Brasilia
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The capital of Brazil is Brasilia, a city bulldozed from the wilderness in 1957. This city holds a special place not only because it was a planned city but because it has become the focus for various groups that see the region as mystic in nature. Brazil is a gigantic country that offers startling geographic and socioeconomic contrasts. The culture that has developed in this area, constituting the fifth largest nation in the world, is marked by the use of Portuguese as the official language and the mixture of Portuguese and Brazilian cultures makes this area subtly different from its neighbors with their Hispanic heritage. Brazil is also the largest Roman Catholic nation in the world. The nation is also made up of many immigrant groups from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including millions of Italians, Germans, Slavs, Arabs, Japanese, and others, all of whose descendants today speak Portuguese (Nyrop xxi). Regionalism has also characterized Brazilian culture, and numerous barriers existed that discouraged communication among the far-flung settlements of colonial-era Brazil that helped create this regionalism. The varied history and diverse geography of the nation are reflected in contemporary social, political, and economic cleavages. As noted, the population and the ethnic background in the various regions are very different (Nyrop 97-98). The political structure of the country also reflects its cultural attitudes and institutions. Brazil ha
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for Brasilia was different because the planners did not have to cut and trim their vision to fit preexisting land uses. The planners could create an ideal city and believed that they had (Cornish 29-30).
Outsiders see Brasilia as mixing both the ideal and a certain darker element because of the way the city intrudes into a wilderness region. Brasilia is first of all wedded to the landscape. The city is not claustrophobic but involves widely-spaced panoramas flowing into the public spaces. The architecture speaks of nature, but the city and its roads constitute the first major incursions into the Amazon:
The capital's political founders meant the city as the symbolic spark for massive development of Brazil's interior--development which has had fearful consequences for the rain forest, the Indians, and the lower classes that trusted an economic miracle in the wilderness. The progress that gave Brasilia life has devastated nature (Hess 97).
Brasilia is a federal district much like Washington, D.C. and for the same reason--it is the seat of the federal government and as such as separate from the states that surround it, each of which has its own state government while still being subordinated to the federal government. Po
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Approximate Word count = 1616
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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