Fernando Luiz Lara is a Brazilian-American author, activist, architect, husband, father, Professor of Architecture, University Pennsylvania. Prof. Lara works on theorizing spaces of the Americas with emphasis on the dissemination of architecture and planning ideas beyond the traditional disciplinary boundaries. In his several articles Prof. Lara has discussed the modern and the contemporary architecture of our continent, its meaning, context and social-economic insertion.
This article was originally published in InterPlan 2022 Fall - Winter Issue.
Brazil is today a highly urbanized country with 85% of urban population, drastically different from the country of 100 years ago that was 70% rural. The urban experience in Brazil, in most if not all of its largest cities, was shaped by conflicts. The long distances between home and work, the difficulty of finding a dwelling close to downtown, few green areas, high rates of air pollution, urban violence, water shortage, raw sewage on the streets: all these problems are experienced daily, especially by residents of large metropolitan areas. The urban experience reinforces the common sense that there is not and there has never been planning for city growth in Brazil.
However, the opposite is true. The Brazilian experiments in urban planning have improved significantly in recent decades, especially after the democratic transition in the eighties and the 1988 Constitution, culminating with and the signing into law of the Statute of Cities in 2001. Furthermore, urban planning is not new in Brazil, its institutionalization refers to the 1940s and is concurrent with the urbanization process.
The very process of modernizing implies the colonial practice of imposing values and beliefs of ruling elites onto large swaths of the population. Our diagram encompasses the modernization/ colonization mirror in its very structure. Every action taken by the ruling elites from the top down in the name of modernization has an effect on the working classes below.
More than at any other time in recent history, the challenges of economic growth, social development and democracy bring urban and environmental policies to the center of the Brazilian debate. The urban crisis that the country is now experiencing motivated different social groups to take to the streets in June of 2013. Those movements were protesting primarily for improvements in urban mobility, and secondarily for better public services in healthcare. It leads to the urban policy’s central dilemma for Brazilian democracy: What should be the role of the State in planning and implementation of public policies regarding urbanization? What should be the contribution of citizenship participation in government decisions? How are universities contributing to the contemporary challenges of urban policy?
Brazilian streets exploded with protests in June 2013, just as myself and Ana Paula Koury were starting a research collaboration comparing participatory processes and traditional top-down planning practices, and we felt the need to develop our own concepts and theories to explain Brazilian spatial history. On the one hand, the narrative set up by international observers such as Perry Anderson or Vicino & Fahlberg did not grasp the nuances of the Brazilian context, and, on the other hand, local scholars such as Rolnik or Ribeiro & Santos Junior were too caught up in the whirlwind (of events) to be reflexive. The more we read the more we felt like there was a mismatch between the conceptual lenses of the Global North and the rich ethnography/engaged scholarship of the Global South. Right in the middle of this mismatch, as if operating a kind of magnetic repulsion, were the Brazilian streets, the way they were designed and the way they were appropriated. There was a lack of theorization capable of capturing the nuances of the Brazilian context, and it was in order to fill this crucial gap that we wrote Street Matters: A Critical History of Twentieth-Century Urban Policy in Brazil, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press this year.
Written almost concurrently with the unfolding events between 2013 and 2018, our book seeks to interpret Brazilian inequality through the lens of the relationship between street protests and urban policy, making explicit the conflict between popular democracy and economic interests in the production of the space on the periphery of Western capitalism. Having space as the main variable of analysis allows us to discuss the production of the Brazilian city as both an instrument, and the consequence, of an unequal society. The tension of street protests is the foundation on which conflicts of Brazilian democracy have been based. By analyzing the historical changes brought about at such moments, we can derive important lessons for urban policy in Brazil. The narrative seeks to uncover different historical moments and evaluate the political agenda of the Brazilian state versus popular movements, demonstrating that the struggles for the construction of a more just society are inscribed in the spatial arrangements of Brazil’s major cities, for better and for worse.
We introduced a conceptual diagram to theorize and explicate the relationship between space, social movements, and the extreme inequality of Brazilian society. Following Manuel Castells’s suggestion that “we need a theoretical perspective flexible enough to account for the production and performance of urban functions and forms in a variety of contexts,” we proposed a theoretical tripod comprising the axes of work, land, and security, with transportation as a node at which these three intersect and traverse. The axes form two pyramids—one at the base, symbolizing the working classes holding up the system, and one at the top, inverted, representing the elites.
Another inspiration for our theoretical tripod comes from Arturo Escobar work, Encountering Development (1995). Escobar argues that there is no modernization without colonization. The very process of modernizing implies the colonial practice of imposing values and beliefs of ruling elites onto large swaths of the population. Our diagram encompasses the modernization/colonization mirror in its very structure. Every action taken by the ruling elites from the top down in the name of modernization has an effect on the working classes below. The opposite is also true: social movements’ political pressure and protests (their more radical form) push for changes in societal structure that impact the stability of those at the top of the social strata. As the reader can by now understand, our conceptual tripod operates with a broader definition of coloniality, in which structures created for the benefit of a minority are being imposed, on the ground and in the minds of the majority.
The tripod structure guarantees comfort for those who live at the top (good jobs, land tenure, and protective police force) while subjecting the majority at the bottom to precariousness at work, informality in housing, and repression by police. Regressive policies enacted by the ruling elite have the effect of augmenting the distance between those above and those below. Progressive change pushed by social movements has the effect of shortening the distance between the classes, reducing the privilege of those at the top. Protests, both by the working class and by the affluent classes, take place when the rods expand (more inequality) or contract (less inequality). Our main argument is that while race, gender and class fill the void and are operating in the societal structure all the time, the three institutional variables of land, labor and police are acting in space, producing The very process of modernizing implies the colonial practice of imposing values and beliefs of ruling elites onto large swaths of the population. Our diagram encompasses the modernization/ colonization mirror in its very structure. Every action taken by the ruling elites from the top down in the name of modernization has an effect on the working classes below. InterPlan 2022 Fall - Winter American Planning Association International Division 19 progressive or regressive change. If the rods stretch, it means that life becomes more unbearable for those below. If the rods shorten, this threatens the privileges of those above.
Over the years, Brazilian working classes have put pressure on their local governments to build infrastructure such as water and electricity, and pushed the federal government to improve working conditions and raise the minimal wage. Interestingly enough, none of those changed or even threatened the inequality structure theorized in our tripod. Water and electricity, along with more educational opportunities and a public health system (Sistema Único de Saúde, SUS), improved people’s lives but kept the distance between the rich and the poor unchanged. The election of Lula da Silva in 2003 looked like more of the same at first, but it eventually did bring some change. In the theoretical tripod, raising the minimum wage above inflation and promoting economic expansion (via consumption) would shorten the labor rod. It bears remembering that police repression did not change during the Lula years, nor was there enough of an effort to give land rights to the inhabitants of the periphery (Lara, 2013). Rather, the poor improved their lives during the Lula years by consuming more, which, ironically, made the rich richer.
When the growth-by-internal consumption model started to sputter during Rousseff’s first term (2011–2014), both the elites and the working class took to the streets to protest in June 2013. The commodities boom was over and economic measures implemented to mitigate the 2008 financial crisis of the North were now putting pressure on the Brazilian fiscal balance. Despite significant investments in education and health, the working poor saw their lives worsened by longer commutes (the transportation knot) and decaying infrastructure, and they demanded that schools and hospitals raised to the standards of the Padrão FIFA, the luxurious specifications imposed by the international football association for the stadiums and hotels that were being built at the same time for the 2014 World Cup (Saad Filho, 2013; Vargas, 2016).
Conservative political forces that had been constrained by the success of the Workers Party (PT) took the opportunity and ousted Dilma Rousseff in 2016. The government of Michel Temer started dismantling all labor gains of the 13 years of PT government, halting also the investment in infra-structure that was central to the urban policy of 2003-2015. In terms of real improvement of transportation, sanitation and health infra-structure, the protests of 2013 were a missed opportunity. Despite the best intentions of the protesters, life today in Brazil is much worse than in 2013 for the average worker. Real improvement will have to wait another decade, if they start now.
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