The modern and Vila Amaury:

the dichotomy of thought in the construction of Brasilia

Abstract

The present article has the goal to expose and comprehend the role that vanishing certain occupations played, focusing in Vila Amaury (1959-1960), compared to the attempt of building an image of the new capital of Brazil, Brasilia. The case of this settlement speci cally calls attention due to the peculiar manner in which the State operated its erasure, locating it on low lands where the Paranoá lake would take place, triggering a prescribed and intentional lapse of time. If, on the one hand it had some permission for the poorer population of the Federal District to dwell nearby the National Congress, on the other hand this permission ful lled the goal of gathering in just one place numerous and small “favelas” once sprawled all around the territory. At this point of this research, we sought to analyze this case based in oral reports presented by Ivany Câmara Neiva (2017)
and in the documentary of Vladimir Carvalho and Eugene Feldman, “Brasília according to Feldman”, from 1979, besides secondary sources in respect to the subject. In a second moment, we will depart from critical analysis in relation to the modernization theories and how these could have contributed not only for the construction of a speci c representation for the new capital, by means of in uencing on the eld of architecture, urbanism and social sciences, but also for the exclusion and aversion of socio-spatial appropriations of poorer urban populations, such as favelas, slums and, a very used term in the case of Distrito Federal, “invasions”.