Remaking the ‘World’ in the World Heritage List: International Organisations,Settler Colonialism,and Architectural Preservation in Brasilia

Introduction

Martha Finnemore and Michael Barnett argue international organisations are bureaucracies operating in accordance with the ‘pathologies and power of expansion’ in an ongoing quest for greater international legitimacy, rather than mere vassals subject to the whims of powerful states. ¹ This pursuit of greater legitimacy necessitates the revisability of mandates and organisational practices towards the aim of maintaining authority in the evolving conditions of international politics. ² Decisions, debates, and practices of international organisations always have a location, despite the preponderance of deterritorialised inquiry into the effects of international organisations. ³ Such approaches obscure both the physical locations that are, in fact, constitutive of local and international politics, geopolitical order, and contestations over sovereignty produced through institutional practices. ⁴ As Diana Panke claims, the fact that the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) is based in New York is ‘the main obstacle for successful [diplomatic] activity’ by diplomatic corps from smaller, less powerful states that lack the means to maintain a permanent diplomatic contingent. ⁵ Location, space, and the built environment matter to the study of global politics, because, to appropriate Robert Cox’s phrase, location and the transformation of space is always for someone and for some purpose. ⁶ And thus to observe the relationship between institutional change and space is to locate the very material substance of politics for various groups or individuals and for a intended purpose.

The starting assumption for inquiry into international organisations through international relations (IR) is sovereign territorial control of individual member states that sign onto treaties, thus giving substance to international organisations. Here, space is merely the backdrop of politics, rather than integral to the coproduction of the very basis of who gets what, when, how, and why. There has been a resurgence in explicit calls for IR scholars to deepen the engagement with space that is based on a shift to interpreting space as constitutive – rather than as an inconsequential stage – of international politics. ⁷ Orit Gazit calls for the need to inquire into the entanglements of physical and symbolic location of international regimes as a premise for understanding their effect on global politics as the ‘spatial, visible crystallisation of the community’s social energy and solidarity.’ ⁸ Where these institutional revisions of the 1980s in the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) World Heritage List hit the ground in Brasilia is the subject of this article. This article connects the spaces made through institutional changes to include the 20th century-built environment to the UNESCO World Heritage List through the question: What were the spatial and institutional effects of the addition of Brasilia, the first 20th century site added to the World Heritage List in 1987?

This article argues that the adaptations to maintain legitimacy of the UNESCO World Heritage List by including 20th century-built environment is premised on the preservation of the material order of settler colonialism in Brasilia. The institutional revisions for a more representative World Heritage List partitioned Brasilia into racialised zones and set in motion the proliferation of inscriptions that corresponded to this form of spatial power in cities in East Africa and the Levant. In this way, the addition of Brasilia to the List was a form of extraction that transformed both entanglements of power and space within the city, but also spurred on institutional shifts that made the UNESCO World Heritage List a vehicle to preserve the built environment of settler colonialism in cities, such as Tel Aviv, Rabat, and Asmara.

The carving out the new capital of Brasilia from the interior Amazon in 1956 was part of President Kubitschek’s ‘50 years in 5 years’ modernisation plan to settle the interior Amazon. The plan sought to extend sovereign control inland by shifting the capital 1,000 kilometres away from the primary coastal population centres of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro through an obscure 19th century clause calling for a new capital. This inland expansion to construct Brasilia was the continuation of 15th century processes of Portuguese settler colonialism or in settler colonial theory terms, the ‘invasion’; despite independence in 1822, the settlers remained to build a nation state that was premised on the dispossession and displacement of Indigenous communities and the flourishing of the settler polity through enslavement for a plantation economy and mineral extraction. ⁹ The persistence of settler colonialism across Brazil relates to the notion that settler invasion is a ‘structure not an event’ ¹⁰ that is mediated by urban design and construction of Brasilia that normalised the physical and symbolic elimination of Indigenous communities. Moreover, the construction precipitated contestations between settler labourers on the one hand, and the political authorities and elites, on the other hand. ¹¹ While explicit military violence reaps the most destruction and should not be downplayed, this article shifts the focus to the social practice of architectural preservation as a tool to further the project of Indigenous land dispossession with the concomitant consolidation of control within the settler polity that is validated through the World Heritage List.

The addition of Brasilia to the UNESCO World Heritage List offers a rich case to observe the mutual constitution of space and the legitimacy of an international organisation. First, the addition of the pilot plan (plano piloto) as Brasilia to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1987 ushered in the inclusion of 20th century-built environment to the World Heritage List, thus rendering sites from the same century as aesthetic objects to be preserved, studied, and documented. As James Holston writes in 1989, Brasilia – by which he means the pilot plan – became the ‘model city’ for the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) and more broadly for the 20th century modernist movement. ¹² To clarify, member states nominate sites for the World Heritage List, then pending recommendations by the technical body, International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), voted on by the World Heritage Committee. The vote by the Committee ultimately determines whether a site is added to the World Heritage List. The effect of adding Brasilia paved the way for the addition of 20th century modernist architecture tied to settler colonialism in Tel Aviv, Rabat, Asmara, the United States. The nomination and inscription materials for each of these sites refer to Brasilia, both as a source of inspiration and to draw distinction from in order to justify the quest for inclusion to the World Heritage List. Second, the preservation of Brasilia draws attention to the afterlives of what Frantz Fanon referred to as the ‘settler city’ that partitioned space through the logics of Indigenous land dispossession and the consolidation of control by the settler polity. The afterlives of the built environment produced through settler colonialism speaks to the role of disciplinary knowledge and international organisations to legitimate the dispossession of Indigenous land by rendering the built environment as an aesthetic object detached from the conditions through which it was produced.

Settler colonial studies provides tools to locate the entangled production of space in Brasilia with transformations by international organisations. The fundamental premise of state sovereignty in the international system assumes static control over a given space or territory through the claim that states exercise the monopoly on the use of violence. However, settler colonial studies connects the production of space to power; the symbolic and physical elimination of Indigenous peoples is the very foundations of the settler polity. By tracing the production of space through international organisations with settler colonial studies, this article analyses contestations over space both within and beyond the state apparatus. ¹³ Indeed, IR scholars have increasingly tried to forge direct connections between IR and space, ¹⁴ although the porosity of IR lent to longstanding overlapping engagements through geography, ¹⁵ the built environment, ¹⁶ and infrastructures. ¹⁷ Despite IR not existing without notions of space in the core tenant of state sovereignty, international organisations remain largely removed from the discussions of space.

This article creates dialogue between the institutional transformations of the World Heritage List in the addition of the 20th century-built environment and the spaces produced through those efforts. I examine how the quest to increase institutional legitimacy by the World Heritage Committee, which administers the World Heritage List, led to the inscription of Brasilia, the first 20th century site added in 1987. By drawing on World Heritage Committee meeting notes, news articles from the 1980s, and literature from architectural history on Brasilia, the article demonstrates how international organisations and forms of knowledge are entangled in the reproduction of the settler colonial spatial order, thus prompting questions on the mutual constitution of localised spatial orders and global orders. In the case of the addition of Brasilia, the question becomes whether the inscription established the conditions for what Lorenzo Veracini refers to as the global settler colonial present, or one defined by settler colonialism as a particular form of domination not limited to settler states, such as Australia or the United States. My approach creates dialogue between IR scholarship on international organisations and settler colonial studies to explore these connections between spatial and global order via international organisations.

I begin with a discussion that connects settler colonial theory to the production of space, specifically the built environment. I then discuss connections between settler colonialism and the spatial order produced in the design and construction of Brasilia in the late 1950s. This particular form of spatial order was, in turn, reasserted through the preservation effort in the 1980s towards the aim of increasing the institutional legitimacy of the World Heritage List.

Settler Colonial Studies: Prioritising the Production of Space through the Built Environment

Settler colonial studies orients the study of international organisations to contestations over space. Settler colonial studies fashions settler colonialism as a distinctive ongoing social formation that is premised on territorial control and the dispossession of Indigenous land with the concomitant symbolic and physical elimination of Indigenous populations. ¹⁸ This follows Patrick Wolfe’s well-trodden claim that settler colonialism is a ‘structure not an event’, because settlers ‘come to stay’. ¹⁹ As a result, this structural logic of settler colonialism endures as Indigenous land dispossession and territorial control by settler polity is normalised. However, there are ongoing contestations between the settlers or ‘rabble’ and colonial administrators that play out through legal armature, coercion by police-military force, and forms of knowledge within the settler polity. In the case of Brasilia, an international organization in the UNESCO World Heritage List also shapes these contestations within the settler polity through the preservation of the pilot plan.

Scholars of settler colonialism argue this structural spatial logic of dispossession begins with the onset of a settler colonial project that does not end with changes in administrative structure (i.e., national independence). ²⁰ By structure, scholars of settler colonialism are referring to a particular kind of spatial logic of dispossession and territorial domination to facilitate the expansion of the settler polity at the expense of Indigenous peoples. This focus on territorial control shifts from the analysis of extractive industries enriching the metropole in franchise colonialism to an interpretation of land – or abstractly, space – as the primary basis to erect and to maintain settler societies. ²¹ The focus on land and the built environment that normalises these forms of control directs attention to the mutual constitution of spatial and geopolitical orders. ²²

Frantz Fanon conceptualises the mutual constitution of the spatial and political order central to settler colonialism through built form in French colonial Algiers. Fanon explains:

The colonial world is a world divided into compartments. It is probably unnecessary to recall the existence of native quarters and European quarters, of schools for natives and schools for Europeans; in the same way we need to recall apartheid in South Africa. Yet, if we examine closely this system of compartments, we will at least be able to reveal the lines of force it implies. This approach to the colonial world, its ordering and its geographical layout will allow us to mark out the lines on which a decolonized society will be recognized. The colonial world is a world cut in two. ²³

The built environment makes possible the compartmentalisation of racialised difference that folds into the self-fashioned civilising mission and the military strategy of tempering resistance. Fanon elaborates on the oppositional characteristics of the ‘settler city’ and ‘Native’ or Indigenous zones. ²⁴ The settler city of ‘white people, of foreigners’ is ‘strongly built, all made of stone and steel’ with paved roads, municipal cleaning services and wide boulevards, whereas the Native zone is characterised by marginalisation, density, and poorly-built structures. ²⁵ Fanon, as one of the earliest scholars working on the relationship of space, the built environment, and settler colonialism, complements the work of Janet Abu-Lughod, who referred to the same role of the built environment in producing ‘urban apartheid’ and ‘dual cities’ in cities such as Rabat and Cairo. ²⁶ For Abu-Lughod, dispossession of Indigenous land is rendered through design and construction of the spatial and architectural difference of the ‘European’ or ‘settler’ zone and Indigenous zone. What are the afterlives of these compartments? How have they been appropriated, reinforced, or maintained? The preservation of the pilot plan in Brasilia through the UNESCO World Heritage List offers insights into these changes.

Scholars of settler colonial studies analyse a range of social practices that reproduce the structural logic of Indigenous dispossession and the contestations over settler spatial control. Given the structural logic of the ‘elimination of the Native’ necessitates ‘sustained iteration in the present’, ²⁷ scholars have analysed the reproduction of the settler colonial spatial logic through racialised property regimes, ²⁸ military and police violence, ²⁹ and forms of knowledge. ³⁰ These interventions demonstrate the wide range of social practices tied to both the production and reinforcement of the settler colonial spatial logic. However, there is surprisingly little attention paid to the built environment as a source to analyse the reproduction of the spatial logic of Indigenous land dispossession and settler spatial consolidation with a notable exception in the work analysing the production of space through the built environment in Israel/Palestine. Palestinian displacement through Israeli settler colonialism dating back to the late 19th century with Zionist Yishuv settlement and the intensification through the Nakba, when over 700,000 Palestinians were displaced and prevented from returning, on through the present offers insights into the importance of the built environment toward the project of displacement and construction of the Israeli state. During this timeframe, over six-hundred Palestinian villages were remade through destruction, appropriation, or reforestation, thus dispossessed buildings connecting the material remains of Palestinian villages to past and present injustices as an ongoing Nakba. Indeed, urban planning and architectural production are fashioned as ‘crimes on the drawing board’ that further Palestinian dispossession complemented by the production of Israeli spatial control on both sides of the Green Line. ³¹

Sharon Rotbard’s White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa, brings together settler colonialism, the built environment, and architectural preservation. Rotbard analyses the narrations of official Israeli national histories and modernist architecture in Tel Aviv to resituate White City Tel Aviv, a World Heritage site justified for similarities and differences to Brasilia, as an exclusivist Jewish Yishuv and later Israeli enclave in opposition to the Palestinian Arab port city of Jaffa, from which the foundations for Tel Aviv emerged in the early 20th century. Here, Rotbard extends the work of Fanon and Abu-Lughod by connecting the logic of ‘European’ zones designed through modernist architecture as white cities, where race, settler colonialism, and the built environment intersected in the construction of Tel Aviv, Algiers, Casablanca, and Dakar. He explains these as ‘attempts to found new, modern European cities overlooking or beside what were perceived as ancient, crumbling Arab dwellings. Both were exercises in settler colonialism’ that later became of interest to architectural preservationists. ³² This last gesture towards preservationists and modernist architecture is particularly useful for analysing Brasilia in that 20th century modernism is the same architectural form preserved in the pilot plan in Brasilia. In fact, White City Tel Aviv was added to the World Heritage List 2003, sixteen years after Brasilia; the preservation of Brasilia is directly referenced in a comparative discussion in the nomination and inscription materials for White City Tel Aviv. Rotbard further clarifies the connection between modernist architecture, settler colonialism, and preservation by arguing that ‘the best places to examine modern architecture remain outside of Europe, in urban spaces which were developed under colonial governance’. ³³ By bringing together modernist architectural, segregated zones, and architectural preservation, Rotbard foregrounds the built environment and its preservation as justified through a narrow reading of architectural history that decouples settler colonial origins from the motivating logic of racial segregation.

Rotbard’s intervention suggests the potential in analysing the social practices of ‘interpreters’, ³⁴ an individual or group, making meaning out of the built environment through preservation. Social practices of interpretation convert the built environment into ‘a reliable document of the past and a purveyor of historical facts’ ³⁵ that confirm self-perceptions of (and claims to) notions of history, identity, and ownership or sovereignty, ³⁶ because the design of the built environment reaffirms the Brazilian nation state through what is fashioned as Brazilian national modernist architecture. ³⁷ Crucially, these interpreters invoke the relevance of modernist sites, like Brasilia or Tel Aviv, to the history of modernist architectural and planning in order to render these sites legible to institutions, such as the World Heritage Committee. Simultaneously, the association of these sites with the World Heritage List legitimates their relevance to architectural history. These efforts that append interpretive frames to the built environment are not a byproduct of the dispossession and contestations over spatial control within the settler polity, but rather the very substance of architectural preservation of Brasilia.

Constitution of the Pilot Plan as the Settler City

The design and construction of the pilot plan for Brasilia finds resonance with Fanon’s articulation and constatations over the boundaries of the ‘European’ compartment of the settler city. Lucio Costa, architect and urban designer, won the 1957 national competition to design the urban plan for the new capital city was based on the pilot plan, an administrative and residential enclave with north-south and east-west axes in an abstract curved cross-like pattern for the interior site that was conceived as terra nullis, despite Indigenous presence. Costa’s characterisation of the pilot plan as a ‘deliberate act of conquest, a gesture of pioneers acting in the spirit of their colonial traditions’ ³⁸ reflects the wider strategic aims of the Brazilian government to integrate the interior of Brazil with the population centres on the coast. Indeed, the histories of resistance by interior Indigenous communities against land dispossession by government authorities and missionaries ³⁹ posed problems for enlisting labourers needed to construct the pilot plan. Indigenous populations were perceived as a security risk and were understandably unenthusiastic about the explicit act of dispossession implied by the construction of Brasilia. As a result, officials recruited candangos, ‘poor itinerant laborers’ ⁴⁰ racialised as ‘non-white’ due to mixed African, European, and/or Indigenous aancestry from Northeast areas of Brazil, who were willing to migrate to Brasilia in 1957 to construct the new capital on the condition that they leave upon completion in 1960 (although sections of the plan would be finished through the 1970s). ⁴¹ In turn, this established ‘a visible racial divide’ between public servants – and planners of Brasilia – who were racialised as ‘white’ based on the pilot plan and the candangos population racialised as ‘non-white’ in peripheral areas. ⁴² The intersection of political elites planning and candangos building the settler city of the pilot plan situates the contestations over space within the settler polity, all at the expense of Indigenous land dispossession.

The spatial-racial difference at the foundations of the pilot plan as the settler city developed in the earliest years of construction. The mass destruction of a candango settlement in what would become Lake Paranoa remains ‘one of the most haunting examples of the expulsion and erasure of the least powerful from the capital.’ ⁴³ The displacement of candango settlements to the outskirts beyond the pilot plan eventually consolidated into ‘informal’ urban form as satellite cities that became associated with candangos in opposition to the bureaucratic elites that were based in the pilot plan or across Lake Paranoa. James Holston claims that ‘the success of Brasilia’s [spatial] order depend[s] to a considerable degree upon keeping the forces of disorder out of the capital [read: the pilot plan] and in the periphery’. ⁴⁴ While candangos were revered as pioneers during the construction of the city, the meaning shifted to a derogatory term as the satellite cities grew and the aim of political elites was to maintain the boundary between the pilot plan and surrounding satellite cities. ⁴⁵

The role of candangos in the construction of the pilot plan clarifies the settler colonial studies triad that includes: 1) settler administrators in the form of Brazilian government officials as well as modernist architects and planners, 2) Indigenous communities dispossessed of interior Amazonian lands throughout the 20th century, and 3) settlers or what Patrick Wolfe characterised as the ‘frontier rabble’ ⁴⁶ – in the form of the candangos – motivated by financial opportunity. ⁴⁷ Crucially, settler colonial studies point to tensions within this triad; settlers are needed by the colonial authority to displace Indigenous communities, but at times work in opposition to this authority, whereas both the colonial authority and settlers work in opposition to native communities displaced by the settler colonial political, military, and spatial order. As I will show below, these enduring tensions between the architects, planners, and government on the one hand, and the candangos, their racialised lower socioeconomic class descendants on the other hand, is the premise for the preservation effort in the 1980s. ⁴⁸

Both the layout and the architecture in the pilot plan was underpinned by the principle of tabula rasa and national aspirations for modernisation. ⁴⁹ At the inaugural ceremony in 1960, President Juscelino Kubitschek underscored the nationalist credentials in that the pilot plan was designed and constructed by Brazilians with the explicit intent to transform the national project through the medium of 20th century modernist architectural design and planning. ⁵⁰ Modernist architecture and planning was the medium to channel the evangelicalism of the transfer of the capital based on the belief that modernist design held the potential to fundamentally social engineer the human body and with it, wider societies through the built environment. ⁵¹ In the words of Le Corbusier, leaders were confronted with either ‘architecture or revolution’, as architecture held out the potential to both transform and to manage society. In other words, the construction of Brasilia would not only transform the nation state, but also the body politic of Brazil through modernist design.

In Brasilia, architectural preservation was not just about the maintenance of buildings, but also the maintenance of the racial socioeconomic order that was reinforced spatially through the preservation intervention that culminated in the addition to the World Heritage List in 1987. The preservation effort of the pilot plan fits within this wider history of spatial contestations of the settler colonial order in Brasilia. ⁵² By the 1980s, the informal satellite cities populated by candangos began to merge with the pilot plan. Rather than focus on integrating or improving the living standards in the underserved satellite cities, city administrators and preservationists viewed the satellite cities as a threat to the formalised settler colonial order expressed through the original designs for modernist architecture and monumentality of the pilot plan. In 1986, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), the technical body of the World Heritage List analysing sites for addition to the World Heritage List, reflected these concerns by expressing urgency for inscription due to the disarray of the satellite cities that ‘infringed upon’ and threatened the integrity of the pilot plan. The ICOMOS recommendation explains:

large, often transitory, population distributed among the seven satellite cities, as well as in the poorer neighborhoods that were established to the detriment of the 1956-1957 project. In the absence of both a master plan and a code of urbanism [for the satellite cities], the standards defined by Costa and Niemeyer [in the pilot plan] have been infringed upon in the greatest disarray. Higher structures in certain sectors, construction in open spaces, modifications in the road network, and other transgressions have gravely altered a monumental landscape initially of great quality. ⁵³

The preservation effort was to keep the candango populations in the satellite cities in order to maintain the integrity of the pilot plan. While the main form of housing, superquadras, on the pilot plan were designed to accommodate between three hundred and seven hundred thousand residents, there are around 300,000 residing there today. This figure pales in comparison to the nearly 2.5 million residents in Brasilia, the majority of whom reside in satellite cities.

The 1980s preservation effort was part of a larger symbolic rebalancing between the public and the government after the end of a 21-year military dictatorship in 1985. The then newly minted civilian governor of Brasilia, Jose Aparecido de Oliveira, initiated the development of a preservation plan exclusively for the pilot plan at the start of his administration. He appointed the original design team of Lucio Costa along with Oscar Niemeyer as well as internationally-renowned landscape architect, Roberto Burle Marx, to craft the ‘Brasilia Revisited’ preservation plan. ⁵⁴ As with any revisiting, the preservation effort created a historical narrative of the past that exclusively focused on the original design of the architecture and spaces of the pilot plan, thus reinscribing the segregation of the pilot plan from the satellite cities, and by extension the difference between populations racialised as white and less than white. Despite passing suggestions to include low-income housing or ‘economically viable blocks’ near the pilot plan for those ‘virtually cast away from the city’ in the satellite cities, the plan intensifies difference between the pilot plan and the satellite cities. ⁵⁵ It was through the transformations in the World Heritage List that this plan of revisiting was to come to fruition.

‘Brasilia’ and the Quest for Institutional Legitimacy for the World Heritage List

The inscription of Brasilia in 1987 transformed the meaning of world heritage. The addition of a 20th century site was made possible by an amendment to the World Heritage Committee operational guidelines that separated ‘historic towns’ (pre-1900) from ‘new towns of the twentieth century’, which paved the way for the inscription of Brasilia. ⁵⁶ These changes and the inscription of Brasilia set in motion the addition of several 20th century modernist sites outside of Europe, which corresponds to Rotbard’s claim that the most remarkable modernist architectural sites were located outside of Europe. Subsequent modernist sites located outside of Europe include White City Tel Aviv (2003), campus at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (2007), Rabat (2012), and Asmara (2017). The addition of Brasilia also set in motion the rewriting of the World Heritage List inscription criteria by a modernist organization, the International Committee for Documentation and Conservation of Buildings, Sites, and Neighborhouds of the Modern Movement (DOCOMOMO). In this way, Brasilia was the start of the inclusion of 20th century modernist sites but draws on a much wider institutional efforts to increase the geographic representation of more recent sites to the World Heritage List.

In 1972, the World Heritage List was established via an international treaty, the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. Since the first tranche of sites added to the World Heritage List in 1978, there has been an ongoing effort to enhance the legitimacy of the institution. There has been a degree of success in light of the fact that the treaty began in 1972 with two state parties, Egypt and the United States, and now currently has 193 state parties (and one observer mission), which corresponds to the exponential increase in World Heritage Sites. As of June 2020, the current total is 1,121 cultural, natural, and mixed-use sites spread out across 167 states. This makes the Convention one of the most widely accepted in world politics.

However, the status of world heritage, attained when sites are nominated by states and voted on by the World Heritage Committee, is premised on fraught claims to universalism. Irina Bokova, the former Director General of the UNESCO, of which the World Heritage List is a part, asserts that world heritage sites ‘belong to all the peoples of the world, irrespective of the territory on which they are located’. ⁵⁷ The essential criteria for sites to be added to the World Heritage List are that sites are of ‘outstanding universal value’ along with at least two of the ten selection criteria. ⁵⁸ However, the self-fashioned universalism of the World Heritage List has been increasingly challenged by scholars critiquing the nomination and inscription of world heritage sites as part of the production of official national histories ⁵⁹ or as ‘transactional devices’ within wider diplomatic negotiations due to the outsized role played by the nation state in the process. ⁶⁰ These critiques of the politics of the World Heritage List rarely account for the spatial effects of inscription, nor do they deal with connections between spatial and geopolitical orders produced through the List.

Even internal UNESCO World Heritage Committee – the organisation that administers the World Heritage List – recognise the limitations in the claims to universalism. In 1984, a technical expert from the ICOMOS, the technical body that assesses cultural heritage nominations for the World Heritage Committee, warned that nominations reflected ‘more of national, rather than universal, value’. ⁶¹ However, the recognition of the limitations in notions of universalism have been interpreted as being addressed through a more representative List. Specifically, this has been understood as a geographic and typological imbalance that threatens universalism, because over half of all sites are in Europe and North America. ⁶² In 1986, European and North American sites comprised over 50 percent (N=90) of the cultural sites inscribed on the World Heritage List (N=178), whereas Latin American and the Caribbean region was a mere 9 percent (N=16) of the List. ⁶³ These imbalances in the List posed the question of whether the claims to universalism underpinning the List were, in fact, appropriate. ⁶⁴  While these issues surfaced in meeting notes in the 1980s, the issue of distribution would eventually be institutionalised in the Global Strategy for a Representative, Balanced, and Credible World Heritage List in 1994. However, these early years of the 1980s started conversations on the ‘severe imbalances’ on the World Heritage List. ⁶⁵ These geographic anxieties were expressed by the Secretariat in 1985 meeting notes: ‘the geographical representation of States was still very uneven, with few State Parties from the Asian and Eastern European regions.’ ⁶⁶ This recognition by the Secretariat, the technical body of ICOMOS, and state parties spurred on a concerted effort to expand the geographic scope of the List and to include 20th century sites. The addition of Brasilia, as the first 20th century site added to the World Heritage List, and one located in Latin American fits within these general efforts to expand the geographies and types of sites on the List towards the aim of greater legitimacy.

The Brazilian government advanced the UNESCO World Heritage List nomination of Brasilia based on criteria i and iv ⁶⁷ , which were both framed in terms of the 20th century modernist movement. The process began with the 1986 addition to the Brazil tentative list in preparation for the 1987 inscription file, which asserts criteria i based on the pilot plan as a ‘singular artistic achievement, a prime creation of the human genius, representing, on an urban scale, the living expression of the principles and ideals advanced by the Modernist Movement’. ⁶⁸ Similarly, criteria iv advances the pilot plan as a ‘unique example of urban planning brought to fruition in the 20th century, an expression of the urban principles of the Modernist Movement as set out in the 1943 Athens Charter, in Le Corbusier’s 1946 treatise How to Conceive Urbanism, and in the architectural designs of Oscar Niemeyer’. ⁶⁹ Here, the justification of the site through the history of the modernist movement blurs with the nationalist Brazilian interpretations of modernist architecture by Oscar Niemeyer. The connections between the European modernist movement ideas of urban planning in the CIAM Athens Charter (1933) incorrectly noted as from 1943 in nomination and inscription materials and key figures such as Le Corbusier were mythologised through the World Heritage List materials due to the perceived influence on the large-scale urban plan and architecture on the pilot plan. The pilot plan, fashioned as ‘Brasilia’, was framed by architectural historians as an ‘instance of a Third World Country that turned the tables and took the lead in architecture’ by building a modernist city, something not achieved in Europe. ⁷⁰ Through these narrations, Brasilia became the definitive synthesis of widescale modernist urban planning and architecture that was a source for legitimising the preservation of modernist sites both within and outside of Europe in accordance with the institutional aims to increase the representation of sites by the World Heritage Committee.

Preservationists of the pilot plan blend national histories with modernist movement historiography to both mythologize and to remake the space of the pilot plan. The nomination file notes that the ‘Brazilian experience’ with modernist movement architecture and planning that informed the design of Brasilia was connected to ‘a process of national self-affirmation before the world’. ⁷¹ On the one hand, the new national capital reflected the modernisation ambitions of industrialisation, resource extraction, and greater sovereign control of the Amazonian interior. On the other hand, preservationists relied on the notion of ‘Brazilian modernism’ articulated in the Brazil Builds (1943) and Brazilian Architecture (1949) exhibits at the MOMA and Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, respectively, as a rubric for interpreting the significance of the site. Both exhibits fashioned a blending ‘modernism and brasilidade [i.e., a distinctive sense of Brazilian-ness, directly linked to its tropicality]’ with its own national architectural expressions, such as the Ministry of Education and Health building in Rio, which is revered as the first modernist structure designed by a team of architects that included Lucio Costa and Le Corbusier in 1939. ⁷² The distinct blend of nationalist modernism of Brazil, codified by these exhibits and the Ministry of Education and Health building, underscores how the nationalist modernism realised in Brasilia was cultivated or at least validated through elite art spaces in Europe and the US. By framing the Brasilia architecture – and builders – as distinctly Brazilian, preservationists’ narrations gloss over the endemic racial socioeconomic issues that were exacerbated through the construction of the pilot plan that undermines the aspirations of universalism asserted by both the modernist movement and the World Heritage List. As noted, the effect during and after the construction of the pilot plan was the spatial fragmentation that circumscribed candangos to informal satellite cities the pilot plan. By fashioning associations between the nation state and the modernist movement, both the designers in the 1950s and preservationists in the 1980s, were able to perpetuate the myth of an egalitarian Brazilian society that transcended race when, in fact, both the construction and preservation of the pilot plan intensified racial and socioeconomic difference through spatial organisation. The effect was the silencing of the tensions that underpinned the construction of Brasilia in much the same way that the notion of a ‘racial democracy’ obscures entrenched racialised structural inequalities in Brasilia and wider Brazil. ⁷³

The preservation effort effectively reinforced the spatial, racial, and symbolic boundaries between the pilot plan and the satellite cities through decentralisation initiatives of the 1980s. On the one hand, the preservation plan of Brasilia Revisited called for returning to the original 1956 plan for the city that assumed candangos would leave after completion. The return to the original plan as the preservation plan for Brasilia intensified closing of the boundaries between the pilot plan and surrounding areas to render the ‘pulverized metropolis’ of polycentric satellite cities populated by candangos, their descendants, and migrant groups fanning out from the pilot plan. ⁷⁴ Decentralisation was fuelled by the state-led development of far-flung satellite cities in the 1980s in Samambaia and Riacho Fundo that were roughly 25 and 18 kilometres (km) from the pilot plan, respectively. This distance reflects the placement of other satellite cities that emerged in the 1950s and were consolidated in the 1960s, such as Taguatinga (30km from the pilot plan) and Ceilandia (24km from the pilot plan). The vast distances between these satellite cities and the central business district of the pilot plan led to the establishment of informal settlements that were blurring the boundaries of the pilot plan. The impetus for the preservation of the pilot plan as partition becomes apparent when, in 1988, The New York Times editors, described the pilot plan as ‘under siege’ from informal settlements and the satellite cities. ⁷⁵ For preservationists, the encroachment needed to be put in bay in order to maintain the pilot plan as the textbook modernist city designed by Costa, not as the sprawling city with the pilot plan as merely one neighbourhood. ⁷⁶

One example of this urban form mounting the ‘siege’ on the pilot plan was in Ciudade Estrutural, an urban neighbourhood primarily occupied by garbage collectors residing near the main garbage dump on the northwest edge of the pilot plan. In the 1980s, the built fabric of areas like Ciudade Estrutural were ‘infiltrating’ the pilot plan with echoes of the ‘disarray’ and ‘transgressions’ noted in the 1986 ICOMOS Report. ⁷⁷ In response, both the preservationists fashioning the 1987 World Heritage List nomination and the ICOMOS representatives stipulated that the district reinstate the 1956 policies from the time of creation ⁷⁸ that effectively reinforced the spatial segregation of the pilot plan from the satellite cities where both candangos remained after completion and Indigenous communities displaced by the construction of the city resided. By 2000, UNESCO-Brazil pointed to the effects of these changes by noting: ‘The Observer of Brazil stated that even though there was increased demographic pressure [on the pilot plan], the construction activity concentrated on areas outside the main urban design [read: satellite cities], did not threaten the integrity of the World Heritage Site’. ⁷⁹ Thus, the spatial fragmentation was justified based on isolating the pilot plan from surrounding areas by a return to original policies and designs.

Preservationists redefined the pilot plan as Brasilia through the inscription to the World Heritage List. The pilot plan became Brasilia, and Brasilia became the pilot plan. The satellite cities did not register in this equation, as those areas designated as beyond the buffer zone were unintelligible through the framework ⁸⁰ for the inscription were unintelligible through the frameworks of modernist architecture, and thus, were of little interest to the preservationists. The inscription made possible the narrative construction of the pilot plan as Brasilia, while reinforcing the spatial boundaries between the pilot plan and satellite cities. In fact, the distinction of the pilot plan is not mentioned in either of the criteria used to justify inscription. Instead, Brasilia, by which the preservationists mean the pilot plan, is noted as a ‘singular artistic achievement’ and ‘a unique example of urban planning’. ⁸¹ In this way, preservationists narrating the pilot plan as Brasilia not only elide the satellite cities along with the candangos and their histories within the city, but also all that occurred between sketching the plan on article in 1956 and the preservation effort in the 1980s.

The spatial segregation of the pilot plan through the inscription to the World Heritage List crystallised Brasilia as a material manifesto of the archetypal modernist city. The inscription materials fashion the pilot plan as ‘the definitive example of 20th century modernist urbanism’ and as the ‘the living expression of the principles and ideals advanced by the Modernist Movement’. ⁸² However, the framing of Brasilia as the epitome of the modernist city is premised on its partitioning from the immediate surrounding context of urban sprawl and the wider satellite cities that make up the polycentric city of Brasilia. ⁸³ Indeed, the UNESCO inscription materials celebrate that it is possible to ‘clearly distinguish the city’s limits [of the pilot plan] from the territorial expanse in which it was introduced’. ⁸⁴ This follows Lucio Costa’s wishes of preservation, so that ‘future generations have the chance to see the city ‘as it was originally conceived, meaning that it is circumscribed from its surroundings. ⁸⁵ In effect, the consolidation of the narrative that Brasilia is the archetypal modernist city established which histories and tools for narrating the histories of Brasilia mattered. All that is within the pilot plan registers as intelligible through modernist movement principles, whereas all that falls beyond the buffer zone is unintelligible, thus legitimating their exclusion from the histories of the city in the World Heritage List materials or in the historiographies of modernist architecture. As a result, the original vision for the city mattered most along with the modernist movement tools to narrate that history in opposition to, and at the expense of the satellite cities. And all of this was validated by and part of the transformation of the UNESCO World Heritage List.

The inscription of Brasilia in 1987 fit within the greater interest to document, study, and preserve 20th century modernist architecture. Interest in preserving modernist architecture grew against the backdrop of postmodern design dominating architectural production in the 1970s through the 1990s and the ‘steep disciplinary decline’ in authority of architecture in the 1980s. ⁸⁶ As a result, preservation served as a ‘convincing source of legitimation’ that granted architects renewed disciplinary prominence in shaping the built environment. ⁸⁷ In the words of Zaha Hadid: ‘by the time I came interested in him [Oscar Niemeyer, the architect of the main buildings in Brasilia] during the late 70s, early 80s, you could hardly find any books about his work’. ⁸⁸ However, the preservation and inscription of Brasilia as a World Heritage List site would raise the profile of modernism after 1987, as would the Le Corbusier Foundation’s restoration of the Villa Savoye in preparation for Le Corbusier’s centennial celebration in 1987 and the reconstruction of what is thought of as the defining modernist structure in Mies van der Rohe’s German Pavilion for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona in the same year. The combination of these developments generated interest in preservation, modernism, key figures like Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer, and Brasilia. This contributed to the inscription of Brasilia in 1987 and Oscar Niemeyer receiving the prestigious Pritzker award in 1988 for the Cathedral of Brasilia (co-recipient with Gordon Bunschaft) and spurred on efforts like the creation of DOCOMOMO-International, which would play an instrumental role in subsequent changes to the World Heritage List.

Entangled Legitimacy in the Inscription of the Settler City

The addition of the pilot plan to the World Heritage List that enhanced the legitimacy through better representation of geographies and types of sites was contingent on the transformation of Brasilia. The addition of the pilot plan as Brasilia silences the satellite cities and the inequities imposed through segregated urban spaces. Design, construction, and preservation were each leveraged to reinforce the foundational premises of inequality within the Brazilian state in general and the Brasilia, in particular. However, to analyse the fragmented spaces of Brasilia tells the story of inequality that was facilitated by the inscription to the UNESCO World Heritage List. In this way, the legitimacy of the World Heritage List was contingent upon the reproduction of the settler colonial spatial order of Indigenous displacement and the partitioning of the settler ‘rabble’ from political and economic elites. The entanglement of the UNESCO World Heritage List in such processes necessitates consideration for the longer-term effects of the inscription of Brasilia beyond the site itself.

The addition of Brasilia to the World Heritage reshaped the meaning of world heritage. Contemporary architecture became part of the corpus of sites to be considered for the World Heritage List. On the surface, this expanded representation seems like a step in the right direction for the World Heritage List, even if it is not conflated with fraught notions of universalism. However, the spatial production of segregation and the normalisation of Indigenous land dispossession through preservation in Brasilia should prompt consideration for the kind of spatial order required for the expanded legitimacy of the World Heritage List. Each of the subsequent sites in Tel Aviv, Rabat, and Asmara are urban zones produced through settler colonialism in the early 20th century, and thus prompt the twin questions of what role does the World Heritage List play in shaping global politics and what kind of spatial effects do inscriptions have on that geopolitical order? The case of Brasilia suggests that the World Heritage List – and perhaps international organisations more broadly – have the capacity to serve as vehicles for normalising segregated zones premised segregated zones premised on the displacement of Indigenous populations and the consolidation of territorial control by political and economic elites. The reproduction of this logic provokes reflection on the potential of the World Heritage List as a vehicle for the reproduction of the logic of settler colonialism. The entanglement of the preservation of the pilot plan with the UNESCO World Heritage List in Brazil suggests new potential directions for focusing on the built environment as a source to analyse how the logic of elimination endures and is contested within the settler polity in geographies, such as Brasilia.

The entanglement of the World Heritage List, modernist architecture and planning in the pilot plan, and settler colonialism prompts greater consideration for the relation between space, forms of knowledge, and international organisations. To explore the role of space in the production and maintenance of the power of international organisations is quite literally to locate how the foundations of these institutions and their practices are shaping geopolitics. This focus on the spatial practices as geopolitics is a reminder of Eyal Weizman’s palindrome: he went searching for the politics of architecture, but, in fact, found the architecture of politics, or the way that politics is imagined and practiced through space. ⁸⁹ As Weizman’s palindrome suggests, the forms of knowledge to make the built environment knowable, and thus deemed worthy of preservation, through institutions such as the World Heritage List are not distinct from geopolitics, but elements of the very substance of international politics. And thus, this intervention suggests the urgency to inquiry into the multiple forms and instantiations of settler colonialism, international organisations, and forms of knowledge through other organisations. Here, I would like to suggest that scholars in international relations – and the social sciences more broadly – should be paying attention to the architectures of politics, otherwise, there is the potential to miss the actual material foundations on which power in international politics is produced, practiced, and reified.