Lessons from the modernist project for the Amazon

Abstract

In 1972, the Brazilian government implemented a colonisation scheme and a series of new towns along the Transamazonian Highway, then under construction. The state-driven project aimed for regional development, economic growth, and national integration, which legitimised the military regime. Despite robust funding, it was abandoned as a failure a couple of years later. Since then, deforestation and a low Human Development Index have marked the region. This paper analyses the governmental colonisation project and its manifestation through historical interpretative method and urban morphology, based on original documents, a site visit, and economic, political, social, environmental, and agricultural studies. The paper introduces the notion of national development and modernisation, closely related to the physical transformation of the natural environment. It then examines the colonisation scheme and the new town layouts. It also compares them with a successful precedent, the private colonisation enterprise in northern Paraná state. Finally, the paper points out some of the constraints of the Amazonia project and sheds light on this town and country planning fiasco. The general argument is that architectural and urban design was treated as a sign of modernity insofar as it implied a radically different outcome from both the contested urban reality and the natural environment to be subjugated. Modernist thought and functionalist layouts materialised the aspiration to completely transform the habitat instead of adapting to it.