On 21 April 1960 President Juscelino Kubitschek oversaw the inauguration of Brasília as the capital of Brazil. While construction of the city was far from complete at that moment, Kubitschek rightly laid claim to a tremendous administrative and political victory by having overseen the construction of a city ex nihilo in the remote Center-West to become the seat of the federal government during his five years in office.
As the centerpiece and most conspicuous symbol of Kubitscheks program for national development, Brasília provided a focus for debates about the nations present and future. Virtually all aspects of the construction were intensely controversial and occurred during a time of relatively little government censorship. The debates about Brasília provide rare and valuable insight into how Brazilians from a variety of perspectives conceived of modernity and their place in it. This dissertation explores the campaign to build Brasília and its reception by various contemporaries through an analysis of the public debates as documented in newspapers and other media, official documents, the recollections of participants, and published primary sources related to the construction of Brasília. Brasília's inauguration marked the triumph of a particular vision of modernity, one that privileged socioeconomic modernization and investment in large-scale infrastructural improvements. It provided the framework, in both material and intellectual terms, for the developmental policies pursued by the military regime that governed the nation from the new capital from 1964 to 1985. Exhibiting an unwavering focus on the future, the planners of Brasília appeared to ignore the present, failing to address the problems that plagued existing cities and populations. Rather than an emblem of progress and development, with time, Brasília came to epitomize the continuation of politics as usualit was a top-down, forced effort at development that brought considerable economic growth, but that did not reach the majority of Brazilians. Nearly fifty years on, Brasília is neither the utopia nor failure imagined by proponents or detractors, but a living city that embodies the complex and contradictory nature of modernity in contemporary Brazil.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-07282006-115412 |
| Date | 29 July 2006 |
| Creators | Story, Emily Fay |
| Contributors | Jane Landers, Marshall Eakin, Michael Bess, Edward Wright-Rios, William Fowler |
| Publisher | VANDERBILT |
| Source Sets | Vanderbilt University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-07282006-115412/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Vanderbilt University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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