Brazilian garden cities and suburbs: accommodating urban modernity and foreign ideals PDF

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Brazilian garden cities and suburbs: accommodating urban modernity and foreign ideals Renato Leão Rego* Abstract This paper discusses some adaptations of the garden-city concept in Brazil, and reveals how a foreign physical model was conveniently matched to specific civic purposes. The layout of thr...

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Brazilian garden cities and suburbs: accommodating urban modernity and foreign ideals Renato Leão Rego* Abstract This paper discusses some adaptations of the garden-city concept in Brazil, and reveals how a foreign physical model was conveniently matched to specific civic purposes. The layout of three planned new towns – Águas de São Pedro, Maringá, and Goiânia – and two garden suburbs (Jardim América and Jardim Shangri-lá) are analyzed along with their planners’ discourses and their representations in the contemporary local press. The analysis reveals that the garden-city concept was used as a path to modernity, a civilizing instrument, and a tool for real-estate venture by involving processes of representation and institutionalization different to those at their point of origin. Keywords: planning diffusion, city beautiful, academicist urbanism, new towns.

Introduction: garden cities elsewhere ‘There is not a position of the civilized world to which the Garden-City message is not now being sent regularly.’ E. G. Culpin, 1913.1 ‘What will be the style of the urban architecture of our times? The garden city.’ L. Anhaia Mello, 1947.2 The garden-city idea, which swept through the world in the early twentieth century, invigorated planning initiatives in many contrasting contexts, and Brazilian society was certainly not indifferent to the English arrangement for modern urban living. The garden suburb was the first version of the idea to be disseminated in Brazil in the 1910s3, and two decades later, whole new towns were being designed upon the garden-city layout and a huge land-development enterprise was considering the social city scheme for a regional planning proposal.4 While projects for urban improvements in the most important Brazilian towns evoked images of Paris, new residential areas were also being designed according to the formal principles of the garden city,5 for everything ‘English’ was highly appreciated in early XXcentury Brazil, when a kind of informal British imperialism was still being experienced.6 Moreover, an outward-looking economic orientation within South America had also brought about an association by local elites of ‘modern’ with everything foreign, whereas ‘traditional’ remained associated with activities linked to domestic production.7 Furthermore, the creative *

Departamento de Arquitetura e Urbanismo, Universidade Estadual de Maringá, Maringá PR, Brazil. Email: [email protected]

and dominating role played by world metropolises endorsed urban globalization to the point that cultural deference and native aspirations encouraged local initiatives for foreign models, reinforcing the international circulation of ideas.8 However, the New World, and particularly a country just starting to experience industrialization and urban overcrowding, hardly provided the negative Old World environment for which the original garden-city idea was dreamed up to overcome. Even though the general features of the garden city could help to tame the effects of tropical environments, its sinuous layout was culturally distant from Brazilian town-planning practices. Yet, the civilized garden-city layout was adopted.

Figure 1. ‘This way, it is worth living’: an elegant, stylish urban couple admires an unconventional European-style surrounded by trees and clear sky. A 1934 advertising campaign for houses being sold in ‘model suburbs’ developed by the City Company in São Paulo. Source: A Gazeta, 24/11/1934.

European eclecticism had reproduced a classical, medieval or rural milieu as a reaction to the modern European culture of industrialization. Brazilian eclecticism then reproduced the same milieu to create something associated with modern European culture. The Brazilian fantasy was of the contemporary French and English aristocracies and their styles, per se, which were symbolic of the perceived superior culture of Europe.9 The fate of the garden-city concept in Brazil seems to have been very much the same (Figure 1). From its initial appearance in Howard’s book, Tomorrow: a peaceful path to real reform (1898), and its ‘classic’ implementation at Letchworth, the garden-city idea found fertile soil worldwide, though its international dissemination did not strictly follow the original proposal. As noticed elsewhere, a selective application occurred during its process of global diffusion, as well as a shift in emphasis from social reform to physical planning.10 In fact, ‘the more that

the original blueprint was mediated through various disciples of the cause, and the more that cultural factors came into play, the greater was the degree of deviation’.11 Its essence had been shaped upon the idyllic countryside and the architectural traditions of the English past;12 a certain pastoral nostalgia and a particular concept of Englishness had replaced grim realities with cozy villages, cultivated gardens, and healthy lives. The gardencity movement thus popularized ‘country’ aesthetics; the lanes and cul-de-sacs designed by Raymond Unwin (1863-1940) ‘became the exemplar for hundreds of “garden-type” suburbs and developments catering to this need to partake of “country” in territory that was by no stretch of the imagination any longer countryside’.13 Though resulting from a specific set of historical circumstances, the garden city ended up being re-used in different contexts and for new reasons. As a point of fact, Atlantic crossings provided a kit of planning tools, some of which lay unused while others were eagerly taken up, and others still were transformed.14 The garden city’s dissemination proved that Howard’s model was capable of being reinterpreted to suit local climates and cultures.15 In Latin America, the garden-city idea was generally used more as an image than as a reformist urban model.16 Despite some broad contributions to the debate about town planning and urban growth,17 the selective borrowing of the garden-city concept in Brazil does not appear to differ from that observed in its neighboring countries. Even so, to what extent was the foreign ideal adapted to real local convenience? And how did the foreign physical model meet specific civic proposals? In order to answer these questions, this paper focuses on two garden suburbs (Jardim América, 1917, and Jardim Shangri-lá, 1952) and on three Brazilian new towns designed along garden-city lines: Águas de São Pedro, a 1936 bucolic spa town developed by private initiatives; Maringá (1945), a regional commercial center founded within a pioneering settlement venture implemented by a private British development company in the mid-1920s; and Goiânia (1933), a remote capital city planted in an agricultural state in central Brazil. While bearing in mind the diffusion mechanisms of planning ideas, this paper identifies physical transformations and idiosyncrasies in the way the garden-city concept was interpreted locally, by analyzing town layouts, planners’ discourses and the perceptions of the local press. Aristocratic, green environments: 1917-1950s The first garden-city initiative in Brazil was Jardim América, the garden suburb designed by Richard Barry Parker (1867-1947) in São Paulo in 1917. According to the British planner, ‘the grand boulevards, the extensive lawns with different shapes for public recreation (…) give Jardim América a peculiar aspect like the Anglo-Saxon homes across the Atlantic Ocean. It is a truly picturesque and charming place and the only garden of its kind existing in Brazil.’18 Thus, curved streets and ‘avenues bordered with jacarandas created purple-hazed Arcadian verdure through which buildings were barely visible – the quintessential high status, low density garden suburb.’19 Jardim América was originally ‘a middle-class enclave, not a comprehensive endorsement of the Howardian ideals of a self-contained settlement’, and the local requirement for detached houses mitigated the enclosed spaces created by groups and terraces, found in the English interpretation of Camillo Sitte (1843-1903).20 The process of adapting garden suburbs to local contexts, which in most cases meant a reduction or simplification of the original features to the most suitable market-oriented design, had thus started. Yet, the first Brazilian

garden suburb affirmed the successful transference of British Garden Suburbs to a tropical milieu, and its adaptability to the local conditions.21 At first, plot selling endured certain difficulty, for the planned openness (preferred by North American and British homeowners) conflicted with Brazilian notions of family intimacy. Additionally, affluent people who could afford to live in such remote area were fond of French-style luxury palaces rather than of the house styles seen in Letchworth Garden City and Hampstead Garden Suburb. Moreover, there were issues relating to the internal semi-public common gardens; particularly, their maintenance and the costs of a professional gardener. Brazilians tended to consider gardening in a different light to Britons: for descendants of a slavery society, there was no dignity in outdoor manual work.22 Neither homeowners nor the municipality felt responsible for the Victorian gardens laid out by Parker, which led to the re-parceling of the areas, eliminating the original internal gardens.23 As a result, plots ended up being walled off, leaving just a few aspects of the original garden-city layout intact – the winding tree-planted streets and the substantial green areas.

Figure 2. Jardim Shangri-lá, 1960’s. The garden suburb campaigned as ‘aristocratic’, ‘magnificent’, and ‘super modern’ residential neighborhood. Source: Museu Histórico de Londrina.

Once the semi-public internal gardens were discarded, which slightly increased the population density, Jardim América established a pattern which was followed in Jardim Paulista, Jardim Europa, Alto da Lapa, and many neighborhoods throughout São Paulo and beyond.24 The City of St. Paul & Improvements Freehold Land Co. Ltd, the 1912 Londonbased firm that had hired Parker and was responsible for the first garden suburbs in Brazil,25 soon developed other new residential neighborhoods in São Paulo according to the same formal principles of modern urban environments. Likewise, garden suburbs were created in many important Brazilian cities as a modern urban trend.26 They had more realistic objectives, and were capable of easier, more widespread application than the original garden-city proposal, as had occurred elsewhere,27 despite local considerations about the garden city being a whole urban proposal. An exemplary case is Jardim Shangri-lá (Figure 2), the 1952 garden suburb created in Londrina, a city in northern Paraná state. Founded from scratch in 1931 as the first township of the British colonization enterprise, early 1950s Londrina was a hinterland new town experiencing massive development due to prosperous coffee growing and trading. Culturally tied to the Brazilian metropolis (of São Paulo), the affluent local elite contacted the civil engineer Francisco Prestes Maia (1896-1965), former mayor of São Paulo, to prepare a master plan to regulate urban sprawling. Maia introduced several new planning notions and practices, particularly “the radio-concentric systems of avenues; the multi nuclei structure with secondary centers for regional commerce; functional zoning; and ‘ideas of neighborhood unit [originally in English], garden-cities, garden-suburbs, linear cities and other urban models relating to the organization and grouping’” of buildings.28 Local aspirations for mirroring metropolitan trends and Maia’s new urban code resulted in the layout of Shangri-lá. Leo Ribeiro de Moraes (1912-1978), best known for campaigning for modern town planning (as well as the garden-city model) in local newspapers, was called in to design this new and unusual urban form;29 Moraes was a São Paulo-based architect-engineer who graduated from the same Polytechnic School as Prestes Maia – where American and British planning notions were debated. In 1941, Moraes lectured on the garden-city idea and held fast to the Howard concept. On that occasion, he explained that the ‘garden city is first and foremost a city, not a village, a bairro or a suburb. By ‘city,’ one understands a community with its own life; i.e., with its own economic, social and civic life. It is important to stress this, for as ‘garden city’ is a suggestive name, worldwide developers will soon cash in on it. In São Paulo, for instance, there is a neighborhood named Garden City’.30 Nonetheless, this was exactly what Moraes did when a decade later he designed Shangri-lá garden suburb. The layout for the first planned residential environment in Londrina depicted green, winding streets in contrast with the conventional gridiron that had up to then configured the townscape (Figure 3). Plot area was considerably greater and, given the width of the streets, the general image of the neighborhood was anything but cozy or picturesque. It was, above all, modern; particularly when taking the detached single houses into consideration: built in the ‘functional style,’ they evoked internationally praised midtwentieth-century Brazilian architecture.31 Londrina was ‘importing’ not only modern planning practices but also modernist architecture, which was combined with the garden-city atmosphere and resulted in an appealing residential setting.

Figure 3. A Jardim Shangri-lá street, 2012. The wide, tree-lined curved streets and wide plots were the appealing novelty of Londrina’s 1952 garden suburb, whose other important feature was modernist architecture. Source: Author photograph.

Social identities were also forged through the associations that the members of these particular communities created between their neighborhood’s images and themselves; symbolic goods constitute one of the markers of the ‘privileged classes’ and, at the same time, are excellent instruments for the creation of social distinctions.32 To a certain extent, the ‘discourse of distinction’ was applied to the launching publicity of new suburbs. Jardim América had been described as a ‘chic suburb’ (bairro chic) and a ‘noble suburb’ (bairro nobre), enabling each of its residents to become a ‘privileged man’ (see figure 1).33 Likewise, Shangri-lá was identified as the first ‘aristocratic residential neighborhood’ in Londrina.34 Indeed, these areas are eminent upper and upper-middle class neighborhoods, respectively, and, like most Brazilian garden suburbs, were developed by private initiatives. Notably, the whole expression ‘garden suburb’ was not adopted in Brazil, possibly because the direct translation of suburb in Portuguese, subúrbio – or even bairro (meaning a particular neighborhood), has less noble connotations. Rather, the single word ‘garden’ (jardim) was adopted not only to name new residential areas that emulated the fashionable foreign model, but also, more widely, to name urban developments radically opposed to the original conformation idealized by Unwin and Parker as a suggestion that they were more distinct areas. All in all, somewhat distant from the idea of Howardian social reform and more closely related to lush green planned residential environments, Brazilian garden suburbs can be understood as the emulation of a stylish image.

A spa town: Águas de São Pedro (1936) Aspects of British villages were traditionally found in spa towns in Brazil, notably the usual cottages and the ‘arranged disorder’ of the jardin anglais.35 The marriage between town and country offered by the British garden-city idea could was an additional important promotional force for this sort of development as long as they could appeal to a select public interested not only in cures and leisure, but also in the benefits of a high-quality environment. Prestigious Brazilian spa towns did not try to avoid urban environments; rather, they used to offer the very services of towns that would support urban bourgeoisie behavior in idealized country scenery.36 Although the population of spa towns normally comprised people searching for cures who demanded healthy environments, low levels of noise and agitation, and medical support for their exhausted energy levels, they also included their companions and tourists, who demanded comfort, leisure and fun, not to mention the permanent residents, retired people and staff who worked in the spa venues, as well. Thus, a sumptuous grand hotel, a casino, and suitable mineral-spring facilities set amid a picturesque townscape with parks and gardens were commonly offered features. Bearing that idea in mind, the developers of Águas de São Pedro intended to build a new health-town model for South America in São Paulo state, 200 km northwest of its capital, based upon modern principles of medicine, sanitation, and town planning. Thus, the gardencity model was applied to the layout of the Águas de São Pedro spa town (Figure 4) in order to enhance the relationship between nature and urban settlement, setting up vast green areas, park-avenues and tree-lined boulevards as a means to attract tourists. The foreign planning model added greatly in the building of scenery befitting the needs of quietness and contemplation37, and the local newspaper proudly announced a town designed according to the ‘patterns of famous European spa towns’.38

Figure 4. The extended layout of Águas de São Pedro, 1957. The main park and the Grand Hotel are on the left, while the residential area and the parkway are on the right. Source: Cartório de Registro de Imóveis da Comarca de São Pedro.

The ‘European-pattern’ spa town was designed by Jorge de Macedo Vieira (1894-1978), a civil engineer best known for having designed several garden suburbs in São Paulo after working with Barry Parker as a graduate intern when the British planner was in Brazil. According to Vieira, Águas de São Pedro was laid out as a low-density town, with abundant open spaces and two different zones – a small commercial area and a larger residential neighborhood – comparable to the best garden cities as their percentage of green areas were equivalent. A park system was the backbone of the town, settled in a valley, proving once more Viera’s ability of enhancing the sites’ particularities. Águas de São Pedro was located close to the spring between two parks, which were connected by a 100-meter-wide avenue, set alongside the open canal. The upstream park surrounded the main buildings (hotel, casino, spa, swimming pools, gazebos, etc.) and offered a picturesque four-kilometer path through English-style gardens, while the downstream park was created to avoid flooding. Vieira determined the reforestation of the whole valley and designated sixty per cent of the urban area to parks, parkways and squares.39 Thus, on the road along the ridges surrounding the town four belvederes revealed a panorama of the town and the adjacent valleys – the most exciting stroll according to the town planner (Figure 5).40

Figure 5. The entrance of Águas de São Pedro Municipal Park, 2012: tropical greenery and exoctic picturesqueness for the spa town. Source: Author photograph.

Tree-lined winding streets meandered from the town center and the commercial zone and continued throughout the main residential area, where plots accommodated single or semidetached houses, no higher than two stories, detached from the front and rear limits of the plots; and carried on up to a posh residential neighborhood, where greater lots extended from one street to another. Residential lots were to be enclosed by either hedges or low, discrete

fences in order to maintain the garden-city style. Initially, residential lots were 600 square meters, but later, unfortunately, ended up with only half of that area, interfering in the overall picturesque aspect of the town.41 An early resident remembered that all the electrical cables were underground in the central area, that is ‘there were no aerial cables. It was very modern and still nowadays it draws attention.’42 Parker had also praised this ‘modern’ urban feature by recognizing ‘the way modern needs disfigure our roads, filling them with wires and cables of telegraph, telephone, electric light and trams and the brackets that support them.’43 Though fai...