Chapter 3 : Beautiful stranger

Chapter 3 :

Beautiful stranger

Fabiola

I board my Jet leaving for my country, with a heavy heart.

To God, beautiful stranger, I hurt because I won't see you again.

I am back home, in my country Brazil. I live in the capital of Brazil which is Brasilia, I will tell you a little about the history of Brasilia:

In 1960, this city located about a thousand kilometers west of the Atlantic coast had 120,000 inhabitants. When the decision to establish the capital there was taken in the mid-1950s, Brasilia was an uninhabited plateau, located at an altitude of 1,000 meters and isolated within Brazilian territory. President Juscelino Kubitschek's plan to transfer the seat of state from Rio de Janeiro, an overpopulated city, to this location is seen as a manifestation of the government's desire to "rebalance the regions among themselves and to promote landlocked regions." . The construction of the new capital was the subject of significant planning, to which the town planner Lucio Costa and the architect Oscar Niemeyer, to whom we owe the main buildings, contributed. Large-scale works are undertaken and spread over several years, such as the construction of roads facilitating access to Brasilia. Many services and personnel still had to be moved in April 1960, at the time of the inauguration. At the end of the 20th century, Brasilia will have around 1.5 million inhabitants.

1763 to 1956, the capital of Brazil is Rio de Janeiro. In this immense country (8.516 million km²), the population and wealth are mainly concentrated on the Atlantic coast. By moving the capital to the center of the country, President Juscelino Kubitschek (1902-1976) wanted to rebalance the country's economic activity. He indeed claims a proactive policy which he summarizes with the slogan “50 years of progress in 5 years”.

The bet is partly fulfilled. When Brasilia was inaugurated on April 21, 1960, it had around 100,000 inhabitants. Today, although it is not yet as attractive as the megacities of the coast (Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, Saõ Paulo), Brasilia has 2.5 million inhabitants, compared to more than 6 million for Rio de Janeiro. and 12 for Saõ Paulo.

A city for everyone?

Driven, throughout his life, by a deep commitment to equality between men, Oscar Niemeyer hoped that Brasilia could become the universal city, open to all, where tolerance and fraternity reigned. But events proved him wrong from the inauguration of Brasilia. "The enchantment ended suddenly. The candangos returned to their miserable region; those who remained had no choice but to crowd into shanty towns outside the city , even though they had built it,” says Oscar Niemeyer in an interview.

The Brasilia site mobilized up to 60,000 workers, the majority of whom came from the north and more precisely from the poorest state in the country: Minas Gerais. Even if the city found its population, the ideal dreamed of by Oscar Niemeyer, Lucio Costa and President Kubitschek did not materialize: the workers and their families did not have the means to settle in the city that 'they had built and remained in their poor barracks located inoutside the city. These informal sectors gave birth to the satellite towns that still exist around Brasilia.

This is the story about the creation of Brasilia.