦑d⦒ and the urban planners was to create a modern city that avoided the excesses of Río and São Paulo (overcrowded slums, the preponderance of favelas). Costa’s “grand vision” envisaged a new urban centre that was deliberate, orderly, rational, dignified and systematic. In practice, the endgame to the myopic focus on the Plano Piloto was a city of inequality (with a good quality of life only for a minority of the inhabitants), congestion and urban sprawl (‘Inside Brazil’s ‘cautionary tale’ for utopian urbanises’, Diana Budds, Curbed, 07-Jun-2019, www.archive.curbed.com). Rather than being transformed into the shining exception, Brasília is “a mirror of Brazilian society…those with power live in a little island or cocoon. Those who don’t—which is the majority—live on the outside” (Prof. Vincente Del Rio).

—————————————-———
⦑a⦒ alternately it has been likened to the Crucifix, to an airplane or even to a bow and arrow
⦑b⦒ and avant-garde landscape design by Roberto B Marx
⦑c⦒ 90% of the Brasiliense, in the lower or lowest income brackets, live outside the centre in satellite towns
⦑d⦒ the politician in power who initiated the Brasília project in the mid-1950s

Glasgow’s Postwar Planning Wars: Utopian Visions of Dystopia, Slum Clearances, New Towns and Social Engineering – Part 2

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Built Environment, Heritage & Conservation, National politics, New Technology,, Regional politics, Town planning
Glasgow ca.1945 (Source: Glasgow Heritage)

In Part 1 of ‘Glasgow’s Postwar Planning Wars’ we saw how decades of neglect and torpor had resulted in a concentration of Victorian slums and a chronic housing crisis that Glasgow authorities coming out of World War 2 were forced to confront. This prompted the 1945 Bruce Report, proposing that what Glasgow needed to regenerate its overpopulated metropolis was a new approach which was in the words of its author Robert Bruce, ‘surgical’ and ‘bold’. While Bruce’s scheme emphasised slum clearance and a mega-sized re-building project within the city limits, other planners from outside Glasgow put forward a competing plan, one with a very different vision of Glasgow and its solution for the city’s problems.

Patrick Abercrombie (Source: alchetron.com)

The alternative model: ”New Towns”
 In 1949 the Scottish Office (in Edinburgh) presented the city of Glasgow with an alternate blueprint for improving living standards and renewing the city, the “Clyde Valley Regional Plan 1946” (CVRP), Advocacy of the CVRP model was spearheaded by English town planner Patrick Abercrombie〚𝔸〛, whose town planning CV included the City of London, Hong Kong and Addis Ababa. The Abercrombie Plan recommended rehousing much of the population outside the city largely in “New Towns” which would function as overspill areas for overcrowded central Glasgow…it proposed not Bruce’s skyscrapers but low-rise living, expanding out to spread the density beyond the city limits [‘Scotland from the Sky’, BBC One, Series 1, Episode 2, (TV documentary, 2018)]. Integral to the plan was the presence of green belts in unbuilt areas, establishing buffer zones between the city and the New Towns – an idea the CVRP got from the earlier Garden Cities Movement〚𝔹〛. The outcome of the authorities’ attempts to transform Glasgow’s urban landscape into New Towns and “Peripheral Housing Estates” will be outlined in detail in ‘Glasgow’s Postwar Planning Wars, Part 3’.

Scottish New Town (Source: Pinterest)

New Towns phenomena
 New Towns were not novel to Glasgow and Scotland, the new towns movement was an international one (from the 1950s on, spreading to developing and de-colonising countries in Africa, Middle East and Asia) [’New towns on the Cold War frontier’, (Michelle Provoost), Eurozone, 28-Jun-2006, www.eurozine.com]). Pioneered in Britain, the movement followed the passage of the 1946 New Towns Act—handing the UK government power to designate areas of land for new town development—kick-starting an ambitious program of new peripheral and outlying settlements across the Home Countries [‘New towns’, UK Parliament, www.parliament.uk].

Schism Over Glasgow: two distinct planning strategies
Academic Florian Urban sees the contest to shape postwar Glasgow as one of national ’planners’ versus local ’housers’. The Scottish Office’s CVRP was national policy, Westminster’s optimal regional fix for the poverty, overcrowding and unsanitary nature of Glasgow’s urban inner core. Bruce’s plan was to be the intended local fix, the solution to Glasgow Corporation’s objective of eradicating the city’s slums and ghettos. The first group was advocating dispersal away from the centre and the other containment in newly configured but in some cases even denser concentrations within the metropolis. The schism between the planning philosophies of the planners and the housers tapped into other existing tensions at the time – Tory national government (1951-55) versus Labour Glasgow City Council〚ℂ〛; ’refined’ Edinburgh versus “gritty industrial” Glasgow [‘Modernizing Glasgow – Tower Blocks, Motorways, and New Towns 1940-2010’, (Florian Urban), Glasgow School of Arts, www.radar.gsa.ac.uk]. The Corporation’s opposition to the Scottish Office’s interference (as it saw it) was couched in existential terms…loss of population was equated with the Glasgow authority’s loss of political prestige [‘Building and Cityscape Council Housing’, (Ranald McInnes), The Glasgow Story, www.theglasgowstory.com].

Photo: the sun.co.uk

Regionalisation v Containment: the first as advocated by the Scottish Office and Abercrombie entailed first and foremost the creation of new towns (low-rise housing consisting of “detached, semi-detached or terraced houses surrounded by ample green space”)…contrasting with the containment approach of Bruce and the Glasgow City Council which sought to create “an architecture based on the principles of the existing city (3 to 4-storey modern tenements and corridor streets)” (Urban).

Image: Google Earth

Even after Glasgow Corporation withdrew its approval of Bruce’s proposals (too radical, too expensive), it never formally adopted the Clyde Valley Plan in its place…it did however accept many of the CVRP’s principles. In 1954 the Corporation made key concessions to the planners, agreeing to the creation of green belts around the city and accepting the inevitability of decentralisation (the need for 100,000 new flats outside the metropolis to alleviate the centralised overcrowding). The planners’ objectives were aided by the appointment of Archibald Jury as city architect〚𝔻〛 who was fully on board with the goals of (British) national planning (Urban).

Photo: Architectsjournal.co.uk

A mishmash of “divergent visions”
 In the end the Corporation sat on the fence and opted for “two bob each way”…cherry-picking from both rival schemes — so that both modernist tower blocks and low-rise buildings got erected concurrently and haphazardly, oodles of high-rise and low-rise housing all mingled in together. This confused juggling of opposing plans by the Glasgow authorities led to construction delays and made for erratic even schizophrenic urban planning in the three decades after the late 1940s, contributing to high levels of dissatisfaction felt by many Glaswegians with their reassigned housing arrangements〚𝔼〛.

▓▒░▒░▒▒▒░░▒▒░▒▒░▒▓

〚𝔸〛 together with co-author Robert Matthew
〚𝔹〛 the New Towns movement can trace its British lineage to the “Garden cities movement” of the turn-of-the-Twentieth-century – to the pioneering experiments with Welwyn (later the first of the British New Towns), Letchworth and Cadbury’s Bournville
〚ℂ〛 Glasgow Corporation, still trading on its earlier status as an economic powerhouse within the British Empire, was staunchly committed to resist any attempt by Westminster to curtail its municipal powers (Urban)
〚𝔻〛 replacing Robert Bruce as Glasgow chief planner after he resigned in pique in 1951 following the rejection of his plan
〚𝔼〛 many of the residents removed (some forcibly) from inner Glasgow and relocated in the New Towns and the peripheral estates were sufficiently disenchanted with their new lot that they requested to be transferred to alternate accommodation

Glasgow’s Postwar Planning Wars: Utopian Visions of Dystopia, Slum Clearances, New Towns and Social Engineering – Part 1

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Built Environment, Heritage & Conservation, National politics, New Technology,, Regional politics, Town planning
⏏️ Corporation engineer Robert Bruce (Source: Scottish field) ⨳

⨳ ⨳ ⨳
As WWII drew to a close Glasgow Corporation (City Council) had big plans for changing the face of Scotland’s biggest city and the (British) “Empire’s Second City” in the postwar period. Determined to rid Glasgow of its unhealthy “ghettos of decay and decline”, its plague of overcrowded slums and entrenched poverty and to fix the city’s critical housing shortage, the Corporation was gearing up for a mission to transform the city-scape. In 1947 a plan for total urban renewal put forward by the city engineer and master of works, Robert Bruce, found favour with the authorities〚𝔸〛 [‘Streets in the Sky: a social history of Glasgow’s brutalist tower blocks to be documented’, Judith Duffy, The Herald, 29-Mar-2015, www.heraldscotland.com].

⏏️ Central Train station, Glasgow (Photo: Network Rail) ⨳
⏏️ The Planning Committee’s eight-minute film ‘Glasgow Today and Tomorrow’ (1949) was its sales pitch for Bruce’s vision of “New Glasgow”. The functionality and conformity of the estate in this model illustrates why the Bruce Plan was likened to a communist Eastern Bloc city (Screenshot, ‘Scotland on Screen’)
⨳ ⨳ ⨳
“New Glasgow”
Bruce’s radical scheme was to wipe the slate clean in Glasgow…tear down a whole slab of the city including the run-down tenements in a wholesale slum clearance. Included in the plan for demolition were much of Glasgow’s iconic buildings, including architectural gems built by famous 19th century architects of the city, “Greek” Thomson and CR Mackintosh (Glasgow Central Railway Station, School of Arts, etc and many other historic Victorian, Georgian and Art Deco buildings). Bruce, an avid admirer of Le Corbusier modernism, wanted to fill the void at least partially with skyscrapers (“Streets in the sky”), the plan being for the city to “reinvent itself by building high and building modern”, alongside a program of urban and industrial decentralisation〚𝔹〛 [‘Canned designs: Two sides of Glasgow’, Christopher Beanland, TheLong+Short, 07-Apr-2016, www.thelongandshort.org]. Bruce also wanted to jettison the city’s familiar grid pattern in favour of straight streets and rectilinear blocks.⏏️ Slums in the Gorbels (Photo: thesun.co.uk)⨳ ⨳ ⨳
Fixing “the worse slums in Britain”
Apparently unfazed by the horror expressed by many Glaswegians at Bruce’s brazen assault on the city’s grand architectural heritage, the Glasgow City Council had definite self-interest in mind when it endorsed the plan: Bruce’s scheme was essentially about slum clearance and re-housing people in the less densely populated parts of the city, not about re-location away from the city’s boundaries. Politically, this suited the Labour-dominated Corporation which was concerned that large scale depopulation of central Glasgow〚ℂ〛 would diminish the city’s standing in the UK. In the late 1940s Glasgow Corporation walked back its initial endorsement of the Bruce Report…shied away by the projected astronomical cost of the project while Britain was in the vice of postwar austerity. Ultimately some of its initiatives were implemented but many were never put into practice〚𝔻〛. One ‘modernisation’ initiative that did come to realisation was the M8 motorway, constructed right through the middle of Glasgow (“Glasgow Inner Ring Road” encircling the city centre). Around 230 tower blocks in the city did get built (some of the tower blocks were subsequently torn down much later), eliciting mixed opinions from the community. Most of these high-rise constructions were cheaply and quickly finished to meet the pressing exigences of public housing. While some residents were initially attracted to the features of modern convenience included—central heating, indoor toilets and hot running water—the downside for the longer term was poor quality housing stock (Duffy). ⏏️ Moss Heights (Source: UK Housing Wiki – Fandom) ⨳ ⨳ ⨳
 Moss Heights
Moss Heights in Cardonald was the Corporation’s debut experiment with high-rise family housing (accommodating 263 families, built 1950-1954), and one of the best known. Intended to be “superior high-density housing for the working class”, the reality was that Moss Heights was more expensive to rent or buy than the usual Glasgow Corp units, thus many of those same working class families couldn’t afford to live there [‘Moss Heights’, University of Glasgow Case Study, www.gla.ac.uk]. The radical nature of the Bruce Plan polarised the community and dismayed many Glaswegians, eventually provoking a reaction to its extreme position and an ensuing tussle between two competing bodies of technocrats, one national and one local, to determine the future shape of Glasgow. The rival plan, the Clyde Valley Regional Plan 1946 (CVRP), was backed by the Scottish Office in Edinburgh. Part 2 of ‘Glasgow’s Postwar Planning Wars’ will look at the CVRP and its impact on Glasgow. Red Road Flats (Photo: glasgowtimes.co.uk) ⨳ ⨳ ⨳

Footnote: Red Road Flats
 While Moss Heights was a “one-off”, Robert Bruce’s vision of clusters of high-rise buildings filling the Glasgow skyline didn’t really arrive until the 1960s, their belatedness made up for by being scattered all over the city. One of the most notoriously Brutalist of the high-rise Sixties complexes was the massive complex of eight tower blocks known as the Red Road Flats in the northeast of Glasgow〚𝔼〛 . The ageing and condemned buildings, vandalised and afflicted with asbestos and rising damp, were demolished between 2012 and 2015 [‘End of the Red Road’, Disappearing Glasgow, www.disappearing-glasgow.com]. Red Road, along with “the equally controversial and derided Hutchesontown C estate in the Gorbals”, became a symbol of “the errors of Glasgow’s ambitious post-war housing renewal policy” [‘Red River Flats’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾

〚𝔸〛 officially, the “First Planning Report to the Highways and Planning Committee of the Corporation of the City of Glasgow”

〚𝔹〛Bruce’s vision was long-term, envisaging a transformation over a 50 year-span into “a healthy and beautiful city”

〚ℂ〛 the city an agglomeration of one million people at the time

 〚𝔻〛 an embittered Bruce resigned his post with the Corporation in 1951

 〚𝔼〛 furnished with the same set of “mod cons” as Moss Heights

The Choral Powder Keg: A Health Hazard Tailor-made for the COVID-19 Crisis

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Public health,, Science and society, Society & Culture, Town planning

When a pandemic or some similar “Black Swan” event sweeps the world, hitting many countries with great intensity, particularly in Western societies with a high degree of religiosity, comfort and solace is often sought within the spiritual “safe house” of the church. As soon as the novel coronavirus landed and spread, it was apparent the church services especially where high rates of attendance was commonplace, would pose a public health risk.

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(Source: www.newslocker.com)

Yet in the US eleven state governors chose to maintain freedom of worship over community safety by exempting religious institutions from the general prohibition on public gatherings, notwithstanding that some of the states registered the biggest clusters of COVID-19. Even in other states there was a pushback by church men and women against government bans on assembly in places of worship. As a consequent 71 members of a single church in Sacramento were infected by the virus [‘Pastor who refused to close church due to coronavirus killed by outbreak’, (Rebecca Nicholson), Express, 15-Apr-2020, www.express.co.uk].

This was mirrored in overseas scenarios, in South Korea in February, one infected churchgoer infected at least 37 other members of her church on a single contact [“‘Superspreader’ in South Korea infects nearly 40 people with coronavirus’, (Nicolette Lanese), Live Science, 23-Feb-2020, www.livescience.com].

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South Korean choir with face masks  (Source: AP)

The choral petri-dish
 The holding of packed sermons in churches and other places of worship, like any close contact between confined, concentrations of people, breaches the prescribed social distancing guidelines and exacerbates the incidence of coronavirus infection. But just as dangerous and with even more potential to transmit the viral disease through communities is the choral activities of churches. The activities of choirs initially continued unabated in the early stages of the pandemic but an incident in Washington state in early March brought home how risky choir practice is. 61 people attended a choir practice at a Presbyterian church in Skagit County, within a short time 45 of the group had been infected by COVID-19 and two had died. Other choir outbreaks, some fatal, have occurred In Calgary (Canada), Amsterdam (Netherlands) and in South Korea [‘Scientists to choirs: Group singing can spread the coronavirus, despite what CDC may say’, Richard Read), Los Angeles Times, 01-Jun-2020, www.latimes.com].

Infectious diseases experts have pinpointed the obvious dangers of contagion associated with choir singing…unrestrained vocal activity at close quarters in often poorly-ventilated, confined space. The vocalists exhale and inhale deeply to sing which makes them highly susceptible to the passage of airborne particles. Through the process of aerosolisation, the virus floats freely in the air (and has been observed to survive for up to three hours) [‘Churches can be the Deadliest Places in the COVID-19 Pandemic’, (Kevin Kavanagh), Infection Control Today, 03-Apr-2020, www.infectioncontroltoday.com; Read].

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Inexplicable change of stance by CDC
With eyes fixed on the November elections and the need to shore up vital support from the Evangelical Christian Right, President Trump from his White House ‘pulpit’ intensified his call in May for governors to reopen religious institutions as an essential service, eliciting pushback from some governors. At the same time, surprisingly the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) decided to drop their warnings against choral singing despite the inherent danger it poses. CDC justifies this change of position by downplaying the likelihood of airborne transmission beyond six feet⊞ [‘Behind Trump’s demands to reopen churches: Slipping poll numbers and alarm inside his campaign’, (Gabby Orr), Politico, 22-May-2020, www.politico.com; Read).

Heightening the risk of unleashing ‘super-spreaders’
CDC’s controversial move has drawn broad criticism from medical experts including specialists in bio-aerosol research who have refuted CDC’s claim, calling it “hazardous, very dangerous and irresponsible”, and that it exposes America to new waves of super-spreading from the activity of choir members (Read).

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⇑  With religious singing relegated to the home, some American churches have tried to get round the prohibition on in-house congregational services by organising drive-in sermons

Fallout from the churches
Although many parishes and parishioners in the US have adjusted well to the new world of online sermons, some traditional congregationalists worry that the new ‘norm’ will spell the disappearance of the in-person church experience altogether [‘How the Pandemic Will Change Us’,  (Rod Dreher), The American Conservative, 13-Mar-2020, www.theamericanconservative.com].

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(Photo: www.stjohnswhitchurch.org.uk)

 

Endnote: The economics of the choral closedown
The halt to choral activities due to COVID-19 has led to a whole bunch of “knock-on” problems worldwide. Like anybody else with their income source impacted adversely by the crisis, choristers, classical musicians and organists attached to the churches affected have been deprived of livelihood. But it goes even beyond that. As the Royal School of Church Music in the UK indicated, the pandemic ”has literally ripped apart the many close-knit groups of singers and instrumentalists who (need to) spend significant amounts of time together”. Church musicians who rely on the service are especially hard hit. It is doubly hard for self-employed church organists who have lost their access to practice – unlike other musicians who keep their instruments at home, they rely on “using instruments in public buildings for the vital practice which enables them to maintain their hard-earned skill” (Royal College of Organists). [‘Pandemic has ‘ripped apart’ church choirs’, (Hattie Williams), Church Times, 01-Apr-2020, www.churchtimes.co.uk].

B56340A8-827C-4442-8B7B-BE792413AF4A

(Source: eBay)

PostScript: There is another side problem resulting from the non-use of organs in churches. Like the raft of airplanes grounded due to the coronavirus, complex and expensive organs require continual attention. They need “regular playing to ensure that the fragile technical components are kept in good working order“ and  free from damage (Williams).

•—————————————-———————•

⊞ the Washington Post states that CDC acted on a White House directive to omit the choir warning from it’s website guidance information. CDC may have also relied on earlier statements from WHO contending that “there is no evidence of transmission of the virus as an airborne pathogen”. WHO’s conclusions have themselves been debunked as “decades-old dogma that held that droplets only travel an arm’s length in the air” (Read)