Big streets, small streets

I came across an interesting piece on today’s CBC News. The article asks us to rethink some words and phrases we use in our daily lingo. CBC Ottawa came up with a list of words which were submitted by readers as well as some of their journalists who are Black, Indigenous and people of colour. Seeking insights from anti-racism and language experts it turned out that a number of phrases which people use in everyday dialogue can be hurtful to various groups of people for the historical and cultural context of such terms.

Of these phrases, the term “ghetto” and “inner city” caught my attention greatly. As the article states:

[…] terms like ghetto and inner city grew out of the industrial revolution in North America. The word ghetto also has a painful historical root in Europe during the Holocaust, and was likely derived from Jewish settlements in Italy centuries ago. Meanwhile, from the late 1900s onwards, political rhetoric and media representation showed suburbs as pleasant, quiet and gentle areas, while inner city was seen as dangerous and risky (CBC Ottawa, 2021).

This enchantment of the suburbs and the tensions between city and the suburbs remind me of Paul L. Knox’s Metroburbia, USA (2008). The American Dream, as writer and historian James Truslow Adams coins in The Epic of America (1931), is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone. In depicting metroburbia—a fragmented mixtures of employment and residential settings, combining urban and suburban characteristics—Knox further notes that the entire residential fabric of metroburbia rests on the American Dream, founded on the promise of ever-increasing levels of material consumption, the expectation of single-family home ownership, the accumulation of wealth, and systematic upward social mobility through ingenuity and hard work (Knox 2008, 132).

There are numerous and various causes of suburban development; looking beyond what contribute to suburban development (the causes) Knox seeks to explore the why—why do these causes lead to the rise in suburban development. Placing human beings as the centre of the why Knox identifies self-awareness as the key force that interacts with the causes of contemporary suburban development. Self-awareness, in Knox’s words, is a state of mind as well as a commodity. With signs of new materialism appearing everywhere, people want nice things—things that act as symbols of style and distinctiveness; things that range from imported mineral water, designer clothes, expensive makeovers, to houses and cottages. With the emergence of the new economy that is based on digital technologies, economic, and cultural globalisation, new bourgeoisie and new petit bourgeoisie quickly emerged and gained significant economic influence.

To the class fraction generated by the new economy, the reenchanted suburbs proves to be the enchantment; an enchanted suburbia house feels right and in Knox words, is the right “stuff”. House, in any case, is more than a place for home, it is a medium in which clear statement about the owners themselves and their lifestyles could be pronounced. Material consumption hence gains yet another role—a role in the fulfillment of dreams, images, and pleasures. With the rise of the new role of material consumption and a rising emphasis on the ideological principles of houses, suburban homes and patterns of home-related consumption become a powerful social processes in which owning suburban house and shaping the house mold people’s consciousness of place, identity, and power.

Perhaps it is this enchantment of the suburbs, embedded with the ever-rising of materialism and its implication on social status, that further contributes to the decades-long divide between suburbs and inner cities.

The CBC article says that ghettos and inner cities are typically seen to be places where less refined people live—people who aren’t up to date culturally, development-wise. Thus using the terms “ghettos” or “inner cities” implies a negative connotation toward people of a certain socio-economic class (often associated with racialised groups) — typically those who have recently immigrated and often move to large metropolis areas and not suburbs.

If the streets of the ghetto are small streets, streets of the non-ghetto parts of the city could be the big streets. If the streets of the suburbia are big streets, streets in the city could then be small streets. This complex and fluid nature perhaps signals a time for us to rethink not only the use of phrases but also to realise the social, historical, and political context that give connotations to phrases that seem evermore quotidian.

Spatial inequalities: understanding the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro

Suburbs are geographic spaces located in the marginal or peripheral areas of the city. It is a space produced next to the city but, due to its geographical location, types of construction and uses are dissociable from the space considered urban (FERNANDES, 2011). The perception of peripheral and suburban areas by scholars and the general public varies geographically and over time. To better understand these variations, we should take into consideration the particularities and history of occupation of suburbs worldwide.  

At the beginning of the 19th century, the suburbs of the city of Rio de Janeiro were occupied by large religious properties belonging to the orders of the Catholic Church or by private mills and farms. After the arrival of the Portuguese crown to the city in 1808, the management of these lands was given to the Crown and wealthy members of the Portuguese Court. During that time and until the end of the century, these suburban regions served as areas of agricultural production and housing for members of the upper and middle classes, who were able to afford the costs of living far away from the crowded city center.  

However, with the new development plans initiated by the mayor Pereira Passos in 1903, aimed at “beautifying” the downtown, a new spatial organization emerged and profoundly altered the structure and territorial characteristics of the suburbs. New neighborhoods emerged from settlements occupied by working classes and low-income communities - now evicted from the city center. Without establishing any urbanistic standards and lacking effective relocation policies “a spontaneous configuration of occupation took shape: poorly drawn rough earth streets, without curbs, were appearing everywhere. New constructions were made in inappropriate lots, lacking alignment”, as described by Nestor Goulart dos Reis (1977, p. 53).

“The suburbs of Rio de Janeiro are the most curious thing in terms of buildings in the city. The topography of the site, capriciously mountainous, certainly influenced it, but what influenced it most, however, was the misfortune of the constructions. Nothing more irregular, capricious, and unplanned can be imagined. The houses appeared as if they were sown through the wind, and after the houses, the streets were made. Some of them start as wide boulevards and become narrow-like alleys. They take turns, useless circuits, and seem to escape the straight line with a tenacious and holy hatred. Sometimes they were built in the same direction with an annoying frequency, others were built far away. In an area, there are houses crowed in a space, and just ahead a vast field gives us a broad perspective. So, this is how the buildings are located and the street layout. There are houses for all tastes and constructed in all shapes.”[1] 

Another significant milestone that directly influenced the occupation of the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro was the implementation of railways, starting at the end of the 19th century. Railways were potential vectors of expansion to this territory, which were previously remote and inaccessible for the majority of the population. The matching identity of suburbs and railways in Rio de Janeiro is so striking that it requires a very detailed examination. Differing from other cities in Brazil, where the geographical distance from the city center defines the suburban limits, only in Rio the region of neighborhoods crossed by railways are considered suburbs, even if there are other zones equally distant from the downtown. Such specificity was defined by the common sense of the train as a main way of transportation for working classes and minority groups who maintained a dependent spatial relation with the city center (SOARES, 1960 apud FERNADES, 2011). Fernandes (2011) saw in this “ideological kidnapping of the term suburb” justification for the construction of a negative and disqualifying view of this region. In fact, in terms of development levels, the railway suburb – formed essentially by lower and mid-class neighborhoods, is the most neglected area in comparison with other regions of the city in terms of urban planning, conservancy, and management.

Throughout history, the stigmatized views of the suburbs were also able to influence urban development plans for the city that often focused on the functionalist character of this region. One of the most iconic projects was the Agache Plan. The French architect Alfred Agache, hired by the mayor Antônio Prado Júnior in the late 1920s, suggested the adoption of an urban policy favoring the construction of cheap housing in the suburbs, which would also be endowed with basic urban infrastructure. Although not implemented in practice, the plan became a symbol of socio-spatial segregation and the dichotomy between bourgeoisie × proletariat in the city of Rio de Janeiro.

Nowadays, this inheritance of a sign-ideological representation of socio-spatial segregation in the city still characterizes the selection of criteria for urban municipal actions and seems to occur based on the demand of the economic elites. This distinction is even more evident when the object of study is public space. In 1999, Tangari compared the existence and distribution of public spaces throughout the city. She found that only 8% of public spaces were located in the suburbs, and together, they added up to less than 100 hectares, while in central and southern regions – which have the highest income levels – open spaces occupied around 1,000 hectares of the territory (TANGARI, 1999).

Unfortunately, over the past years, there was no urban development concept to address these structural disparities where the State has just reinforced spatial inequalities in a clear demonstration of how investments are applied based on geographical location. In the suburbs, public spaces have been relegated to a mere potential solution for speeding up suburban commuters to and from the downtown. Interventions such as the creation of bus rapid traffic corridors (BRT) and the enlargement of existing roads based on an outdated automobile-oriented transportation system have been responsible for building more significant physical barriers, especially in low-income neighborhoods and racial and ethnic minority communities. These barriers that often segregate many of these peripheral neighborhoods develop a place devoid of identity and highlight the existing racial and social divisions that have shaped the city.

[1] Excerpt of the book “O Triste Fim de Policarpo Quaresma” (The decline and fall of Policarpo Quaresma), where the author gives a brief description of the suburb of the City of Rio de Janeiro at the end of the 19th century. The book was originally written in Portuguese by the Brazilian writer Lima Barreto and translated to English by Francis K Johnson.

References

FERNANDES, Nelson da Nóbrega. O rapto ideológico da categoria subúrbio: Rio de Janeiro 1858-1945. Rio de Janeiro: Apicuri, 2011.

REIS, José de Oliveira. O Rio de Janeiro e seus prefeitos: evolução urbanística da cidade. Rio de Janeiro: Prefeitura do Rio de Janeiro, 1977.

TÂNGARI, Vera Regina. Um outro lado do Rio. 1999. Tese (Doutorado em Arquitetura e Urbanismo) – Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo, Universidade de São Paulo, 1999.

TÂNGARI, Vera Regina; SCHLEE, Mônica Bahia; ANDRADE, Rubens de. (org.) Sistema de espaços livres: o cotidiano, ausências e apropriações. Rio de Janeiro: UFRJ, 2009.