15th INTER NATIONAL PLANNING HISTOR Y SOCIETY CONFERE NCE

URBAN TRANSFORMATIONS, INDIGENOUS PROCESSES AND

RIPPLE EFFECTS

THEREZA CARVALHO SANTOS

Address: Universidade Federal Fluminense
Programa de Pós-Graduação em Arquitetura e Urbanismo
E-mail: therezacarvalho@id.uff.br, thereza.urbandesign@gmail.com

ABSTRACT
This paper addresses urban transformation. It proposes to discuss the roles played by
diverse and cumulative forms of public open space appropriation, by different users and
for different purposes, based on ongoing research carried on in two cities in two different
continents. Certain more frequent social uses and economically related practices have
been, historically, associated to a range of spatial patterns. Throughout decades or
centuries, those uses and users, and their practices, have aggregated new physical
manifestations of prevailing economic, social, cultural and political forces, with distinct
functional and symbolic meanings, to existing and accommodating spatial patterns and
equally accommodating rules of usage.
Preliminary research findings indicates that urban changes made through different forms
of space appropriation, for different social purposes and users, whether micro or macro
scale, have triggered ripple effects that “goes on” changing the area for a length of time
depending on certain circumstances. Those changes characterize an indigenous process
of gradual urban transformations (or dynamic sedimentation) defining an evolution
trend. The concept indigenous is here applied to indicate the trend opposite to planning,
i.e. it consists of individual initiatives with collective consequences rather than State or
corporate set of planned often targets. The extent of those ripple effects, in space and
time, appears to vary with culturally established concepts of order (and with whom has
the power to enforce it), with socially acknowledged citizens (and their cultural
background) and with the technology applied to produce wealth and livelihood (and how
it is distributed). They define the rhythms of change.

1. INTRODUCTION
This paper focuses on space appropriation made by different users and the role they play
in city making. Public open spaces are here understood as squares – in any shape and
size, and also in any location –, streets, and street margins, here meant as both sidewalks
and the public/private interface of the marginal buildings or plots. Social uses and
economically related practices are associated to some specific spatial patterns. Through
decades and centuries, those uses, users, and their practices have aggregated to the
cityscape: functional, symbolic and physical manifestations of different prevailing
economic and political forces. Those aggregations sometimes have expanded and
sometimes have shrunk the context area where changes took place.
Every urban change made through different forms of space appropriation, for different
social purposes and users (whether micro or macro in scale), has ripple effects that “go
on” for a certain length of time that is determined by certain circumstances. Those
changes characterize an indigenous process of gradual urban transformations or dynamic

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sedimentation defining an evolution trend. The concept indigenous is here applied to

indicate the presence of inherited dynamic forces of changes alive from within the area.
The extent of those ripple effects, in space and time, varies with the culturally
established concepts of order (and the people with the power to enforce it), the socially
acknowledged citizens (and their cultural background) and with the technology applied
to produce wealth and livelihood (and its distribution). They define the rhythms of
change.
The described indigenous process of urban change also generates livelihood. This can be
better observed in public open spaces – be it square or street – and their margins,
because these elements are more visible than other elements of the urban fabric. These
indigenous processes of change are often triggered by a set of forms, facts and forces of
attraction that certain urban areas exercise more than others, in multiple qualitative
dimensions. Together, they first attract perception, and then fruition followed by other
intentions, often initially singular to the context area. A specific feature in the natural or
in the manmade topography, its location in relation to the existing routes of access, the
singularity of the shape and comparative scale of the buildings alongside these routes,
the singularity of the economic, social and cultural functions they perform, are some of
the issues that help build up the powers (or forces) of the indigenous process of positive
urban transformations. Positive is here understood as something acknowledged as
valuable by specific social groups or by society at large.
With a variety of uses, shapes, and forms – and rhythms of change –, certain public open
spaces establish networks of links within and beyond the urban fabric to which they
belong. They attract multiple kinds of interests and flows that often define some level of
centrality. The dynamic sedimentation of these inherited urban fabrics, and their
indigenous processes of evolution, can accommodate new functional demands
determined by the process of urban growth, provided three basic conditions are kept.
The first condition is accessibility. It ‘irrigates’ shops located alongside the margins and
routes with potential customers. The second and very important condition to be kept is
image and related identity, meaning culturally acknowledged value for specific social
groups. The third condition deals with a dynamic concept of order. The set of rules of
usage – chosen by a given society at a given time, guiding the relations between citizens
and the territory – varies significantly when society changes. State enforcement powers
often do not truly represent the whole of society in its increasingly multiple time- and
space-bound cultures.
The major challenges to face are not only the delicate balance between inhibiting and
allowing, but first and foremost the acknowledgement of new and old social uses and
users, and their correlated spatial patterns of public open space appropriation.
Negligence, indifference or a space-and-time-fragmented approach to this matter have
been proven to kill or endanger the livelihood of large stretches of cities and related
number of citizens.

2. RIPPLE EFFECTS
The perspective adopted in this work understands that a singularity (an exceptional
condition), once perceived in one or more of its qualitative dimensions – what requires
the presence of observers and physical accessibility –, attracts appropriations and,
consequently, general changes that configure a ripple effect which reshapes the
‘townscape’ accordingly. This exceptional characteristic can be either a natural or a man-
15th INTER NATIONAL PLANNING HISTOR Y SOCIETY CONFERE NCE

made feature produced by sedimentation, or it can be preconceived from scratch for

that purpose. One condition for positive changes and urban quality is diversity, with
some balance between the different forms and functions in space appropriation.
Predominance of any function – with the corresponding predominance of its spatial
patterns and forms – tends, eventually, to kill diversity and ultimately to reduce the
quality of the urban fabric.
Five different qualitative dimensions of a city and its grid – and of the process of
sedimentation that intertwine them with the lives of citizens into the landscape – have
been identified. Together, they appear to have influenced all the stages of sedimentation
of the public open spaces selected, with different weights, in different time and space
bound contexts, and have distinguished their interrelations as they consolidated.
The first, the environmental dimension, is here understood as the geo-morphological
features of the terrain – topography, coastline, solar incidence, climate – which attract
the attention of observers, individual intentions which may grow into collective users in
a given time and space context. The environment must be perceived as exceptional to a
certain degree – whether the feature or the location, or both – for the start of the
process.
The social and economic dimensions follow. They comprehend different forms of
appropriation practices and uses of potential values perceived in the area. Market
activities and social encounters go hand in hand and they literally make place for more
complex events and users who will benefit from their location.
The fourth, here called institutional or normative dimension, addresses the rules that
establish those with power to rule and regulate uses and users, mobility and public
access, the building activity and the built forms and changes allowed. Public sector –
with bigger or smaller political prestige, its normative and control mechanisms, and
symbolic presence in the built landscape – is also part of a city’s genetic heritage.
The last one is the morphological dimension, and it characterizes the singularity of space
and form in the light of a mix of different references: formal repertoire, location in
relation to axes of accessibility, quality of design and of building materials, functional
and symbolic contents related to the previous dimensions.
Morphology synthesizes and enhances the interrelations among the previous dimensions
through built forms and shapes that tend to last longer than the purposes for which they
were designed. The many successive uses and built-in values that usually follow are
aggregated to the area. The relative permanence of these earlier forms and later uses
enrich the process of sedimentation of heritage with new interventions, when the
perceived image and identity are positively regarded.

3 INDIGENOUS PROCESS OF URBAN EVOLUTION IN LISBON – PRESTIGE

AND MENACES
The rhythm of change – that is, the space-time relation – on Lisbon’s landscape has a
cadence that is very distinct from the ones that occur in so many Brazilian cities. The
steadier pace of change of the Portuguese capital city allows us to visualize many phases
of the processes of urban transformation in a clearer manner. On the other hand, the

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quicker Brazilian rhythm of change, which many times erases former signs and traces of
older landscapes, illustrates some of the risks in social, economic, cultural and
environmental terms, of allowing radical changes to be made. Permanent mutations may
engender irretrievable losses.
Different rhythms of change seem to correspond to distinct spatial and functional
patterns. These differences in patterns apparently comprise factors of various natures
and temporalities. The collection of successively created and recreated patterns, and
their ‘genetic’ factors, have consolidated before in the inherited urban fabric, as new
changes are consolidating in the present time and are in a possible state of change into
new configurations in the future.
The focus on the genetic capital of the city has led to the search for the past in the
present and the attempt to recognize the possibilities for the future that are related to
this heritage. It also emphasizes the networks – forms, meanings and memories
acknowledged by the many social groups that have interacted with the landscape and its
various functionalities, from remote to recent past – that are in action in the city, in the
present time, with possibilities of influencing the future.
3.1 Prestige, identities and symbolic representations
The Rua Nova (New Street) built in 1294, under Dom Dinis, linked his palace to the
‘Duane’ where the intense maritime commerce paid the regulatory taxes due to the
King. The royal prestige that marked its creation, the social segregation – instituted by
legal regime, restricting access to some and encouraging it to others – constituted
singular characteristics (in institutional, cultural and social terms) that distinguished its
genesis and its existence. Another important aspect that marked its creation was its
geometry, the width and the almost rectilinear form that distinguished it
morphologically from the medieval shape of the neighboring narrow winding streets.
Together, those two physical attributes gave the street an easily perceivable singularity
of image.
Its location, in the low land along the river Tejo – the distance from it being merely that
of a backyard, hence putting it next to the docks –, made sellers, buyers and
merchandises physically more accessible to all engaged in the trade. “It was the strange
public promenade of the 16th century”, whose importance was of such magnitude that,
according to some historians, would have lent to the “new” designation – New Street –
the meaning of prestige and abundance. It marked the emergence of the high-street
model in the Portuguese urban matrix.
Political will and enforcement, exceptional economic concentration of capital and goods,
social prestige, singular morphology, strategic location and accessibility that marked the
multiple genetic dimensions of the New Street’s “birth” interacted positively over the
years, and turned it into “the operational centre of Lisbon – representative and official –
as we would say today – has then become freer from mercantile Jews and industrious
Saracens. It became completely Portuguese” (N.Araujo, 1938). The linear shaped
centrality would last for more than three hundred years – visited by “foreigners of
various nationalities that came to get our treat and commerce”. Trade was apparently a
very important and central theme for the identity of the kingdom of Portugal at that
point, and that circumstance made the Street of Commerce its show-case, its
morphological emblematic image with very prestigious symbolic meaning.
15th INTER NATIONAL PLANNING HISTOR Y SOCIETY CONFERE NCE

Figure 1 – Map of Lisbon in 17th century with Rua Nova dos Ferros shows singular morphologic larger
shape of the street different from the medieval urban maze of Old Lisbon. (FRANÇA, 2005, p.24)

Political will and enforcement, exceptional economic concentration of capital and goods,
social prestige, singular morphology, strategic location and accessibility that marked the
multiple genetic dimensions of the New Street “birth” interacted positively over the
years. and turned it into “ the operational centre of Lisbon – representative and official –
as we would say today – has then become freer from mercantile Jews and industrious
Saracens. It became completely Portuguese” (N.Araujo, 1938). The linear shaped
centrality would last for more than three hundred years – visited by “foreigners of
various nationalities that came to get our treat and commerce”. Trade was apparently a
fulcrate theme for the identity of the kingdom of Portugal at that point which
circumstance made the¬ Street of Commerce its show-case, its morphological
emblematic image with very prestigious symbolic meaning.

3.2 Menaces
Success gradually diminished by the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries,
undermined by a series of disasters related to successive earthquakes of different
intensities and also, after 1580, to the weight of Spanish dominance and the resulting
loss of institutional singularity – associated with other losses in other dimensions –
reduced to extinction the former prestige and centrality of the New Street.

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With the loss of political prestige, the New Street started fading away. Some commercial
activities were maintained, but not with the same “punch” of the past, as the absence of
Royal support and supervision also reduced social prestige and contracted the area over
which the New Street formerly “reigned”. Subsequent efforts of reconstruction
undertaken introduced significant changes in the former genetic process that originally
created the landscape. Geometric regularity became the rule for a very large area,
removing the morphological diversity that once characterized the morphological
singularity of the “New Street”.
The conditions that made the multiple genetic dimensions converge into the linear
centrality of the New Street did not repeat themselves in the reconstruction plan for the
“Baixa” (lowland) undertaken by Marquis de Pombal. The ‘new’ New Street, reshaped
and renamed Street of Commerce, reinserted in approximately the same place, no
longer attracts trade and tradesmen – but why?
The claims of valorization of the reconstruction proposed for Lisbon did not
consubstantiate in the new plan produced. The project presented many features that
could be called modernist today, such as geometric regularity, standardization, and
homogeneity of facades, all too different from the original ‘organic’ diversity of the
medieval urban fabric that characterized the city before the earthquake. The new
rationality proposed by the project focused on the process of production that the plan
would demand and on the processes of building construction and of financing, justifiable
given the scale of the catastrophe. The plan disregarded the multiple dimensions that
characterize the urban fabric and the many interrelations between them that defined
their relative positions in the city hierarchy, and the centrality they defined.

Figure 2 – Drawing by João Leite, 2009. Map of

Lisbon showing addtions and supressions.

It made the original exceptional

morphological features that defined the
‘singularity’ of the former New Street,
straight and wide against the medieval
maze of narrow and winding streets,
unexceptional. The streets of the lowland
area of Lisbon were remade to new standards, made homogeneous and look-alike. The
new regulations and management conditions, engineered by Pombal to make the plan
viable, also made the former exceptional economic and political features of the
15th INTER NATIONAL PLANNING HISTOR Y SOCIETY CONFERE NCE

singularity redundant. Social acknowledgement of the exceptional cultural value of the

street whose singularity had been formerly perceived as an image of the Portuguese
identity was, in those circumstances, also hard to maintain.
The rationality adopted in the reconstruction no longer cared for individual intentions,
social, cultural and economic practices that have been traditionally intertwined with the
landscape and made into part of its genetic heritage. The loss of the former conditions
that made that street exceptional in various dimensions took away the ‘operative
centrality’ image and the associated meaning of abundance that distinguished the “New
Street”. Hardly any commercial activity remained in the street. Different municipal
bodies made several attempts, with little or no success at all, to favor trade. To turn all
the streets in that area to exclusive pedestrian use is one of the more recent. It has not
yet been proven to enhance commercial activities.
The suppression of the conditions that support the singularity in one dimension may
significantly affect the others and not, necessarily, in any positive way. Different streets
analyzed illustrate the argument.
3.3 Suppression
The comparative analysis of the Rua da Palma – which is the axis that links Largo do
Intendente (Intendant Square) to Martim Moniz Square, located in the city of Lisbon –
has revealed how the suppression of vehicle accessibility, hence of “irrigation”, even
over a relatively short number of years, reduced the number of residents, users and
uses, and future prospects. This causes negative ripple effects on the whole of legitimate
commercial activities and their positive attraction of interrelated social practices and
acknowledgment. The street has been actually blocked by the local authority on account
of a promised large public investment, which would have turned the Martim Moniz area
into the new administrative centre of Lisbon, a prospect that never materialized.
The singularity of this prohibition has been since perceived attractive to criminal uses –
drug dealing and prostitution – and has also proved to aggregate more of this kind. The
area now shows clear signs that indicate the ‘new trend’ – to consolidate those
illegitimate practices into specific spatial patterns with unwanted related
complementarities defining links with other areas in the city, creating/reinforcing a
network of criminal intent, actions and routes of evasion.

4. PRESTIGE AND PREVALENT APPROACHES IN BRASILIA

A great part of the analytical work done on Brasilia and surrounding settlements has
been developed according to two trends: ‘for’ the aesthetics of the ‘product’ and the
positive political catalyzing aspect of the ‘process’; or ‘against’ the functionally
segregated aspect of the ‘product’ and social segregation of the ‘process’.
The string of the original ‘free-towns’, around the Pilot Plan, have been expelled to areas
further removed from the city’s center and named satellite-towns. These have been
legitimized by the Government through some kind of plotting, gathered in different
shapes, and have long outgrown their original dormitory function. The process of the
historic development of each one of these cities, and the corresponding social, economic
and cultural deprivation that characterized the living conditions of the first settlers of

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Brasilia – the builders – which derived, to a great extent, from this spatial segregation,
have been sufficiently examined by several authors with different political focus.
One important aspect, however, requires further attention. The fact that these
settlements have undergone a continued process of cumulative changes, over the last
thirty years, and that this process has transformed very positively certain aspects of the
original role those settlements played in the region. What are those changes? What do
they look like? What kind of initiative, and whose, made them happen, and for what
purposes? What do they indicate? Those are the issues this section of the paper will
explore.
4.1 Utopia in practice
This topic addresses the issue of utopian planning of urban spaces vs. making places. The
object area comprises the cities of Ceilandia and Taguatinga, two of five major planned
settlements located around the Federal District of Brasilia, capital of Brazil. The theme is
urban design. The focus comprises changes, additions and other alterations made by the
residents on the original design of the area and pattern blocks. These alterations have
generated ‘ripple effects’ on the immediately adjacent planned spaces and
neighborhoods. The character of these areas, under the impact and influence of these
gradually cumulative ‘ripple effects’, has changed significantly over a relatively short
period of time – the first thirty years.
The vector of change can be traced from Taguatinga – the first workers’ settlement
officially ‘plotted’ as satellite, 25km from Brasilia – outwards to the next satellite-town,
Ceilandia. The urban transformations took place along a road turned into a high-street.
The economic and social rhythms of these two settlements are unparalleled in the
Federal District. The original building patterns and urban grid have been appropriated in
different ways. The two settlements have grown towards each other, mingled and
blended, and have been substantially reconstructed, in many patches, in widely different
scales.
4.2 Changing standpoints
The analytical framework was conceived in a different context, and city. It derived from a
previous research on forms of public open space appropriation in large scale planned
housing estates. It later developed towards identifying the “whys” and the “what fors”.
The move from one target to the other turned the focus from the past to the present
and on to the future and away from the conservative assumption that look at changes as
derived from either design flaw or vandalism.
The alterations carried out by the residents showed a much larger span of choice, mostly
geared to making productive the available space provided for whatever other original
purpose. The space was turned productive in terms of some form of fruition, for
economic, social and cultural purposes. The major ‘arena’ where these changes took
place was the space ‘in-between’ the semi-private/semi-public areas adjacent to the
different building patterns. They triggered a process of social and economical growth
with minimum State investment.
The focus of the analysis relied on three major points. First, it identified the different
purposes and related perspectives that the various agents, or interest groups,
introduced, on their own volition, into the process of making real the planned satellite-
15th INTER NATIONAL PLANNING HISTOR Y SOCIETY CONFERE NCE

towns. Second, it tested the assumption that a different shape – and scale – would
correspond to a different perspective – and interest group – at different times. The third
step was to choose a sample area and to define the approaching scales of observation.
Finally the analysis checked whether some of the more specific findings of the
mentioned previous research were proven valid.
The object area
Ceilandia is situated 35km away from the cross-shaped Pilot Plan of Brasilia. It was
created in 1971 by personal request from General Medici, who was then the President of
The Federal Republic of Brazil. He was annoyed with the string of poor settlements, also
called invasões (invasions), that ‘lined’ his daily route from the ranch where he lived, out
of town, to Planalto Presidential Palace. As a matter of consequence, the Governor of
the Federal District of Brasilia of the time started an official crusade with the purpose of
removing these invasões – the Campaign to Eradicate Invasions – C.E.I. A total of 82.000
people were removed from the area to a site 35km west of the Pilot Plan. The very name
Ceilandia springs from the acronym, C.E.I., plus the English originated word land, ‘landia’,
thus making fate clearer: the land of the unwanted ones. Short memory, hard work, and
the ‘live one day at a time’ rule – that ever so often befalls Brazilians as the only possible
life-motto left –, for one reason or another, all together apparently helped to,
fortunately, boycott the initial stigmatizing attempt on the town and its residents.
Taguatinga was created before Brasilia, in 1958, 25km from the future Capital site. It
sprang from the urgent need to remove a pioneer housing settlement of 4.000 families
formed close to Cidade-Livre (Free City – also meaning free from land use regulations)
alongside one major federal road that led to what was then the huge building site of
Brasilia. Six months later schools, hospitals, houses for the teachers had already been
provided even though planning was never a strong aspect in the process, nor had any
study ever been conducted on the adequacy of the local environmental conditions. The
growth of the settlement took place through plotting new sectors when thus required.
4.3 Some findings
Over the first three decades, the initial settlement of 82.000 people grew to
approximately 364.290 inhabitants. It became the largest of all satellite-towns around
Brasilia. Constricted by a standard urban grid, with standard plots and plot size, as well
as by a ‘residence only’ land-use regulation, hardly ever obeyed, Ceilandia has, literally,
gone overboard in all aspects. Estate development – for commerce and other purposes
and scales of capital – has spread over, once again, the planned spaces for public
activities, and grabbed the ‘in-between’ semi-public/semi-private areas, with ill defined
tenure and worse maintenance, that often characterize modernist urbanism as found in
Brasilia and its neighborhood areas.
The initial part of the survey for the research whose findings this paper discusses,
revealed 1.172 commercial establishments which have been gradually added to the
original building design and planned intention for the area as well as 1.110 other
irregular appropriation of public spaces for well-established commercial purposes. These
changes concentrated in the older and more permanent patches of the town and along
the high-street that linked Ceilandia to Taguatinga. The price of the plot in one of these
patches can be up to three times higher than in any other part of the mentioned
satellite-town.

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Each type of building in the selected patches, once identified, was mapped and its
‘origin’ was traced, first in the area of Taguatinga, the oldest of the two towns, and then
in Ceilandia. The search for their origins identified different patterns typologies or
‘families’ with multiple variations brought about, through alterations carried out for
different purposes. These variations, once analyzed, revealed sets of purposes indicating
different perspectives – or non-physical dimensions – of the urban realm which have
been, apparently, neglected in the original plans. They were the economic-productive,
the administrative-regulatory and the place-making cultural perspectives.
The economic-productive perspective presented itself as a matter of consequence of the
specific circumstances that marked the creation of the satellite-towns and of Brasilia.
The great distances between the Federal District and the main production centers of the
country, distances made even larger by the precarious means of transportation then
available, also made ‘importing’ any goods – from anywhere – very expensive,
particularly in its first fifteen years of the city’s existence. Prohibitive costs stimulated
the enterprising initiative and talents of the many migrants that swapped their original
birthplaces for the desolate landscape of Brasilia’s early years.
They bloomed rather in the neighborhood of the federal capital than in the capital itself,
thus indicating the next dimension of the process of change that took place despite all
planning: the administrative-regulatory or de-regulatory perspective.

Figure 3 – Urban expansion – vectors of growth around Brasilia. (PDOT, 1996)

The severe rules regarding land-use in the Pilot Plan made it very difficult for industry or
trade to settle in Brasilia. At the same time, income distribution concentrated in the
federal capital made it an attractive market for business. The average income in Brasilia
was three times bigger than in any satellite town and the highest in the country.
Taguatinga was the oldest established ‘satellite community’ with a growing population of
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desperately fast learners strongly motivated by the previous arguments. The making-
place dimension regarding – for the sake of this paper – a space with a perceived
meaning that was collectively achieved came, in the selected areas, as a consequence of
the former two.
The pattern of changes – comprising the initial alterations and their ripple effects –
having been identified, revealed a ‘coding-system’ made of a checklist of features and
forces of change that were found to characterize the process of urban configuration of
the selected areas. They have been initially tested and acknowledged, in a subsequent
research conducted in another settlement, as indicators of local potential for
development and self-government, in a process of continued change with minimum
State investment. The mentioned checklist included static features such as design
patterns, density, scale and size, as well as dynamic features such as forces of attraction,
aggregation and valorization.
When and where most of the items in this checklist of features of change were found,
some common performance criteria were also perceived. They comprised: grater
accessibility to major trade flux and visibility from these routes; perceived availability of
whatever goods or services being offered, often implying forces of aggregation
multiplying similar patterns of change in the neighborhood. Any scenario where diverse
qualitative dimensions converge to a certain point tends to generate emerging
centralities, defining new trends of change in the urban grid with strong impact on
future changes in the area. Permeability to changes, as well as environmental adequacy,
were also acknowledged as conditions to the desired process of change towards making
the original ‘satellite-dormitories’ into better places.
The gradual changes have significantly altered the originally planned provisions for, or
the absence of, industry and trade, and the consequent economic growth. A dynamic
economy has led Taguatinga to a non-geometric central position in the Federal District,
finally acknowledged in the last PDOT – “Plano Diretor de Ordenamento Territorial do
Distrito Federal” (Master Plan for Land Use of the Federal District of Brasilia). This hard-
fought for affluence, shown in the unprecedented dynamism of the unplanned business
center – clearly marked by several ‘unforeseen’ high-rise buildings and by the high-street
that emerged from the residents’ cumulative efforts –, turned it into a prestigious
address.
One question that remains to be answered through continued monitoring of the area in
the future is whether the earlier State-led initiative will bear any significant resemblance,
or relation of proportion, with the economic-productive, administrative-regulatory and
place-making dimensions which have distinguished both the process of re-creating the
satellite-town and its product – the ‘newly’ built environment.

5. CONCLUSIONS: URBAN TRANSFORMATIONS, INDIGENOUS PROCESS

AND RIPPLE EFFECTS
W Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier recommended urban planning as “medicine for a sick
society”. However, more than one planned city or district have been severely criticized,
and often with sufficient evidence, for the opposite reason – people have been made
sick by the urban ‘medicine’.

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The area of the Federal District of Brasilia was supposed to be occupied only by the
cross-shaped Pilot Plan. This has been planned and originally conceived, in harmony and
order, as a “work of art” (Fig.). The ‘birth’ of the city was blessed by the creative efforts
of the most powerful minds, and politically influent personas, of that time. As “art”,
Brasilia was supposed to have been kept in a flawless frame, with no poverty, no shanty-
towns around it, to ‘stain’ its purity. The settlements surrounding the Pilot Plan were not
part of the original project for Brasilia. The battalions of poor workers, recruited to build
it, were not supposed to stay. They had not been invited.
The satellite towns have not been planned in ‘harmony and order’, but conceived
through means of some form of ‘rough foreplay’. Several foci of rebellion took place.
These were carried out by thousands of workers that have come to help making the
work of art a reality, and subsequently felt pushed out of the ‘picture’. The violence of
the birth of those new towns had been, apparently, tamed by an institutional
homogeneous handling of space and shape. Their standardized urban design, the one
standard plot – with very few variations from one planned settlement to another – the
absent hierarchy of street grid, the absence of public spaces, the minimal provision of
commercial and of communal facilities – all these factors put together indicated the
mono-functional approach to the matter of satisfying the rebelled workers’ request with
a predominantly dormitory-town.
Several layers of different individual and collective space appropriations of streets, street
margins, and squares, for different concepts of usage, beauty and socially acknowledged
order, have proven to be useful to moderate, where certain conditions were preserved,
new functional spatial links between different urban areas for multiple economic
purposes. Those conditions are accessibility and a certain degree of permission, or
tolerance, to temporary individual or collective forms of appropriation. New uses and
users followed with time. Changes that were made due to individual and to collective
intentions, have helped to accommodate new social and economic activities, allowing
necessary links between the existing street and square layout, creating meaningful
networks with all its multiple functions, shapes and values – and new urban expansions.
Where those conditions were not maintained, changes have helped to condemn the
fabric that took so long and so many to build into practices, meanings, memories and
identities. The human cost of losing functional and meaningful urban tissue, and
networks of uses and live-related expectations, have yet to be evaluated. Evaluation, in
these circumstances, faces, however, other challenges.
How to estimate the value of lost multiple functional dimensions, meanings and
conditions of livelihood, of allegedly intangible “whats”, for allegedly invisible “whoms”?

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