yes you can, güeyes

to all those latinos or whatever out there en el gringou:

what the fucking hell is the matter with you? voting for billary, you should be ashamed of yourselves. remember a little someone named bill who signed operation gatekeeper at the same time he signed nafta, and began putting up the muro on the border? i mean, i know you anglophilic chicanos out there, the anti-amnesty lot that wants to bask in their privilege and keep other morenos out of the country, have always supported this type of bullshit... but the others? i don't get how you aren't turned on by obama.

abran los ojos. yes you can, güeyes.

kiddies vs. minutemen

scared of the big bad tiny little totters, pilgrim?

found @ h

touring the bush (21) : l.a.tinópolis, parte one (zoots)

topping black, white and asian, the latino population count for l.a. (a.k.a losángeles) exceeds 9 million (considering the whole metropolitan area), and the city is one of the few big u.s. of a. cities with a latino majority. l.a. is at the forefront of what mike davis calls the “latinization” of large central cities across the country, from chicago to dallas to new york, while samuel huntington poops his pants. losángeles is the second largest of all mexican, salvadorean and guatemalan cities all in one, and has one of the world’s largest spanish-speaking urban populations.

even so, as davis himself affirms, at least until very recently, a certain “invisibility” of latinos persisted in certain urban scenes and sectors. that doesn’t mean latinos don’t know how to show-off. maybe it’s the baroque in us sureños, but as a way of countering this social, political and economic invisibility or marginality, latinos have proven to be masters at these games of conscious excessful display, usually concentrated in cultural practice and symbols, from food to style to speak to place gestures. latinos are big on markers.


in the urban history of l.a., there are particularly “colorful” (sometimes blood-red colorful), intense city-marking moments. after decades of white-washing (anglo mass migration and domination came full-throttle in the 1850s, and hispanic l.a. dropped from suddenly second term to practical cultural erasure), it wasn’t until the 1940s that l.a. felt the serious first shakes of the new latino inflow.


even before watts 1.0, latinos were stirring trouble in the zoot suit riots that sparked in l.a. in the summer of 1943. the zoots set the tone of urban (conflict) activism and confrontation that would follow in chavez ravine, the chicano movements of the 60s and other l.a.tino political urban squabbles. but zoots were beyond mexican or chicano, even beyond latino. zoot subculture was an (ethnically charged) offshoot of early bigband jazz/pop and jitterbugging (like the zazous in prewar france, or the swing kids in weimar germany), and shared the elements of these earliest blurry pop/youth style movements (before rock n'roll and before flower power) that ended up being -sometimes unintendedly- highly political. even though zoots were usually associated with pachucos, mexican-american proto-punksters, the gang element was not inherent to them. zoot-suits started in dancehalls and ended on the streets.

in his essay "the zoot-suit and style warfare,” stuart cosgrove notes that “the zoot-suit is more than an exaggerated costume, more than a sartorial statement, it is the bearer of a complex and contradictory history… these youths were not simply grotesque dandies parading the city's secret underworld, they were (quoting ellison’s the invisible man) the stewards of something uncomfortable , a spectacular reminder that the social order had failed to contain their energy and difference.…”


these issues of extreme styling, marking difference and tease tactics still permeate contemporary cultural and political latino production in l.a., on different terms and scales, from gangs to graffiti to front lawns to demonstrations; going beyond simple fashioning to a deeper, more enduring set of spatial practices, including mainstream urban politics and real estate, the ultimate city-markers.

next : l.a.tinópolis, parte two (power shift)

touring the bush (17) : caribbean, tropical nonplace (castro)

on new year’s 1959 a different rumble shook havana. it wasn’t the usual stompin’ and rompin’ at the tropicana. it wasn’t the roar of hot-rods around the capri or the glitterati gushing drinks down at the nacional. this time, it was la revolución.

havana was done with the gilded days. done with the fierce batista dictatorship. done with dirty business with the miami mafias and santo trafficante. done with being the continental whorehouse of the rich and famous.


batista fled havana for spain (he died comfortably in mallorca) as castro and his guerrilla troupes marched in. cuba finally had a chance to break with being the sparkling outhouse for the worldpower in turn –first spain, then the u.s. architecture played a key role in building a face for the island in the (modern) world arena. until the fifties, this face was meant to seduce. havana became a very concrete (poured concrete, to be exact) rendering of the tropical arcadia, paradise lost and found. it was a mix of tijuana in the twenties and acapulco in the sixties, or in mtv-realworld-generation terms, what you’d get if vegas and miami decided to have a baby-city. havana was to be a tropical mistress, a western-hemisphere take on honkytonkhongkong.



the castrists must’ve looked (and felt) somewhat out of place in havana, with their ugly commando suits and their unshaved faces, looking like bushmen and smelling of wilderness. they didn’t fit in with the vaults and arches and lounge furniture of the gorgeous max borges addition to the tropicana, or in the supercosmopolitan glass lobby of the riviera hotel. not with the shiny creped silk of the local pop idols like celia cruz and her sonora matancera. havana needed a new face. and castro would make sure she got one.



architecture would join the revolutionary mission. cuba needed an architecture of solidarity, architecture for the dispossessed. in cuba just like everywhere else revolutions sparked in the xxth-century (be it mexico or russia), the first years after the break were times of ferment and rich experimentation –economic, political and certainly in terms of cultural production. and like elsewhere, as revolution turned to regime, these active forces would be subjected and tempered (in mexico the wild and amazing architectural diversity of the 30’s would be substituted by the ugly and poor official architecture of the “institutionalized revolution,” in the former soviet union, stalinism would suppress not only political dissonance, but it would also put out the architectural avant-garde in favor of state-glorifying kitsch.)


cuba’s revolutionary modernism was a relatively late arrival, and it already had a sturdy modernist heritage, basically the canons of international style. the modernist road seemed a bit narrowed compared to the early-xxth-century. still, in these early years, the quest for a new architecture seemed viable. a great example of the (eventually) trampled energies and the failed architectures of the early revolution is the national art schools. in this set of buildings, ricardo porro, the architect for the project, said he wanted to capture a “sensation of explosion.” the school was set on the now-abandoned havana country club, an absolute symbol of pre-revolutionary excess. legend goes that castro thought of building a school at the site playing a round of golf with el che in the months following his rise to power.


the architecture for the art schools was passionate, eloquent, strong, experimental. it was an architecture of search and ideals and hope. it was an architecture that couldn’t last. buried under financial burdens, political doubt and cries against the tinges of bourgeois, the project remained unfinished, and later abandoned.


the same would be the fate of other projects stemming from this brief gap of creative, flourishing architectures, which produced everything from stadiums to innovative housing projects to ice-cream parlors "for the people". architects in cuba were left with one sole client: the castro regime, the became “operatives of the state”. a new set of values and priorities were established : simplistic “rationalism,” prefabricated structures, minimal-resource construction, and standardized architectures.



but most importantly, the productive engine of the cultural revolution had to shift its energies from the revolutionary questioning to the promotion and adoration of the revolutionary regime. havana changed her face, she grew a beard. now she would cater to a different set of just as avid consumers : the fans of enduring state communism. in the end things didn't even change that much : tourists are again getting the special treatment in their own resort microislands, off-limits for cubans; and now they come, skip the cocktails and the bow ties and go straight to the prostitute. the only “democratization” going on is making all these special little treats super-accessible (to dollar bearers), dirt cheap.



next : tropical nonplace (echeverría)

touring the bush (16) : caribbean, tropical nonplace (smithson)

our tour of the caribbean begins a bit off the actual caribbean. this is perfectly legitimate, given our (consciously) slanted search for the tropical nonplace. april 15, 1969. robert smithson is boarding a pan am flight from new york to mexico, headed for the yucatán, not excactly on vacation. he is on a half-mission, a blurry expedition. he carries a beautiful book under his arm. the book is full of pictures of ancient ruins devoured by the jungle.


the book itself feels ancient and exotic. it’s written by this guy named john lloyd stephens, a reknown explorer / anthropologist from the 1800s. stephens had also gone to yucatán, a hundred and something years before. but smithson was determind to make his the inverse of stephens’s classic voyage that stunk of colonialism and historical prejudice. in smithson’s version of the stephens expedtion, the grand, dead ruins of chichen itzá and palenque en up being dumped for pictures of “displaced” mirrors and the ungreat living ruins of an unfinished cheap roadside motel.


stephens’s travelogue includes exquisite meticulous drawings of mayan architectural relics. in a very xixth-century fashion, stephens resented the abandonment of the monumental remnants to the wild and oblivion, he felt contemporary descendants of the maya had discarded their heritage, erased tracks of memory and identity due to careless disregard, fallen victims to their own cultural disorder and indifference. civilization (or culture relevance, historical time) in yucatán had run its course, it was a site of cultural has-beens, devoid of a current and living sense of meaning. a place and people overwhelmed and left numb by their own fallen greatness.


the same primitive slabs and stone idols that stephens brought back to new york, smithson saw in the american natural history museum when he was a kid (the museum would remain his favorite). eventually he got his own mayan (anti)expedition. stephens’s 1848 travelogue was named "incidents of travel in yucatan,” and smithson played with this tile in his own “incidents of mirror-travel in yucatan.”


in an essay titled "landscapes of indifference", jennifer roberts draws this twisted spiral relation between the two:

"perhaps smithson's most conspicuous inversion of stephens's precedent derives from the fact that none of the famous maya ruins appears in any of his illustrations, even though several of the photographs were taken within eyeshot of the major archaeological sites. dispersed and half-covered by sediment or branches, the blocky mirrors of the displacements suggest the ruins, but their empty reference to the desired historical spectacle proposes a systematic erasure of stephens's visionary enterprise. this refusal to see the maya ruins amounts in many ways to their paradoxical re-covering--to their removal from the conditions of archaeology that, over the past century and a half, had endorsed their use as imperialist trophies or their recontextualization as art objects"


smithson in his ambitions of being a "blind traveler," of doing away with the purpose and the prejudice of the classic archeological enterprise, and stepping away from stephens's faults, ends up falling in a neighboring and even deeper pit:

"the collapse of the visual field in yucatan is attended in smithson's narrative by the collapse of the historical field. smithson's mirror displacements function as models of passive memory as well as passive vision."

futher down his tropical trail, smithson reached antiarchitectural heaven and turned things up a notch. the shitty little hotel palenque (still standing, still growing, and still unfinished today) would be the subject of a smithson slideshow/standup-performance offered at the university of utah in 1972 (only one year before his premature death). part art, part irony, part architectural scam, the hotel palenque piece became mythic.


in the end, smithson fell short of his intentions and his proclamations. hotel palenque is little more than highbrow mexican curios:

“my feeling is that this hotel is built with the same spirit that the mayans built their temples…the structure has all of the convolution and terror, in a sense, that you would find in a typical mayan temple…of serpentine facades loaded with spirals and rocks carved in the shape of woven twigs and things; it's quite nice. do that to me this window, this seemingly useless window really called forth all sorts of truths about the mexican temperament… one can't figure out why they put that door there but it seems to belong, it seems to have some incredible sort of mayan necessity. it just grew up sort of like a tropical growth, a sort of mexican geologic, man-made wonder."


smithson falls prey to the same (albeit ultra-refined) western(izing) b.s. essentialism:

"for all his inversions of stephens's narrative, smithson perpetuates, even amplifies, stephens's belief in yucatecan amnesia, indifference, and myopia. and although he hopes to inhabit this status instead of performing corrective surgery on it, his work maintains much of stephens's imperialist violence. both smithson and stephens picture the yucatan peninsula as indifferent in order to extract from it a heritage. for stephens, the contemporary idleness of the maya authorizes his appropriation of the region's archaeological artifacts. for smithson, the idleness, now seen as eternal, is itself the artifact."

kai vöckler writes that in the scattered mirrors of yucatán (and the soft-glow slides of palenque) “the virtual can be intersected with the real…smithson allows time and space to collapse, opposing the apathy of the material to identity and existence.” withouth knowing it, or with the same self-effacing intentions many avant-garde works share, smithson's non-sites picture, plant and play echoes of the future contemporary superconsumption patterns and economies of the region that render new voids and stylized images of a reality that isn't there, and never was.

next : tropical nonplace (castro)

touring the bush (15) : caracas intervened

caracas’s active urban fabric, both in physical and abstract terms, is marked by instability (from surprise constitutional decrees to flash floods), precariousness, fragmentation (social, economic, territorial), group clashes, as well as informal practices. this setting calls for resistant yet flexible architectural interventions, an architecture that can channel insecurity and disorganization, stabilizing without stagnating, strengthening social ties and sense of place, providing a dynamic backdrop for change.


the barrios are not only sources of dismay or inspiration, a bit of both. they are sites of paradox. places of community and of exclusion, of violence and conscience, of work and abandonment, of hope and crushing, of survival and of giving up. sites that contain everything the city is, wishes it was and wasn’t, compressed, charged, accelerated.


architecture in this context is not about imposition or evasion, but about adaptation and gradual change. architects matías and mateo pinto have learned this in and from caracas. they are convinced that architects should try to give ideas more than buildings, and that architectural success is more about small victories against adversity than grand schemes or preconceived ideals.


projects include the san miguel communal house in the barrio de la vega, the vertical gymnasium (collaborative project with hubert klumpner) and hillside housing. all of these projects are precisely focused interventions, experimental containers, with flexible and open user programs. linking service infrastructure, cultural / leisure activities and community development, this is the type of responsive architecture that manages to balance contradictory factors and pushes positive solutions.



next stop : ¡al caribe!

touring the bush (14) : caracas revival

in their book informal city : caracas case, alfredo brillembourg and hubert klumpner, playing on goethe’s somewhat corny metaphor, describe architecture in this city not as frozen music, but frozen politics. this affirmation, wanting to be fresh, is actually more feeble and ineffective than it might seem at first hand. in caracas, architecture (like politics) is anything but frozen, and particularly difficult to grasp.


there is a whole different set of caracas and even chávez buffs, and unlike globaliphobia brats, these guys and gals bathe regularly and they usually don’t think there’s anything wrong with buying superexpensive croc birkins. they might even own one themselves. by now, we should be used to things shabby turning chic. in the case of latinoamérica, at least since the 60s, local art movements have led the way for successive waves of marginality “revivals,” taking from the heroes of yonder like helio oiticica and his tropicalian anti-conformist installations. in the past few years, contemporary art and culture cores like london or new york and even smaller-fry capitals of sophistication like paris or barcelona have been swept off their designer-clad-feet by the wit and low-key hip of latinoamérican production in contexts of adversity.


from the 2003 “structure of survival” at the venice biennale to the hyper-sarcastic pop sentence of pablo leon de la barra’s apex new york show that same year, “to be political, it has to look nice,” works that draw inspiration from peripheral precariousness have established themselves as a firm buoy in the art market. now architecture is wanting to catch up, and caracas provides a particularly engrossing platform for tempting, powerful-if-penniless architectural practices.


taking hints from sources such as the multidisciplinary (art) work of marjetica potrc, and trying to go a tad deeper (potrc's work sometimes falls short of its declared intentions, over-aestheticizing the subject matter, and, in an uncomfortable and very self-flattering gesture, keeping a ludicrous amount of faith in the gallery, the white cube, as a space of reflection) by forging stong, longer-term ties to city practices and on-site phenomena; young troupes of architects-artists-researchers-seekers have taken to the hillsides and the vertical barrios of caracas in search of answers and alternatives.


many of these initiatives and projects have been condensed by the caracas urban think tank, a sort of architectural ngo, a practice founded on critical research and alternative design projects, with a strong emphasis on practical solutions and experimental intervention. the utt was founded in 1993, and since it has withstood and embraced the jolts and trembles (political, social, architectural and otherwise) of the city, managing to bring practical, technical, semiotic and aesthetic concerns closer to the everyday experience of an exceptional urban fabric, to caracas's wastelands of modernity and makeshift proto-utopias.



informality, pragmatism, poverty, innovation, participation, action, conflict, paradox, opportunities conquered and lost. this is the raw matter of the caracas architect. this is why architectural practice and grasp requires exceptional flexibility and open-mindedness. this is why the caracas architect is often not the professional, but the average citizen.

next : caracas intervened

touring the bush (13) : caracas chavista

move over, che. there’s a new big man in town, and on t-shirts. in the nineties we had marcos, now the sporadic-shower kids of genoa, seattle, gràcia, and other “politically sensitive” first-world enclaves have a new icon of enduring revolución, all the current rage in lefty-pop-politics and resistencia superstardom: hugo chávez.


1989 was the tragic year of the caracazo, the biggest social shakedown caracas faced in the last decades. in 1992, chávez appeared on the radar of global politics after two failed coup-d’états against president carlos andrés pérez, who had adopted an active repression against the protests and riots of those years (pérez, a former socialist-turned-sucker-for-washington-consensus-economics, was later removed from the presidency and imprisoned for an outrageous corruption case. he later went into exile). chávez, back then lieutenant cornel, went to jail for two years. he was later pardoned and went on to try his luck in politics, founding the mvr (movimiento quinta república, or fifth republic movement). he won the 1998 presidential election, and from then on things in venezuela would never be the same (well, some things).


privatizations were reverted, a new constitution was sworn, social programs sprung out of nowhere (sustained by petrol-dollars), massive for and against chávez demonstrations rocked the capital (around twenty between 2000 and 2004), a bush-backed coup against chávez failed, and chávez was on his way to becoming the hemispherical anti-freetrade, anti-bush spearhead (he called bush “the devil” in a speech given at the UN general assembly). his local “bolivarian missions” extended to a regional and even global call for radical change. supposedly.



chávez is a polarizing figure. he has taken control over parliament, the military, and the local media (he’s even created telesur, an alternative t.v. broadcasting company that is a sort telemundo-crossdressed-al-jazeera). he’s unsettled foreign affairs and silenced the opposition. he’s pushed the resurgence of the latinoamerican left and proven a vital ally to castro’s withering regime in cuba.


what about the city? has caracas become a revolutionary capital? is there evidence of radical change in the urban fabric? well, yes, but not really because of chavismo, not even his terms. chávez has maintained old political and economic structures, and he has reinstalled even older ones (the return of economic populismos : price controls, state intervention, subsidies, oil-funded spenditure). the precise, acupunctural interventions that have seized caracas and her barrios in the last years do reflect a generalized discontent and a reinvigorated social participation, but they are not direct outcomes of state policy. some are even funded by the devil's advocates (world bank, etc. etc.) what lies in the brick and mortar moutains of caracas's barrios is a semi-latent alternative to pure bolivarismo, a more active, pragmatic and open approach to social needs and problems. another revolution, still in the rough.

next : caracas revival

touring the bush (12) : caracas carcass

a carcass might look dead, but it’s not. i mean, it’s dead, but not dead-dead. did you know after you die your hair and fingernails keep growing? o.k., that’s not exactly true, it’s just an illusory effect of skin retraction due to body dehydration. but still... how about the chicken running after having its head cut-off? headless poultry can still run and its heart still beat as active reflexes stemming from the intact spinal chord for several seconds after decapitation. there are even accounts of miraculous .beheaded birds that went on living for months.



anyway, what I’m really talking about is living corpses, not the living dead : the dead body as a life locus, a breading field for bacteria and maggots and all that icky stuff. well, it happens to cities. cities die, layer after layer. but the dead layers aren’t dead-dead. dead city-layers aren’t as meaningful and functional and obviously active as when they are alive. but usually it takes time before the traces of a dead layer are lost, and in the meantime they prove to be excellent sites for parasitic developments. call it whatever you want: informality, appropriation, temporal use of spaces… it’s the icky stuff in our cities we don’t necessarily like or understand or find “healthy” or “normal.” but in the underdeveloping cities of latinoamérica (and elsewhere), this animate rankness is thriving.

caracas might just be the crown jewel of our sub-continental modern-city carcass collection. after the chavista revolution, the dead modernist layer of the venezuelan capital is host to the most intense and exquisite necrotrophic urban phenomena in the region.



caracas was a teen casualty, caught in the failure and fall of local modernismos almost still in bloom. celeste olalquiaga tells it like the plot of an urban telenovela:

"between the 1940s and the 1970s, the placid city of santiago de león de caracas inhaled the air of modernization, developing into a full-blown metropolis. its daring architecture and raging urbanism left many of its inhabitants breathless, amazed by the ongoing transformation of their hometown into a burgeoning center of international commerce and foreign pop culture. skyscrapers and highways were the signs of a blossoming adolescence that turned caracas into a world capital (paris-new york-caracas, an affluent gallery boasted under its name), which the rest of the americas looked to with envy or greed. perhaps it was the venezuelans' passion for melodrama, but so much abundance just couldn't last. doomed by the same black gold that had given it such vibrant energy, the country that had cheerfully danced in oil-money suddenly found itself catching up with all it had ignored; unfinished projects, overwhelming misery and an enormous national debt adding up to a huge bill for a party that was definitely over. like an orchid left in the sun, the modern caracas withered, its remarkable structures buried under the weight of forgetfulness and disrepair, its vitality sinking into a benign apathy."



pobre niña rica (y moderna)

this is were the story starts and ends at the same time, and starts again, and everything gets fabulously gross. i wish blogger came with odorama.

next : caracas chavista y revolucionaria

touring the bush (11) : caracas, intro/outro

via te acuerdas de?

california livin'

on the satellite view of google earth, a quaint little strip of greenish patchwork grows out of the black blot that is the salton sea. If you take a closer look, you’ll see a strange brown block in the middle. this is thermal, california.



back on land it musn’t seem that strange. this is, after all, the little piece of riverside twilight zone that stretches from the freshly baked freshly botoxed skin of platinum-blond old people and their peackock-feathered rental flats in palms springs to the trampled dirt of (mtv)world-famous coachella to a place called mecca and the miscarried motel paradise of the salton city, awash with dead fish.



people around here know that california livin’ isn’t quite what it’s made out to be.



and yet there’s something a bit shocking about a trailer-park slum in southern california. no sewage, no electricity, and basically living in a dum is something you would expect from a mexican bordertown shanty. but not on this side. maybe it’s shocking because it brings things uncomfortably close to home.

the l.a. times reports:

“like most of their neighbors in the sprawling, ramshackle oasis mobile home park, the aguilars have no heat, no hot water. on cold nights, the family of eight stays warm by bundling up in layers of sweaters and sleeps packed together in two tiny rooms…bathing is a luxury that requires using valuable propane to boil gallons of water. so the farmworker clan spends a lot of time dirty... jose aguilar, a wiry 9-year-old, has found a way around the bath problem. he just waits until dinner. "my mom makes frijoles," he said, "then I take a bath in that water."



“exactly how many people live in the trailer parks is unknown, but social workers estimate tens of thousands. the biggest park, desert mobile home park, or "duroville," (in spanish, duro means hard or tough) has more than 4,000 residents and can be seen off california 195 near thermal. Others are on private property and virtually invisible to passing motorists.”

these half-legal “trailer parks”, featuring special amenities such as faulty life-threatening electric wiring and views of a toxic-fumes-emission car-battery-and-paint-can-burning dump, persist because otherwise thousands of farmers would be left homeless. and that’s no good for all those green little patches you see surrounding the place, growing all sorts of goodies like fresh fruit or asparagus. so in the mean time, it seems, 15-year-old mothers and carcinogens will just have to do.

touring the bush (9) : brasilia vs curtiba, failed utopia / future utopia

unlike brasília, modern curitiba wasn’t brand new, the city came before the ideas for the city, and, in the beginning, it wasn’t even really a beacon of progress. dating back to the seventeenth century, in the late 1800s curitiba became the capital of the state of paraná. nothing particularly interesting yet. in the 1940s the city began to grow considerably with rural populations all over brazil (and the world in general) flocking to the nearest urban center. The city’s population of 50,000 in the early 1900s grew to around 450,000 in the sixties.



compared to brasília’s proud and heroic planning epic, curitiba has a somewhat darker little tale to tell. the notable moments in the city’s urban history coincide with times of shady political debauch. “alfredo” agache arrived from france in 1927, after a grand (urban) tour that included working in casablanca, lisbon, istambul and a third-place plan for canberra in 1912, championing garden city principles and “higienismo.” agache was one of the first “urban missionaries” to arrive in brazil, beating le corbusier to the pulpit. back then rio de janeiro already had a population of 2 million, and the city was trying to push a new phase of modernization and an adequate urban plan. here it starts to get interesting. In 1930, a coup d’état brought getúlio vargas into power, and he eventually inaugurated a fascist-toned dictatorship and police state, the estado novo in 1937.



between 1941-1943 agache created the first modern plan for curitiba, but it was never realized, and was stained by the unfavorable political circumstances of its inception (agache was highly criticized by the likes of costa and other “true” brazilian modernists). despite being tied to the vargas regime, the plan was actually less political than brasília, and it actually marked a more autonomous (and eventually more successful) planning history for the city, proposing a set of “functional guidelines” in terms of sanitation, transportation, congestion and productivity. it proposed a far more “neutral” or pragmatic structuring of the city, without the overwhelming symbolic charge of brasília, and proved to be a healthier legacy.



curitiba would grow in the shadow of the new capital. but as time would show, being closer to urban concerns and less tied to political spectacle was the key of the city’s planning successes. jaime lerner was born the same year as the estado novo. he was one of the young planners who created the institute of urban planning and research of curitiba, graduating in 1964, the same year the city commissioned a new preliminary urban plan to update the shelved agache plan. it was also the year of the coup that installed a right-wing military dictatorship in brazil that would last (with successive leaderships) until 1985. in 1965 the city launched a "curitiba of tomorrow" initiative, where planning issues were discussed and in a series of public debates. lerner contributed to the design of the 1966 master plan for the city that abandoned agache’s radial scheme and focused on linear expansion, sprawl control, transportation integration, downtown preservation and decongestion, and urban equipments.



lerner understood the plan as relatively flexible guideline for action, as opposed to a near-sacred overarching enterprise. in the following years, the implementation of the master plan incorporated new ideas, concepts and needs along with its basic provisions. hints of lerner’s innovative vision and attitude started to show. in the 1970s curitibia started closing down central city streets and turning them into pedestrian-only areas, and created a consequent set of arteries leading into and out of the city (they would later be the backbone of curitiba’s bus-rapid-transit system).



brazil in the 1980s fell into social discontent, economic downward-spiraling, poverty growht, overcrowding and slum urbanization and deforestation. meanwhile, curitiba reached its million-people mark with a whole set of unique sustainable development measures, including protected green belts and parks, the brt system, decentralized administrative processes and a city-wide recycling program. curitibia and not brasília would end up being the model city, not just for brazil, but a true global urban paradigm. who would've known...

next: brasília vs curitiba, now