Favelas were to be avoided, even on the outskirts and in the surrounding countryside.53 However, little thought was given to housing the workers from afar who were building the city. Temporary encampments were put up for them, meant to be destroyed once the capital was standing.54 The capital was meant for government functionaries, the president insisted.55 This was not only naïve but contradictory. Brasília was launched as a grand project of developing the almost empty interior of the country. To the extent that the project was successful, vast migrations would occur. And they did, attracted by the opportunities of the city construction and pushed by the devastating 1958 drought in the poor Northeast. Novacap, the powerful state construction company of Brasília, tried to stop the wave of desperate migrants by erecting police barriers on the access roads – but in vain.56 A set of informal satellite towns grew on ‘invaded’ land around the city of the Plan Piloto before the latter had been inaugurated. By the end of the twentieth century, their population amounted to three fourths of the whole Federal District’s.
The naïve or myopically aesthetic vanguardism of the Brasília project could flourish under the protection of a trustful president, delegated generous wide powers by his party coalition in Congress. But the stark realities of Brazilian inequality and fragile democracy soon caught up. The succeeding short-lived presidencies of Jânio Quadros and João Goulart stalled the Brasília project and did not reside there. Then there was a military coup in 1964. It was actually the military regime which sealed the fate of Brasília, in a positive as well as a negative sense. It decided the capital issue by moving there and continuing construction. It also presided over upper-class private appropriations of most of the lakeshore, originally meant to be accessible to all. Marketizing the apartments of the designed city in addition to accelerating economic inequality made the Federal District more unequal than the country as a whole.57 In 1970, the per capita income gap between Brasília proper and Ceilândia, the poorest of the satellite cities, was equivalent to four times the minimum wage; in 1976 it was thirty-one. In the oldest satellite city, Núcleo Bandeirante, the jump was from two to twenty-three times the minimum wage.*
Nevertheless, half a century later, it is clear that Brasília has been a sort of success, as a thriving metropolis, a strong pole of regional economic development and a full-scale monument of architectural modernism – but also as a showpiece of Brazilian inequality.
The Capitals of Secession
It took several decades, usually more than half a century, for the capitals of the seceding settler states to get their national form. There were two reasons for this. One was the economically difficult construction of new capitals under competing political bipolarity in the new nations out of the British Empire. Pretoria was an exception to the lag, the former capital of a defeated and disappeared nation-state. The other reason was due to the travails of constituting nation-states in Hispanic America, long convulsed by civil wars. Chile was here an exception, with an early conservative establishment, strong enough to send its liberal national liberator, Bernardo O’Higgins, into exile. Rio de Janeiro could thrive on being the site of the imperial Portuguese court in exile and of the new Brazilian nation. Although the main urban municipal governments, the cabildos, of Hispanic America had initiated the national uprisings, once the nation-state was proclaimed they were, like all the secession capitals, under the thumbs of national parliaments and governments.
The new capitals imported their architectural styles from Europe, neoclassicism (in particular for public buildings) and nineteenth-century French Beaux-Arts and historicist eclecticism; neocolonial Spanish styles, as in Lima, came only later in the twentieth century. Occasionally they added a significant legislative accent, as in Washington, Bogotá, Montevideo, Brasília and Canberra, with a signal of popular power over the legislative.
But more striking is the brash assertion of national pride and power in several of the new capitals. There are the spectacular temples to Lincoln and Jefferson and the large and lavish war victory monumentality in Washington; the ANZAC Parade ground in Canberra with its seemingly endless celebrations of participations in imperial wars overseas. The late-nineteenth-century Mexican layout, in the Paseo de la Reforma, of the triumphs of liberal nationalism has no European equivalent. In Buenos Aires, the main avenues are wider and the equestrian statues are higher than anywhere in Europe. The governmental Union Building of Pretoria has no European match, nor does the monumental recentring of Lima to the new Plaza San Martín.
The White Dominion volunteers for the British imperial wars and the Hispanic paseos, statues and theatres to ‘Colón’ illustrate the reproduced ties to the motherland. Such ties were reciprocated when London in 1921 accepted the Virginia gift of Washington in Trafalgar Square, or when the Spanish government donated a ‘Moorish Arch’ to the new Leguía Avenue as a gift at the centenary of the Peruvian secession.
The specific ethnic issues of the settler capitals developed along two lines. One was the integration of the permitted immigrant communities, which proceeded quite well across enduring cultural diversity – by immigrant-language newspapers, for instance – and ethnic competition for jobs and positions. The ongoing integration in diversity was expressed in the typical ethnic-community mobilizations for gifts to the city on occasions of celebration, as well as in citywide celebrations of ethnic landmark events.
The other ethnic issue, how to relate to slavery, ex-slaves and Natives, was much more difficult. To this day, it remains a sore spot in Washington, which is half Black and since the mid-1970s under African American home rule but subject to budgetary supervision by Congress, which is mostly White and conservative. The race issue is much less articulated in Brazil than in the United States, but given the much larger proportion of the non-White population – about half, according to self-identification – it has more explosive potential, and the core of Brasília is very White. The Natives were not dying out, even in the British secessions, where they were denied civic rights. The centres of the Hispanic Empire – as well as, more explicitly, their national successors in Mexico and Peru – did recognize pre-Columbian America, in part even seeing themselves in a historical line of succession to it. However, the Native question was not just symbolic. It was also, and above all, socio-economic. The export- and foreign investment–oriented capitalist market and land and mining rent-based development did not give Natives much of an economic chance. But, while not part of the national foundation, the Natives have returned as part of a popular moment distinctive of the settler capitals.
National Foundations: Nationalizing Colonialism
About half of all current United Nations member states emerged from European colonial rule, not counting states that seceded from European settlements which I have dealt with in the previous chapter. Emancipation from European colonialism is the most common route to a modern nation-state. It had better not be mistaken for a uniform background. In the early twentieth century, the British colonial administration distinguished more than forty categories of overseas territories of the British Empire.1 However, for our purpose of understanding something about the capital cities of post-colonial nation-states, we have to find some common denominator.
The ideal typical modern colony is, first, an overseas territory with a population of a quite different culture than that of the ruling country. In other words, typical colonial rule is rule from a long distance, geographically as well as culturally. Second, colonial rule is based on force, but very significantly also on the claimed cultural superiority of the colonial ruler, which is also deployed as a military, administrative and technological force. Third, part of this claimed and deployed cultural superiority gradually becomes recognized by part of the colonized population. Fourth, colonial emancipation derives its basic dynamic not (primarily) from counter-claims to cultural superiority or even equivalence, but from internal contradictions of the ruling culture – inter
