Southern lights: Metropolitan imaginaries in Latin America

Introduction

Interdisciplinary theories of urban life in Western modernity often associate cities with movements of people, goods, and cultures within larger economic and cultural networks. When it comes to urbanization in new world societies, many historians and comparative and historical sociologists seem to accept the axiom that migration is exceptionally central to the constitution of modern life (Almeida, 2011; Belich, 2009; Games, 2008; Nugent, 1992). To varying degrees, the premier cities of the modern Americas joined a larger maritime Atlantic world connecting Western Africa to the Atlantic seaboard states and Latin countries of Europe. They helped create the trans-Atlantic economy, whilst simultaneously being products of connection to overarching Atlantic modernities, a connection which was both creative and destructive in its effects. Mass immigration and economic and cultural traffic were currents of modernity further stoking that expansion over time, making some American cities places with significant interregional and international connections. Those cities were the major metropolises of the new world and their position over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries warrants their treatment as sites of social historical creation – to invoke Cornelius Castoriadis (1987) – and, as such, metropolitan imaginaries, condensing connectedness, creativity, and diversity in particular city locations.

Migration exemplifies this connectedness of Atlantic modernities. Transnational migration was one of the currents that boosted urban modernity in the Americas by integrating cultures and languages across three continents (Games, 2008). As Moya observes, intercontinental migration brought ‘the extremes: of global forces and local conditions, of the world and the village’ as influences on society-making in Latin America (Moya, 1998: 40). The process is more complex than images of a singular movement would suggest. In the era of one-way mass movements, migrants often moved in three steps from interior regions to ocean voyages, and then either settlement, or a further internal migration (Belich, 2009; Moya, 2007; Nugent, 1992). Up until the mid-19th century, most migrations were involuntary and most migrants were indentured servants or slaves. Their paths intersected in plantations, mines, and farms. The wealth they extracted, harvested, and produced enriched cities as well as the lands colonized in earlier inland expansion. From the 1870s onwards, mass voluntary migration predominated, converting internal movements in the European continent into large-scale one-way transfers of Atlantic proportions. Over time, such movements then turned into secondary migration to frontiers, plains, border regions, deserts, and inland cities. This dynamic produced a spectrum of fateful migratory experiences, which defined societies in the Americas in patterns quite different from African and European societies (Eisenstadt, 2002; Wagner, 2015).

In other work, I theorize the dynamics of metropolitan imaginaries more extensively and explore the institution of these dynamics in North American metropolitan imaginaries (Smith, 2018). In examining Latin America, I set two different aims. First, I address the imbalanced focus in the English-language literature on cities of the USA and Canada by sketching the significance of mass migration and economic and cultural connection for four cities in Latin America. I go on to argue that the intensity of connections gives culture, architecture, and urban design a conspicuous creativity. Second, where key sociologies of southern cities have theorized them as urban imaginaries (García Canclini, 1997; Scorer, 2016; Silva Téllez, 2003), I argue that Latin America’s major cities are creations of metropolitan imaginaries. I distinguish the latter by the quality of international and regional connections that they generate, a quality derived from the mass of cultural and economic flows they are integrated into. As lively centers with greater connection to international and regional networks, metropolises produce greater magnitude for creativity and organic creation. They are internationally significant as places of architectural practice. The literature on urban imaginaries underestimates this important dimension of metropolitan centers. I go the other way in this essay in my examination of 19th and 20th-century Buenos Aires, Mexico City, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro. I do so by emphasizing how the strength of connectivity that they enjoyed and the creativity they bring forth differentiate these centers.

In the Latin American literature, we find a complex paradox in debates about city-making (García Canclini, 1997; Silva Téllez, 2003). On one hand, scholars in the fields of demography, architecture, and urban design treat cities as imaginary creations in the sense that their inhabitants seek to bring order to urbanization. On the other hand, an overall image of uncontrollable dynamism shines through in the literature. Cities are ever-changing ecologies, combining multiple dynamics, agents, practices, and institutions beyond any purposeful ordering process. As ecologies, cities are irrepressible formations that no singular will or plan can subdue. The imaginary complex perpetually unsettles the modern meaning of cities, constantly reconfiguring patterns of city formation and delimiting how policy and planning processes can shape urban reproduction and transformation. Cities variously form on this paradox of attempted rational ordering and complex ecology. How that occurs in specific contexts is one of the central questions motivating theoretical and empirical research into urban imaginaries. With higher connectivity to international and regional networks, the question applies to metropolitan cities even more.

Against this backdrop of discussion on Latin American urban imaginaries, I wish to utilize a specific concept of imaginary. Following Castoriadis, I differentiate metropolitan imaginaries from urban imaginaries in order to focus on the tension of instituted and instituting imaginary (Castoriadis, 1987). Castoriadis’ ontology suggests that societies have a contingent and highly dynamic character – a characterization certainly well suited to the ecological complex of metropolitan cities. However, one addition is essential to mention – his emphasis on the social historical institution of society, which rests on a tension of continuity and discontinuity in history. In Castoriadis’ own words, the social historical institution ‘structures, institutes, materializes. In short, it is the union and the tension of instituting society and of instituted society, of history made and of history in the making’ (Castoriadis, 1987: 108). Societies are wholes, made and transformed in processes of creation. They are imaginary ecological complexes in which people interact as creative agents in an environment engulfed in the anonymous collective creation of society. I suggest that this is a different way of understanding the paradox. Georg Simmel’s sociological theorization of the metropolis also captures this paradox of the individual and the anonymous collective, albeit within an interactionist paradigm (Simmel, 1976). For Simmel, the metropolitan experience entails a routine in which the individual encounters familiar places, known people, and an anonymous physical mass of the large city itself, which is replete with strangers. Simmel pointed to the manner in which inhabitants with an established habitus enact daily routines to negotiate a metropolis so familiar and so strange both at once.

Viewed in light of Castoriadis’ theory of the imaginary institution of society, the paradox of cities highlighted in debates on Latin America’s urban imaginaries appears to indicate two ways in which large metropolitan cities are exceptional. First, they are places of flow. People move into metropolises, and then encounter their metropolitan world daily. City dwellers also encounter new arrivals there. Many of those are migrants, both rural and immigrant newcomers. Intercultural encounters are possible in these conditions, although continuous estrangement and mutual hostility frequently arise in the place of intercultural consociation. Second, metropolitan centers are centers of invention. The traffic in ideas flowing through them stimulates creativity. Being this kind of environment, metropolises attract designers: architects, planners, and engineers. They institute an intense interactive environment of creativity, which, in turn, invites creative agents. Yet, there is unplanned ingenuity evident in the self-sufficient neighborhood formation and community organization that occur in the informal zones of the metropolises, often irrespective of the acute social conditions they are widely known for. The favelas of Latin America set major southern cities apart from comparable new world metropolises in the USA and Canada. In summary, metropolitan cities stand out from other cities because of the intensity of encounters and interactions that they host and the creative environments they foster. Both rest on a tension of an instituted and instituting imaginary.

In this essay, I compare Buenos Aires, Mexico City, São Paolo, and Rio in order to argue that Atlantic patterns of mass migration and large-scale city-making distinguish these four as cities with their own metropolitan imaginaries. Limitations of space constrain me from exploring other viable cases, such as Montevideo, Havana, Santiago, Belo Horizonte, and Lima. The four I have selected relate to transnational currents of people, trade, doctrines, sciences, arts, and methods in ways that give them dynamism. The makers of modern new world metropolises acted and conflicted in those currents. Metropolitan imaginaries instituted conditions in which creative milieu could invent modes of urban design and new styles of architecture. This, along with migration, propelled the imaginary institution of southern metropolitan lights.

Southern lights – Migration

Before examining each metropolis, I have a brief corrective to the prevalent focus on the USA in studies of new world migration. Moya’s thesis that a flourishing phase of trans-Atlantic immigration straddled the turn of the century from 1870 to 1914 emphasizes high levels of immigration to Latin America’s major metropolises (Moya, 2006; 2007; see also Pizarro, 2001). While only 15 percent of the population lived in towns and cities in 1900 (Moya, 2007: 184–90), those major cities were centerpieces of Latin American modernity due to their connections with global capitalism, politics, and cultural transformations. The flow of immigration from Europe slowed in the 1930s. After the Second World War, movement between Latin American countries became the prominent migratory pattern maintaining the character of many as ‘host’ societies (Pizarro, 2001). Higher wages, economic growth, and proximity to the expanding peripheries of capitals, along with the loss of employment opportunities in agriculture and the acceleration of projects of resource extraction, drew people to metropolitan centers, making Latin America a highly urbanized world region by the end of the 20th century. By this time, the region’s megacities were absorbing large numbers of new rural internal migrants (Pizarro, 2001). Movement from one country in the region to another also accelerated. As receiving countries – both at the start and at the end of the 20th centuries – Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina seem to feature the most vibrant metropolitan imaginaries: in other words, the most vital places of creation and creativity. We start with Buenos Aires, then turn to Mexico City, and finally São Paulo and Rio.

Buenos Aires

…gobernar es poblar. (Juan Bautista Alberdi, cited in Nugent, 1992: 112)

That patterns of immigration to Argentina did not fulfill Alberdi’s vision of exhaustive Europeanization of the population is a testament to the complex forces at work in the chains of connection integrating states, markets, and cultures in Atlantic modernity. In the mass movement of migrants out of Europe, more than 20 percent set out for the River Plate region (Moya, 1998: 47). Buenos Aires’ population doubled in the 1880s, repeating the feat in the 1890s (Moya, 1998; Rock, 1987: 153). By 1914, it was, arguably, the foremost capital in the Western hemisphere. As free arable land began to run out, migrants found themselves unable to make a living outside of the cities. Migrants experienced a process of proletarianization in this phase (Nugent, 1992: 118–19), which was also one of industrialization in the city. Buenos Aires was a fast-emerging metropolis of newcomers.

As Argentina’s proportion of foreign-born accelerated to overtake even the USA, reaching 58 percent (Nugent, 1992: 112), Buenos Aires became a place for ‘strangers in the city’ (Sarlo, 2000: 113–15). In population, immigration made its ecology multi-ethnic. Italians, Spaniards, Poles, Germans, Russians, Lebanese, Turks, French, Syrians, Scots, the Welsh, and the English came in numbers (Nugent, 1992: 114). Immigrant communities initiated their own organizations to provide welfare and social activities. Moya’s study of Spanish community associations and friendly societies highlights how Spaniards forged a distinct cultural identity (Moya, 1998). Argentine Jews also sustained a relatively stable metropolitan identity during this period (Liwerant, 2009). Migration to the Latin new world promised Britons, in particular, a better life and reward for the virtues of wealth-producing labor. This was one aspect of a tight connection between the two countries produced by informal British imperialism. The English may have done well, but for many others in the metropolis, conditions were harsh. Sex slavery and abuses of workers’ rights entrenched some in a miserable existence (Rock, 1987: 176). Furthermore, for the middle-class rising out of the established popular classes, there was a loss of recognition of the stable class hierarchy of an earlier era. Creative communities in the city were displacing an ascriptive social order at a high tempo. In that respect, it was not only New York that generated anomie in the new world. Buenos Aires also encapsulated the hustle of Atlantic modernity.

As an Atlantic country, republican Argentina was quite open to the flux of global trade. The state actively framed a legal and political environment conducive to economic connection. From a littoral position of exposure to international forces, Buenos Aires-based merchants were able to bring pressure to bear on public authorities when it came to trade matters. In response, governments brought predictability to Argentina’s position in international markets through contractarian law (Adelman, 1999). Infrastructure complemented the metropolis’ internationality. Port, rail, and tram-building, along with communications, sewerage, and electrification, enhanced the city’s claim to modernity (Rock, 1987: 144–7). Rail emanated from the capital, aiding the conquest of the Pampas and Patagonia and accelerating internal processes of state formation. The nexus between agriculture and industry patterned a network of rail connections from the capital to the country’s outer reaches. Buenos Aires would not have been the energetic metropolis of national and international renown without its international, cross-American, and provincial networks.

At the hub of a national network, Buenos Aires’ elites could press their claim to leadership of the Argentinian state. Coexisting with the self-enriching elite in Buenos Aires, British capital and British traders provided competition for resources, but also a complementary dynamism. With British investment on the rise, the city modernized rapidly. By the end of the 19th century, local elites had elements of cosmopolitanism (Sarlo, 2000). They crafted a porteño metropolitan culture. At the same time, porteños were subject to a cultural normalization of exchange associated with capitalist market cultures (Salvatore, 2001). Being accustomed to the cultural imports of flows of philosophy, art, literature, and theatre, they were equally open to trade and investment.

There were international influences in city-making also. French metropolitan design was visible in the Haussmann-like makeover of the center (Arbide, 1995; Needell, 1995). Geometric boulevards, plazas lined with monumental buildings, and spacious promenades augmented the aesthetic effects of a landscape city (Beriman, 2015). Yet, the capital’s atmosphere diverged in important ways. Along the boulevards, statues and monuments smuggled in Baroque expressions of power. Tall buildings complemented monumental streets. Moreover, the shape of the core had been an artefact of multiple architectural innovations that produced a distinctive look for Buenos Aires. Building exteriors became a primary feature of this distinctive period architecture. The capital’s architectonics displayed American influences also. American finance moved in. Industrial investments from American manufacturers designed plants in the US style. Working class zones grew rapidly in the 1920s. Remarkably, the barrios and shanty towns continued to expand in the Depression years, spurred by further investment in protected manufacturing and textile sectors (Rock, 1987: 232–4). This was expansion beyond the city’s plans.

Certain architectural influences prevailed in Buenos Aires. Architectural modernism was not a matter of individual genius. Rather, collaboration was the master key to creativity, particularly in architectural firms (Arbide, 1995). As with other Latin American metropolises, local schools of architectural imagination and inspiration coalesced. The municipal council and a new School of Architecture at the city’s university became the focus of an Argentine urbanism. Buenos Aires’ Council introduced an Urban Planning and Building Aesthetic Commission and a Building Code in the 1920s, which framed the aesthetics of new neighborhoods. At the School of Architecture, scholars fostered a vernacular modernism (Guillen, 2004: 18–21). Argentine architects journeying overseas learned from other schools of design and brought the lessons home. They applied those techniques along with local styles in the central commercial and public buildings in the metropolis. Modernist banks, office buildings, and department stores thus found a place at the heart of Buenos Aires as built expressions of Atlantic modernity.

Up until the emergence of Peronism, these were two local influences shaping Buenos Aires. Peronism introduced an architectural strategy of re-fashioning public space to alter the structural settings of the new populist imaginary (Domingues, 2016; Scorer, 2016: 135–43). The regime used the Plaza de Mayo as a symbol of access to the centers of decision-making for its organized political base (Podalsky, 2004: 35–9). Public places became sites of conflict and spectacle. Nonetheless, through its careful selection of major projects, the regime did much to enhance the cult of Juan and Evita Peron in public spaces (Del Rosario Betti, 2006). Peronism promoted an austere neoclassical aesthetics that substantialized power. At the same time, the new buildings emphasized democratic access for the masses, aiming ‘to dignify the lower class’ (Del Rosario Betti, 2006: 233). Juxtaposed to this physical mass of power was the existing social Californian architecture of middle-class homes, which were picturesque expressions of the domestic sphere. The two competing tendencies ensured that the city continued to bear a culture of ambivalence.

Architecturally and culturally, much changed after Peron (Podalsky, 2004). Following Podalsky, we can identify a general trend of modernism that continued through to the 1980s in the constructions of key architectural local firms. From suburban and mass housing to multinational skyscrapers, aspects of functionalist form inserted themselves in the capital’s redevelopment. New companies specializing in sourcing materials and technology from overseas completed major projects during this rationalist phase of construction. In particular, the city’s visage re-formed around Miesian towers, which were symbols of new commerce and finance (Podalsky, 2004: 12–15, 176–8). Buenos Aires’ skyscrapers were implants in a varied cityscape. Surrounding them was a con-urban re-figuration of diverse residential zones beyond the center (Podalsky, 2004: 178–81). Outside of the center, the metropolis stood (and still stands) fragmented (Scorer, 2016). It became divided between high security and well-serviced zones of wealthy porteños and self-sustaining and self-servicing working-class barrios and shanty-towns (villas miseria) coexisting alongside them. The latter have been, by necessity, creative, adding hybridity to the city’s social geography. In Buenos Aires, an imaginary of order and chaos informs images of the dual metropolis and structures the interaction between its two sides.

Such changes to the urban landscape pre-figured the consumer metropolis of the 1990s (Podalsky, 2004: 229–35). Buenos Aires’ central buildings were still modernist glass structures, which exhibited transparency by admitting light. However, contemporary architecture has crowded around the center, leaving porteños of the late 20th century to visualize the city through an optic of late modernism. By the 1990s, Buenos Aires had become even more diverse. Latin American migration to Argentina increased in the last part of the century, adding further layers and divisions to existing porteño identity. As the structure had changed, its popular profile shifted. Spatially, the main axis still pointed to the greater Atlantic world. Along with its people, this axial orientation still symbolizes Argentina’s connection with global developments.

Mexico City

Over three centuries, Spanish colonialism left Mexico culturally mixed. In the new republic, the paradox of the metropolitan imaginary would feature in Mexico City as a tendency to absorb migrants and cultures en masse. This tendency was instituted in tension with efforts to make metropolitan places that reflect the historical and cultural plurality of the city. Mexico City from the republican era onwards was a city of in-flows and immersion in national, regional, and international networks. In immigration, Mexico City enjoyed a minor wave of European arrivals towards the end of the 19th century. Porfirio Diaz encouraged the trend of European immigration, as did the regimes of the southern cone at this time. The strongest current was Hispanic. Revival of dormant migration chains in the 1890s rekindled Spanish flows (Moya, 1998: 81–4). After the First World War, internal migration replaced the Spanish in-flow. At the metropolitan level, Mexico City’s population doubled in the first decade of the 20th century (Reader, 2004: 186). Doubling again between 1940 and 1950, and then further tripling before 1970 (Oles, 2013: 313), the national capital experienced escalating growth in its population and its geographical imprint. Across the course of the century, the city’s boundaries expanded from the historic core and the Federal District to the greater Metropolitan Area. Increasingly, newcomers settled in peripheral neighborhoods. By century’s end, Mexico City was one of the most populous metropolises on the planet, having added three million extra inhabitants in the 1990s (Reader, 2004: 171). Of the 18 million who called it home by that time, half were migrants. Much of the populace is drawn by the promise of escape from poverty. They come from rural and mountainous areas of Oaxaca, Chiapas, Hidalgo Tlaxcala, and Guerrero. With large numbers of migrants coming to a metropolis ill-equipped to absorb them, Mexico City ended the century with a large informal sector, which is decidedly diverse in its composition, sub-cultures, and creative potential (Davis, 1994: 279–80; García Canclini, 1997).

In examining the metropolis’ shape, I touch on two aspects of its overall pattern, which reflect the paradox of metropolitan city-making – historicity and modernism. The metropolitan fusion echoes what I characterize as intercivilizational engagement (Smith, 2017). This was also characteristic of the pre-Conquest interaction of indigenous civilizations. As a place with indigenous meaning, Mexico’s formation was, from the outset, cast by the historical experiences of the Conquest and its lasting consequences. ¹ In the Columbian era, the coexistence and conflict of two civilizations and two civilizational imaginaries, indio and Spanish, resonated deeply in the cultural memory of Mexico and its capital. The colonial confrontation of two civilizations sets a pattern of integration evident in the metropolis’ structure. Mexico City has been one of the diverse zones of the Spanish Americas both in its range of spoken languages and, in the postwar period, its physical commemoration of First Nations culture in museums, archaeological sites, sculptures, and public art (Bonfil Batalla, 1987: 73–96). Mexico’s profound past is memorialized through different media. The capital’s ‘intangible patrimony’ composed of written histories, images, myths, pictures, photographs, recordings, and film memorialize at the intersection of tangible and intangible memory (García Canclini, 1997: 92–4, 101). The intangible memory is as much a product of the ‘informal’ metropolis as it is the organized and serviced city. To intangible memory, the informal sector brings popular and democratized meaning re-signifying the original semantics of public intersections and squares. To a great degree, metropolitan cultural memory is negotiable at the cusp of past and present, tangible and intangible, and formal and informal. Historicity infused both the complex ecology of the capital and the agency mobilized with the purpose of creatively shaping it.

As a second point, I want to suggest that Mexico City’s heritage includes a substantial modernist component. At the beginning of the 20th century, Mexico City retained in its architecture and urban form a visible material patrimony. It had developed this during the so-called Porfiriato period (1876 to the revolution) in which Diaz Porfirio presided over a national strategy of modernization. Borrowing directly from European currents of urban design, Diaz invited wealthy European and North American families to assist in the construction of a number of important buildings in Mexico City. ² The national government remodeled the city, inscribing a modern culture in its built structures, metropolitan shape, and public spaces. A Francophone reconstruction of the central core in the 1880s engraved a positivist vision of modernity and progress in the urban fabric. With other influences also informing its development, Mexico City’s public spaces and heroic monuments exclaimed a cosmopolitan civic culture (Oles, 2013: 198–223; Trillo, 1996). Seen as part of a civilizing process, the reconstruction trained the streets and public spaces of the city, taming discontented inhabitants with open boulevards and figurative statues of historic heroes stylized for local tastes and plazas (Trillo, 1996). The growing metropolis looked diverse at the start of the century. The Porfiriato regime must have felt confident in its civilizing achievements, as it took every opportunity to promote its multi-civilizational heritage and its urban culture internationally, including at numerous world fairs. The monumentality of the pre-revolutionary era left an optimistic progressivist landscape in the core of Mexico City as a further historical layer to its emergence as a metropolis in the 20th century.

Structurally, the city lost some of its neoclassical luster during the first decade of revolution. Yet it revived from there. Architecture’s growth as a profession from the late 1920s onwards reflected a long dialogue with Mexico’s past, as well as the international influences flowing through the country’s arts and sciences. Many of the latter came under the label of modernism. The metropolis experienced a period of modernist efflorescence between 1920 and 1940. Like many of Mexico’s cities, the capital grew after the Revolution on the back of state investment in services and early industry (Davis, 1994: 103–4). Funding dedicated to public buildings and parks created an environment best suited to a nascent middle class. In architecture, a wider urban avant-garde of cultural critique brought rich influences from within Mexico – particularly pre-Columbian revivalism – and from outside of it (Carranza, 2010: 1–13; Mutlow, 2005). The monumentality of the Porfiriato era continued in the innovations architects created (Carranza, 2010: 169–201). Yet there were breakthroughs also to new forms of urban design, echoing the influences of numerous artists (Carranza, 2010).

Indigenism, neocolonialism, art deco, neoclassicism, functionalism, and Cubism were modernist influences on architectural training and practice. Functionalism, in particular, was a coherent paradigm of design that enjoyed a period of influence in architecture from the 1920s to the 1960s. Many practitioners experimenting with functionalist designs were seasoned travelers and thus ideal students of the International Style, amongst others. Often, they married Beaux-arts elements with functional utility. Creatively using cement, functionalist architects designed with apertures to light and a sensitivity to color, local heritage, and the surrounding landscape; in other words, their practice adapted elements of location, culture, and history (Burian, 1997; Carranza, 2010: 126–7; Mutlow, 2005: 10–15). Moreover, the arts inspired in functionalist designers the vivid use of color, reflecting an infusion of indigenous, colonial, and republican legacies. Here, receptivity to other paradigms was the practice in the creation of the physical environment.

By the last decade of the century, the metropolis had an emerging skyscraper panorama around the south of the urban core. This only deepened the city’s notorious congestion problems. Nevertheless, the upwards extension of the built environment highlights another aspect of Mexico City. For much of the century, we do not find a concentration of wealth, prestige, and income in a vertiginous downtown center, as we typically find in many Latin American cities (Davis, 1994: 296–7), but this was clearly starting to change. The flat topography of spatially dispersed subdivisions was starting to shift as a more usual skyline sprang up in the metropolis’ south. Notwithstanding this point of exception, Mexico City has a family resemblance to São Paolo, Buenos Aires, and Rio de Janeiro in many respects. The influx of people, ideas, doctrines, cultural influences, and economic goods suggests an overarching pattern shared by the other metropolitan cities. An unmistakable feature is its mass absorption of migrants, from the regions, but also from other countries. Migration fueled a metropolitan ecology – a cultural figuration to which the agents of design endeavored to respond. Likewise, the metropolitan imaginary of the two cities we look at in the next section features migration and other inflows as a compelling component.

Brazil’s metropolises

Brazil’s Lusitanian heritage diverges from the rest of Iberian America. The Portuguese court sought refuge in Rio de Janeiro in the early 19th century. This was a formative precedent for republican city-making. Rio became more of a living focal point for Brazilian identity. From this time, this continental state forged an unusual path to nationhood, one conditioned by the ruling elites’ declaration of a constitutional monarchy, formally separate from Portugal in 1822. It is self-evident that the Court’s relocation mattered for Rio. However, São Paolo’s position as a counterpoint for the republican opposition is less obvious. By the time Brazil declared a republic in 1889, traditionalism had set its modernity and its principal city in a conservative cast. Demographically, Brazil was multiracial due to slavery, which was more intense throughout the territory and lasted longer than in other countries in the Western hemisphere. In the second half of the 19th century, nearly two million slaves underwent the ordeal of crossing the southern Atlantic Ocean in a ‘second slavery’, which particularly affected Brazil (Tomich, 1991). Slavery shaped both São Paulo and Rio in the 19th century and beyond. In this context, race dominated social relations in modern Brazil, not only in the era of slavery but from its abolition onwards as well. It features in the social hierarchy, cuts across the socio-economic divisions of cities, and characterizes the cultural landscape of the nation. The consequences of slavery were central also to the origins and trajectories of both São Paulo and Rio.

Atlantic modernity generated multiple chains of immigration for Brazil. Alongside the African presence, it is notable that large numbers also came from Europe. The main arrivals until the 1870s were Germans and Italians (Nugent, 1992: 122–5). The immigration nexus connected São Paulo state in particular with international developments. ³ With slavery ending in the 1880s, the volume of immigrants accelerated and the range of sending countries diversified to include Spain, Japan, Austria, and Russia on top of traditional sources. Three million came in the four decades between 1880 and 1920. Assistance for passage was available, but some newcomers sponsored themselves. Initially, many of the latter ended up as sharecroppers. Migrants coming in later waves found that the path to landownership was resolutely blocked and so increasingly settled in cities. New migrants would head for the port of Rio de Janeiro and the center of São Paulo in greater numbers to become metropolitan Brazilians. In the wake of the republic’s separation from the monarchy, both metropolises began to assume the appearance of cosmopolitanism. English and French could be heard from the lips of the wealthy and from students (Owensby, 1999: 19). The newcomers hearing those voices and languages would soon know that they were joining cities increasingly connected with foreign trade and imbued with market cultures (Owensby, 1999: 18–26), just as Buenos Aires was at this time. In social relations, commerce and wage labor became the norm. Metropolitan elites acting as benefactors to social networks did not lose the power of patronage; they merely adapted habits and practices of clientelism to processes of marketization.

Immigration was vital for Brazil. While the numbers in metropolitan centers are not as spectacular as they were for Argentina, the impact was still profound. Rio’s population quadrupled over five decades. However, São Paulo’s populace increased nearly 15-fold, enhancing its status as the thriving metropolis of the southern plantation district (Moya, 2007: 188). The national inflow peaked in 1891, ensuring that the high-water mark of foreign influence was registered in the 1900 census. ⁴ Immigration reached its height earlier than in other American countries and its closure came later with the government legislated restrictions in 1927. ⁵ However, a wider view of migration can be taken in this respect. Internal linkages also mattered throughout this period. Rural migrants came to Rio and São Paolo, attracted by the possibility of better economic fortunes and, consequently, boosting the rates of urbanization. Industry was disproportionately centered on the regions surrounding São Paolo and Rio. São Paulo in particular benefitted from migration exceeding half a million inhabitants by 1920 as a byproduct of an unpredicted phase of industrialization (Owensby, 1999: 27–8; Topik, 1985: 217–19). São Paulo emerged as the nation’s premier economic site. By 1950, São Paulo had three million people, while Rio trailed it with two and a half million (Owensby, 1999: 48). Like much of the sub-continent, Brazil also experienced a vein of emigration from the 1970s, much of it stimulated by political developments in Europe and in the rest of Latin America. The number of emigrants leaving for Portugal spiked after the 1974 revolution. As a countervailing trend, flows from other Latin American countries increased. Reaching ten million by century’s end, São Paulo had become one of Latin America’s metropolitan giants. Along with Rio, São Paulo stands out amongst cities in Brazil. This is not only a matter of demography and mass; it is the power, centrality, and creativity of the two cities that distinguish them.

There is much to be learnt from the tension of design and dynamism in Brazil’s metropolises. At the century’s opening decade, city leaders in Rio produced visions of development that would order the urban space while extending connection to provincial cities and areas by transport and communication lines (Da Silva, 2002). Provincial connections supplemented its mainly British shipping links. Joining those cities inspired by French reconstruction of the original centers, Rio witnessed a Hausmannian takeover of the colonial heritage at the end of the 19th century. Brazil’s elite committed to a ‘civilizing mission’ in line with its adoption of positivism (De Carvalho, 1992; Needell, 1995). On one hand, this meant that boulevards, clubs, shops, theatres, cafes, parks, and cars conjured up a theatre of diversion for downtown elites. The growing sensibilities of distinction and cultivation of the white-collar middle class divided city workers from manual laborers (Owensby, 1999: 58–71). On the other hand, the modernization program provoked conflict in Rio itself. The municipal government vigorously prosecuted a sanitation campaign which, in turn, pushed the poor away from downtown areas further into zones of improvisation, thereby producing the first favela. In the process of constructing an orderly core, Rio’s elites relocated to Beaux-arts hotels more removed from the traditional center (Needell, 1995: 533–7). A long and uneven process of partitioning Rio had begun in which favelas and formal housing would be inexorably conjoined, but never mixed. ⁶ The favelas are a landmark of creative dynamism and self-help, stimulating impulses to collective self-organization and improvisation. For the formal city, reform was the agenda and it enjoyed intermittent but vital support from city and state governments. This contrast marked Rio apart for a short time, until informal settlements began to spring up elsewhere.

São Paulo started from a lower base yet expanded more spectacularly. Rail and tramlines marked the institution of the city as a powerful regional center (Da Silva, 2002: 92–8). With such swift growth, the city acquired a singular aesthetic quality which went unchallenged until the 1920s. Designed according to positivist principles of rational civic order, São Paulo imagined and constructed shapely modern-looking avenues that wound in and around major public spaces. Central Paris was not the only inspiration. Engineers and architects had a keen appreciation of innovations in North American and British cities. By the late 1920s, São Paulo was an exemplar of the City Beautiful Movement, giving it aspects of comparison with many other metropolitan cities. Modernism would impact on this trajectory also, just as it did for the other cases discussed in this essay.

The popularity of modernism sets Brazil apart from other Latin American cities. Out of modernism emerged a basis for the synthesis of different architectural currents in the 20th century (Lara, 2010). Known widely as ‘tropical modernism’, an original Brazilian language of design flourished from the 1920s to the 1960s on the back of vibrant adaptation (Andreoli, 2004; Le Blanc, 2012). During this period, Brazilian urban design could depend on an assured reputation as Latin America’s foremost country for architectural practice. ⁷ Indeed, the postwar regime regarded tropical modernism as the means to globalize Brazil’s national identity (Winterbottom, 2016: 8–9). For a time, this strategy succeeded well enough. At its peak, the international prestige of Brazilian designers seemed to be flying high. Consolidation of the academic discipline in university curricula at the outset of Vargas’ rule in 1930 certainly helped lay down the pre-conditions of this phase (Guillen, 2004: 26). So too did the fact that Rio maintained a particularly robust school of architecture, whose work thrived in the environment of support from the regime for architectural modernization in Rio. São Paulo was not left behind at all in the development of an architectural profession: it was indeed the metropolitan incubator for much that is distinctive about Brazilian vernacular style (Winterbottom, 2016: 83). Creative agency in São Paolo, however, emerged independently of the populist regime in the architectural and fine arts.

Of course, in terms of modernism, the federal capital of Brasilia is the most extraordinary exemplar of the CIAM School of practice led by Le Corbusier. Although Brasilia is not considered here at length, a few remarks are obligatory. It is no exaggeration to say that Le Corbusier’s influence in Brazil was stronger than anywhere else in Latin America at this time (Andreoli, 2004; Da Silva, 2002: 101–4; Guillen, 2004). Arguably, the influence of CIAM has been overstated for other countries. However, it is undeniable that the International style – which Therborn classes as ‘developmentalist modernism’ (Therborn, 1999: 30) – was famously encoded into the design of Brazil’s federal capital. In Brasilia, leading architects Lucio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, and Burle Marx brought Le Corbusier’s principles to the foundation of a whole city. Embarking on this project was a declaration of willful intent and nationalist optimism (Lara, 2010: 30–1). The capital’s design epitomizes the utopian ideal of the civilized city, a reformist vision that found ample succor in European modernism. While architects only got the chance to apply this vision wholly to one city, the doctrine from which this hope sprang informed national trends in tropical modernism that emphasized Brazilian touches in São Paolo and Rio.

Modernist architecture went on to harness industrial materials to construct apartment towers and offices on a large-scale elsewhere in the country. Brazil’s celebrated generation of architects – Serguio Bernandes, Jorge Moreira, Joao Artigas, Ernaui Vasconcellos, Rino Levi, and the Milan brothers – aimed at masterly fusions of engineering and aesthetics, producing along the way structures that diverged from purist functionalism (Le Blanc, 2012). However, since, the 1960s, Brazilian architecture has continued to labor fruitfully but without admirers, either internationally or indeed within Brazil itself (Andreoli, 2004). Original designs continued to appear. Architects made use of artistic accessories, landscapes, ceramic tiles, and colors in educational, commercial, cooperative, and residential buildings in the major cities. In this phase, there was less call for new stock of public infrastructure, or indeed for innovation in larger commercial or cooperative projects. Dynamism is instead found in medium-sized structures and housing. Furthermore, the groundswell of collaboration with artists from the 1970s ensured combinations of imaginative design would feature in the built environment and would be an ongoing source of ingenuity. Connections to Japanese, German, and Austrian architects and schools of design opened up channels for exchange as well as opportunities for international practitioners to bring their faculties and techniques to Brazil. In addition to adopting new foreign influences, metropolitan practitioners have diversified their materials. Like the Mexicans, they continue to build with concrete in major projects. However, the most innovative designs increasingly incorporated rustic and ecological motifs into their medium and small-scale structures. Contemporary architects have taken these and other new infusions that demarcate divergences from modernism into exploratory fields of practice.

The 1990s capped the century with breakaway constructivist currents showing a sharper departure from tropical modernism. Under the conditions of a consolidated democracy, architectural and urban design began to experiment a great deal again. Rio and São Paulo’s architectural firms began to show a willingness to engage emergent young designers as a new practicing generation. With Rio, this means a cityscape blend of period styles. One cultural historian writes of Rio’s ‘decadence’ that in entering the metropolis ‘I do not feel like I have moved back in time, but rather that I have stepped into a different time, and sense of time, altogether’ (Winterbottom, 2016: 5, emphasis in original). Rio imparts Brazil’s different sense of temporality. In Rio, the new sits alongside colonial heritage structures and neoclassical, art nouveau, deco, and eclectic styles. In this environment, new buildings age without ever being old. Some of the art deco property built after Rio’s announcement of modernization in the 1920s survives as contested heritage in a mixed landscape. The cityscape of period architecture attesting to unfulfilled visions of the future is an architectonic articulation of strategies of combination experimented with over time. In contrast, São Paulo materializes as frightfully new. Its skyscraper skyline is, by any measure, particularly conspicuous. As well as occupying a vast spatial footprint, this rapid-growth metropolis is a veritable vertical sprawl. Yet, room remains for creative divergence from the massed skyscrapers of the city. As much as anywhere else in Brazil, Paulist architecture reflects modernism’s influence (Andreoli, 2004). In its major structures, brutalism applied with technical subtlety was a major post-functionalist genre. Although sourcing national materials with greater regularity, architects still made only a partial turn to the local climate.

São Paulo acquired a reputation as Latin America’s most expensive city, even as it began to diversify itself economically. The historic nucleus has experienced a degree of evacuation, leaving a stock of vacant residences (Lima and Pallamin, 2010). At the same time, development of informal neighborhoods and peri-urban business districts were distinctive features of the last two decades of the century, which deepened the segmented character of the city and its appearance ‘as a mosaic of misplaced pieces’ (Lima and Pallamin, 2010: 39). Informal settlements sprang up in Brasilia at this time, dotting the perimeter with patterns of popular appropriation of space. However, the consequences were not the same as they were for interconnected and densely populated São Paolo. In São Paolo, by way of contrast with Brasilia, the developmental logic brought about regionalization beyond the boundaries of the city and its informal peripheries. In addition to this, the developmental logic increased conflict, a phenomenon further animated by the rise of neo-localist politics. The polarity of the city was both source and environment for social movements concerned with housing and workers’ rights. Arguably, it is only in this atmosphere that a vehicle like the Workers Party and Lula, as its prominent leader, could arise in the manner that both did. São Paulo encapsulated the sharp conflicts that arise in a massified metropolitan environment in which skyscrapers and favela communities confront one another.

Conclusion

The cities I examine in this essay are instantiations of the metropolitan imaginary. Each is a condensation of mass movement and logics of creation and destruction. In this complex ecology of movement, interaction, and engagement, we find agents and agencies endeavoring to order metropolitan spaces with the sciences and arts of architecture, urban design, and engineering. Massive one-way migration set new world metropolises apart from their old world counterparts. In the last two centuries, the four metropolises attracted many newcomers. Major port cities became metropolises, but so did other inland cities, as we see with Mexico City. What distinguished their metropolitan imaginaries was the lure of people, economic goods and flows, and creative practitioners en masse, and the production of ecologies of creativity. The amassing of cities sets major metropolitan centers apart; they become cities of the metropolitan mind, as Simmel (1976) argues. Some were premier cities at particular junctures (such as the ‘global cities’ of the 1990s). The creation of the mass metropolis was thereby the making of meaning-infused spaces in which the intensity of experience of the anonymous collective becomes a shared metropolitan habitus. Southern metropolises condensed the effects of economic flows, multiple migratory movements, and the circulation of ideas and practices, particularly in architecture and urban design, which were both rationalistic and artistic at the same time. Yet, there is also a ‘dark underbelly’ of new world mass urbanism resulting from the dislocating and destructive effects of modernity. Southern metropolises are beset with critical environmental problems, shortages of accessible quality housing, a deep divide between formal and informal zones, crime, fear, insecurity, and deadlocks in transport. They are the effects of an instituted and instituting metropolitan imaginary, to paraphrase Castoriadis. Metropolitan Americans have made southern cities through imagination and agency by creating in the tensions of these impulses and structures, of institution and design, and of migration and belonging. Southern cities confront the challenge of a new kind of metropolis with this heritage. How they do so is a topic for further research.