Seeing Like a State; How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Review

by James C. Scott, New Haven: Yale University Press, 445 pages, $37.50

Brasilia wasn't the first city to be designed by a small cadre of planners and built from scratch. But of all such efforts, it was the most absurd: a new capital in inland Brazil, constructed without regard for the country's present or past; a crowdless, cultureless monument not to the nation that built it but to an abstract idea of what a great city should be. It was conceived by Juscelino Kubitschek, Brazil's president from 1956 to 1961, whose home in the new city was dubbed the Dawn Palace. "What else will Brasilia be," he explained, "if not the dawn of the new day of Brazil?"

Brasilia lacks the public squares and corridor streets that dominate the nation's other cities. It has none of the flexible spaces that allow for a vibrant civic life, for barrio loyalties and neighborhood chauvinism, for street festivals and - ahem - spontaneous street demonstrations. Instead it contains huge concrete apartment buildings and gigantic, lifeless squares. It is a city with lots of open space and no crowds to fill it; a city, to quote James Scott's excellent Seeing Like a State, of "architectural repetition and uniformity. Here is a case where what seems like rationality and legibility to those working in administration and urban services seems like mystifying disorder for the ordinary residents who must navigate the city. Brasilia has no landmarks."

But it still exists, and people still live there; it does not rot in the jungle like an ancient ruin. It persists because it takes more to build a city than a few self-styled geniuses with a plan. You need construction workers, and they need places to live. The workers "soon squatted on additional land," notes Scott, "on which they built makeshift houses.... By 1980, 75 percent of the population of Brasilia lived in settlements that had never been anticipated, while the planned city had reached less than half of its projected population of 557,000."

The Brasilia of the planners' dreams is an imaginary city, an abstraction poorly realized by the actual and imperfect urban landscape. Its concrete blocks and behemoth squares still stand, but they could not exist without a secret city to sustain them: the squatters' and ex-squatters' more anarchic settlements, the capital's shadowy double.

For Scott, a Yale professor of political science and anthropology, Brasilia symbolizes the hubris of "high modernism," the belief that experts can rationally design an optimal social order without regard for tradition or accident. The "simplifying fiction" of high modernism, Scott writes, "is that, for any activity or process that comes under its scrutiny, there is only one thing going on. In the scientific forest there is only commercial wood being grown; in the planned city there is only...