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

As Edward Glaeser stressed in 1999, “cities are not bad because of size, but rather because they are ill governed.”¹⁵

Urbanization: Past and Present

The contrasts between the governance strategies that guided the urban experiment in Curitiba and those that informed the less successful approaches seen elsewhere in Brazil must be understood within the context of the intense process of urbanization that engulfed the country in the 1960s. A rural exodus of huge proportions took place as millions of impoverished countryside dwellers were forced to leave their homes due to modernization, industrialization, and the mechanization of the agricultural sector. According to some estimates, in a 10-year period beginning in the 1960s, about 13 million people left the rural areas to live in the cities; in the next decade, the number increased to 15 million. In search of economic opportunities, peasants found their way to the state capitals of the south-southeast corridor, particularly São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Curitiba, and Porto Alegre.

That massive transfer of people from rural to urban areas coincided with the cycle of authoritarian politics that started in Brazil with the 1964 military coup. State capitals became critical units in the military’s strategy to promote the country’s modernization and industrialization through public and foreign investments. Yet that development model, characterized by great inequality in income distribution, generated a series of distortions that accentuated the negative effects of urbanization in the form of swollen cities and a lack of public services.