Urban Brazil: Visions, Afflictions, and Governance Lessons By Iva ...

The Urban Political Economy

During the colonial period the south of Brazil was largely neglected; neither Curitiba, established in 1693 by a group of Portuguese colonists, nor São Paulo, founded by Jesuits in 1554, were considered jewels of the crown. The bulk of economic activity in the colony, especially mining, sugar plantations, and the slave trade, was concentrated in the northeast, where the initial large urban settlements included the city of Salvador, the capital of colonial Brazil, and Recife. Although independence in 1822 transferred political power to Rio de Janeiro, the new nation’s capital, São Paulo, Curitiba, and Porto Alegre were to remain dusty and sleepy provincial towns without influence for several decades. Only in the first half of the 20th century did São Paulo became South America’s largest industrial center, incurring severe urban problems along the way. Curitiba, however, only started to show signs of urban saturation in the 1960s. When the country’s political climate changed radically with the military coup in 1964, the city had 400,000 inhabitants and was absolutely unprepared to cope with the socioeconomic changes caused by the accelerated process of urbanization and the push for industrialization.

Although Curitiba was still an industrial laggard in the mid-1960s, especially compared to São Paulo, both cities suffered from overburdened and inadequate mass transit systems.