Contemporary Urbanism in Brazil: Beyond Brasilia

摘要

Brazil, so much like the US, struggled throughout the 20th century to fashion itself into a democratic Utopia and so often fell a long way short of that ideal, moving back and forward between populist authoritarianism and more or less democratic republicanism. At the same time, its cities grew huge as successive waves of industrialism and harsh rural working conditions and poor land rights drove ever-increasing numbers of the hopeful poor to its urban areas. In the process, as the elites grew richer and the poor ever less hopeful and yet more numerous, the hope of its particular Utopian modernism, expressed most clearly in the sinuous fluidity of Oscar Niemeyer's buildings, died.