How to visualize social-spatial segregation?

Brasilia, Brazil

By Mariana Bomtempo
segregation, right to the city, brazil, brasilia,

This project aims to use the parameters of race, income and density of Brasilia to highlight the discrepancies placed in the city

Brasilia was built to be the capital of Brazil and part of a plan to occupy the interior of the country once that since the colonization period the territory was mainly occupied on the coast. The main core of the city was planned and built accordingly to Lucio Costa’s urban design project, which followed Le Corbusier’s concepts and the CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) manifestos. The Pilot Plan of Brasilia was constructed by a labor force that could never afford living there.

Picture: Vila Amaury, 1958. Source: Historias de Brasilia, Facebook Page.

The dichotomy between Pilot Plan and Satellite Town is too simplistic to define the complex urban sprawl that Brasilia became nowadays. Before the construction of the capital there were already two cities - Planaltina and Brazlandia, also some of the camps built to house the constructor workers remained as neighborhoods. Some of the informal settlements formed by people who were seeking for better opportunities were removed to Satellite Towns, others remained as informal settlements and some new ones started and kept growing more recently. In some areas where there were small farms for local production did not resist the market pressure and were divided as horizontal condominiums to house the middle class. Meanwhile, the Pilot Plan remained not much different from what was planned, with huge plots of land vacant sitting on urban infrastructure speculating, while the whole city effervesced with settlements popping up everywhere.

Photo: Sol Nascente, Ceilandia. By Joana França.

Nowadays, Brasilia is the fourth most populated city in the country and is a scenario of segregation of communities in the urban space, especially related to educational and economic aspects. This phenomenon contrasts with the utopia behind the idealization of the city, that supposedly was going to reflect the flourishing future of the country, and as soon as possible the city has turned to be another sad reflection of the deep inequalities in Brazil.

Photo: Estrutural. By Joana França.

In this scenario with a well-defined division and a long distance between social classes, the upper class, which also commutes by cars, never encounter or acknowledge the reality of the lower class, which lives far and commute by an inefficient public transportation. It can be said that “such inhuman environment promotes social exclusion by limiting interaction, preventing the ‘unexpected’, and controlling access and use, resulting in a sterile urbanity” (Hehl, Minha Casa-nossa Cidade, 333).

Photo: Lago Norte. By Joana França.

MAPS

As way to visualize this discrepancy and specialize it I develop the following maps. The first one compares the relation between land, race and income in the city of Brasilia. When the user clicks on the circles with the income it’s possible to get access to the precise number of the income of that area together with the resident population broke into percentage of races.

The density is shown on the map to add the relation with land. The difference between the most dense places and the lower ones shows how even more dramatic this relation is. Most of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city owns huge amounts of urban land in Brasilia.

Above this box the layers can be turned on and off, relating the density, income and residents. Each resident is represented by a dot, unfortunately I didn’t have enough storage to upload the data with the white residents, but the location of the mass of non-white residents explicits the social spatial segregation in Brasilia.

The second map was inspired on the American Racial Dot Map. The blue points represent residents who declare themselves as white, the orange dots represent residents who declare themselves as brown and the red dots are the residents who declare their race as black. The relation between race and urban land/density gets clearer.