Planning Latin America's Capital Cities 1850-1950

Arturo Almandoz, Arturo Almandoz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781136767203
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

In this first comprehensive work in English to describe the building of Latin America's capital cities in the postcolonial period, Arturo Almandoz and his contributors demonstrate how Europe and France in particular shaped their culture, architecture and planning until the United States began to play a part in the 1930s. The book provides a new per

Chapter 1

Introduction

Arturo Almandoz

Europa Transfer: A Historiographic Survey of Latin American Capitals¹

When American planner and scholar Francis Violich published his book Cities of Latin America (1944) – in some respects an introduction, for the North American audience, to the unknown urban reality of the rest of the two continents – he repeatedly praised the gracious ‘Old World’character of the main Latin American metropolises, comparing it to the lack of genuine urban style in most North American cities. As major intercontinental differences, Violich also emphasized the attitude of South American public leaders, who ‘in general, have made a greater effort to leave behind public works and to take an active part in planning the physical development of their cities than have those of the United States.’ He highlighted the contrast at the end of the nineteenth century, when urban expansion of Latin American cities had taken place according to ‘the old traditions of planning in the grand manner’:

While in the United States our cities embarked upon expansion without an established nucleus, without a sense of civic form or dignity inherited from history, most Latin American cities had such a pattern for future growth. Not in every case did Latin American cities follow the old traditions of planning in the grand manner, but a general comparison today between our cities and theirs indicates a greater planlessness in the development of our urban environment. The early established civic discipline of Latin America has served to endow their cities with a better feeling of form and urban character, which goes far to counteract some of the weakness in other respects.²

The contrast between the cities of North and Latin America was noticeable up to the time when the book was written in the early 1940s, when most Latin capitals were still under the influence of European urbanism. But probably the contrast would not be so apparent to a Violich of today, when not only has the ‘weakness’ of Latin metropolises undermined their urban balance, but also North American planning skills have been widely adopted throughout the continent. Nevertheless, Violich’s early impressions recall a definitely European-oriented period of Latin American urban history, not experienced in the same way by North America. Although it is past, that period informed the conspicuous ‘Old World’ image that some Latin capitals still offer in parts of their complex structures. Let us now review the different perspectives from which historians have approached that period,³ in order to provide a framework which could help us to understand – in the following chapter – the different stages of the process of city development and urbanization.

The political independence of Latin American colonies from Spain and Portugal – which came about in most of the continent between 1810 and 1825 – did not imply either an economic or a cultural release from Europe. Britain assumed the economic predominance in the area, through the exploitation of those natural resources which were necessary for its expanding economy and world trading system. If Britain thereby became the economic paradigm of commercial progress and industrialization, France managed to consolidate the cultural prestige that it had acquired during the eighteenth century. Translating both the European humanism and urbanism for the young republics, France was acknowledged as the guiding muse of Latin America. With the connivance of local elites, the former colonies thus entered an era of cultural neo-colonialism, some of whose components have been described, for an English-speaking readership, in the works of W.E. Crawford, C.0 Griffin and E. Bradford Burns.⁴

From the 1960s the so-called School of Dependence provided a historical matrix for understanding that neo-colonial era, whose economic, political and social dimensions were analysed by Cardoso and Faletto and the Steins at that time.⁵ In relation to the urban change, the dependent urbanization of Latin America was described according to the successive predominance of blocs of power which conditioned the post-colonial stages of capitalist dependence. The results of such a succession in terms of the national patterns of cities and the structural problems of urbanization have been explored by Kaplan, Castells, Quijano, Rofman and Roberts, among others.⁶ As a result of their materialist logic and their macro-structuralism, some of these approaches ended up overestimating the importance of economic dependence, and reducing the social changes to the imposition of cultural models from abroad.

From a geographical perspective, Richard M. Morse focused on the growth and articulation of Latin America’s urban networks during the nineteenth century, when the structural weakness inherited from the colonial era had to be rectified in order to attain industrial modernization.⁷ The twentieth century was reviewed in a panoramic text by J.E. Hardoy, where the urban sprawl of Latin American metropolises was set in the context of the main urban planning and design ideas coming from abroad.⁸

One of the key issues of the modernization of Latin America has to do with the importation of urban planning and design ideas from Europe, and the distinct way in which these were incorporated into the capitals of the emerging republics. This question was treated in morphological terms in the international history of urbanism by Sica and later in the work of Gutiérrez, which remains the major history of Latin American urbanism and architecture.⁹ Without considering Ward’s distinction between ‘transference’ to colonial contexts and ‘diffusion’ amid culturally-related but non-colonial countries,¹⁰ the question of transfer has been explored gradually over time through partial approaches with the urban historiography of Latin America. A seminal text also by Hardoy provides an outline of the main influences arriving from Europe, on a continental scale, between 1850 and 1930, where the author concluded that the Haussmannic surgery and the Beaux-Arts tradition of French urbanism inspired a great many of the proposals for the ‘bourgeois city’, until the rise of the metropolises.¹¹ Another panoramic yet brief review of this diffusion has been produced by the Argentine architect Ramón Gutiérrez, who has completed the genealogy of the European urbanists who visited Latin America from the first decades of the twentieth century until the years following World War II, when he recognizes that the ‘European cycle’ was ‘toned down’, while American planning had a ‘growing influence’ in Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and Venezuela.¹²

Over the last ten years or so, the theoretical interpretation of the urban models which arrived from Europe, both in terms of design and culture, has been explored through two main trends of historical research. On the one hand, there are studies which have reviewed in detail the urban proposals elaborated by leading European designers who visited the Latin American countries during the early decades of the twentieth century. For instance, Jean-Claude Nicholas Forestier’s urban and landscape designs for Buenos Aires, Havana and other capitals were compiled by Leclerc.¹³ Le Corbusier’s visits to Argentina, Brazil and Colombia were minutely reconstructed in a collective work edited by Pérez Oyarzun.¹⁴ Karl Brunner’s contributions as the pioneer of modern urbanism in Chile and Colombia have been reviewed in an issue of the Revista de Arquitectura.¹⁵ Although not focused on a particular figure, different examples of the transfer of urban planning and design ideas through proposals inspired by European models were compiled by Gutiérrez in another journal issue.¹⁶

Another trend corresponds to the historical study of how that transfer of urban design and culture informed the physical transformation and social change of some capitals since the second half of the nineteenth century. Although some works on urban growth were produced in the 1970s,¹⁷ the urban history of individual cities was not published until the end of the following decade.¹⁸ Rio was described by Needell;¹⁹ SãoPaulo by Rodrigues Porto;²⁰ Buenos Aires by Gutiérrez, Berjman and Gorelik;²¹ Havana by Segre, Coyula and Scarpaci;²² Lima by Ramón and Caracas by Almandoz.²³ Featuring the role played by foreign planners and planning models in Latin American capitals, particular episodes of that transfer have been revisited in countless journal articles and collective works in recent years, some of which will be referred to in the following chapters.

European influence has been studied not only in terms of physical changes and planning proposals but also in relation to the urban ideas, myths and fashions that informed the ethos of the bourgeois city in Latin America. Approaching the process of cultural diffusion in terms of social theories imported after the progressive modernization of the nineteenth century, Morse analysed the parasitic burden that some of the growing capitals were for the expanding economies of Latin America. He based his analysis on the ideas elaborated by local intellectuals who were influenced by European positivism and liberalism, a tradition that Morse recognizes as prevalent during the nineteenth century.²⁴ Bradford Burns emphasized the role played by local elites, whose cultural conflict with other local social groups often ‘provides a useful guide for the interpretation of Latin American history.’²⁵

As in the case of Europe, the portrayal of the bourgeoisie seems to be fundamental to an understanding of the urban mythology of that period, especially during the extravaganza of the so-called Belle Époque. In this respect, the urban historiography of Latin America provides two major approaches which recreated the social climate of the Europeanized cities. The ideological effects of European urban culture on Latin societies are to be found in José Luis Romero’s wide ranging Latinoamérica. Las ciudades y las ideas (1976). Here he demonstrates beautifully how, until the 1930s and the eve of the emergence of the ‘mass metropolises’, the bourgeois city displayed an almost total imitation of Europe in terms of social customs, political ideas and literary trends. Especially during the final decades of the nineteenth century, the piecemeal implementation of the ‘Haussmannic example’ not only responded to the need to expand the Latin capitals, but also to the bourgeoisie’s longing to appropriate the metropolitan myth coming from industrializing Europe. For the Frenchified elites of these cities, the invocation of Second-Empire Paris was thereby supposed to make possible their magic transformation from post-colonial city into real metropolis.²⁶

The cultural change of the learned elites of Latin America is also portrayed in Angel Rama’s La ciudad letrada (1984), an outstanding example of social semiology of Latin metropolises through their literature. This Uruguayan critic also pointed out the Haussmannic example as a feature of the period, but recognized the original value of that imitation. Rama insisted that rather than a mere copy of Second-Empire Paris or Victorian London, there was a genuine recreation due to the urban desire and fantasy, illusion and obsession of local elites excited by the metropolitan spirit.²⁷

Also coming from a literary domain, the Peruvian critic Julio Ramos recreated the flânerie of some novelists and chroniclers that – as Walter Benjamin and Georg Simmel did in the European metropolises – reported the spectacle of consumerism and the ‘rhetoric of walk’ evinced in the public spaces of Latin America’s booming capitals at the turn of the century.²⁸ The Venezuelan historian, Elias Pino, directed a research project into the main manifestations of modernity in Latin America during the significant period 1870 to 1930, stressing the role played by the capitals as the setting for exhibiting the progressive devices and fashions arrived from Europe.²⁹ More recently, Pineo and Baer compiled experiences of social movements, political changes and administrative reforms in some countries during that same period of significant urbanization.³⁰

Notwithstanding their historical accuracy, most of the works referred to above fail to put into perspective Latin America’s urban importation from Europe, particularly in terms of the recent debate about the international exportation of urban models. This debate has focused mainly on the twentieth century, whose latest manifestations of diffusion are close to the emerging discussion on globalization, which has been addressed from different disciplines.³¹ But, as Ward has recently pointed out,³² the overall perspective of the diffusion of urban planning since its beginnings in the late nineteenth century can only be found in the works of planning historians such as Peter Hall and Anthony Sutcliffe. They established the framework for understanding planning as an international movement whose key ideas travelled throughout different contexts.³³ Unfortunately, they have not been well known in many countries of Latin America, where the historiographic interpretation introduced by Choay and Benevolo has predominated,³⁴ according to which twentieth-century urbanism can be explained in terms of models and traditions shaped in industrial Europe, whose routes and means of transfer seem to be less important than the models as such.³⁵

So the reconstruction of the route map of Latin America’s importation of urban models from Europe, and specially from France, is a task that for the most part remains to be completed...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• The Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Urbanization and Urbanism in Latin America: from Haussmann to CIAM
• I Capitals of the Booming Economies
• II Early Viceregal Capitals
• III The Caribbean Rim and Central America
• Index