4. Planning a society: urban politics and public housing during the Cold War in Natal, Brazil

Yuri Gama¹

Introduction

In Brazil, until the late 1930s, private industries were the main constructors of public housing. These companies let houses and rooms to their own workers. After 1940, the state played a progressively larger role in building more affordable housing intending to provide shelter for a new urban working class and give a sense of private ownership to people who used to rent or squat. This chapter focuses on revealing the reasons for the strong presence of public housing in Natal, the capital of the north-eastern state of Rio Grande do Norte. Much of the extensive literature on housing infrastructure in Brazil emphasises industrialisation and mass protests as drivers for housing policy mainly in large south-eastern cities such as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. A relatively small, poorly industrialised, and relatively quiescent city such as Natal fits poorly into these existing explanations. However, looking specifically between 1960 and 1980, public housing projects proliferated with a real drive from different government units to attend to popular needs and their own ideas. While the prevailing literature focuses on unveiling the impact of present government practices on changing popular consciousness, this chapter questions the origins and the reasons behind these governmental efforts. More specifically, this chapter analyses the role of state-led social housing in shaping the urban working class during the Cold War.

Throughout the modern history of Natal, affordable housing for people on low incomes or the middle classes was the purview of the state with the help of private initiatives. Beyond providing shelter for people, mass housing infrastructure and urban planning served as a tool of sanitary education, political propaganda, Cold War strategy, and economic development between 1900 and 1986, when the federal government closed its main housing agency. In the first 40 years of the 20th century, local and regional authorities along with urban planners developed comprehensive neighbourhood plans that were never completely fulfilled, but influenced the city’s growth and hygiene habits. Although these plans did not focus on affordable housing per se, they changed Natal’s architecture and construction laws and measures through sanitary urbanism, such as the 1924 Plano Geral de Obras de Saneamento [Comprehensive Sanitary Works Plan] by engineer Henrique de Novais and Saturnino de Brito’s 1935 Plano Geral de Obras [Comprehensive Works Plan]. Among several aspects of planning, these massive works destroyed buildings and alleys, and changed the sizes of pavements and houses while implementing rubbish disposal and sewer infrastructure that influenced the urban expansion of Natal and Rio Grande do Norte.

After 1930, with the creation of agencies such as Institutos de Aposentadoria e Pensões (IAP) [Pensions and Retirement Institutes] in 1933, the Fundação Casa Popular (FCP) [Casa Popular Foundation] in 1946, and the Banco Nacional de Habitação (BNH) [National Housing Bank] in 1964, the federal state, through different administrations prioritised the construction of conjuntos habitacionais2 with the support of local states and private-construction companies. As the state planned and constructed affordable homes conforming to modernist architecture, an anti-communist discourse, and sanitation requirements, I argue that state-sponsored housing in Natal became an instrument to shape citizenship and to form a new society based on old ideas. Considering infrastructure’s capacity to reveal insights into governance, culture, and ideology (Larkin, 2013), this chapter examines ideas and practices of politicians, bureaucrats, and planners behind public housing construction in the state of Rio Grande do Norte. I posit that by using housing to tame communist inroads and to control a new growing urban working class, transnational and national meetings of local and international urban planners, politicians, diplomats, and academics fostered an ideal of moderate citizenship and particular political subjects based on Cold War ideals.

Specifically analysing the most active years of housing construction, between the late 1950s and the late 1970s, I situate Natal’s history in Adrián Gorelik’s discussion about the social construction of the Latin American city in the 20th century (Gorelik, 2005).3 Natal’s public housing emerged directly influenced by transnational Cold War politics in a local context. Different from industrial centres such as São Paulo, in which public housing construction mostly followed the emergence of new companies, in Natal, a poorly industrialised region, housing investment became a way for authorities and elites to implement cultural transformations connected to Cold War politics. Thus, Natal’s public housing infrastructure between 1945 and 1980 developed as a cultural model that attempted to shape a new society. By associating new sanitary, economic, and political habits with the provision of social housing restricted to the working class alone, authorities and elites fostered a model citizenship visualising a new and modern urbanised Rio Grande do Norte.

After a coup d’état in 1930, the governor of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Getúlio Vargas and his allies ousted all the existing governors and replaced them with their own choices creating a provisional government up to 1934. Vargas’s coalition expanded and strengthened the federal government with new agencies that coordinated national policies in education, health, labour relations, commerce, and industrial policy (Williams, 2001). Suffering backlashes and fearing possible coups, in 1937 Vargas instituted the Estado Novo [New State] an authoritarian-nationalist regime. Among many programmes, in conjunction with the Rockefeller Foundation, the Vargas regime coordinated a campaign of national hygiene with sanitation workers and disseminated public information on tropical and venereal diseases (Williams, 2001). At the same time, the state policy promoted social harmony and class collaboration with massive support for industrialists and workers’ rights. In this sense, with the creation of Institutos para Aposentados e Pensionistas (IAPs), during the Getúlio Vargas administration, and Banco Nacional de Habitação (BNHs), during Castelo Branco government, the federal government and its state interveners assumed the responsibility of providing housing for and regulating the labour conditions of the working class (Holston, 2008). The example of housing in Natal reflects James Holston’s analysis of Getúlio Vargas’s administrations in which the state considered the workers to be special citizens ‘by bestowing social rights they had never had and celebrating a dignity of labour it had never recognised’ (2008). However, in contrast to Holston’s engagement with the residents’ struggles in his book Insurgent Citizenship (2008), I investigate the politics behind state initiatives of building affordable housing complexes equipped with schools, open spaces, and community centres.

Initially created in 1933 to organise the social security of the emerging working class, the IAP was divided into several different sections according to each labour category and soon became the first country-wide federal housing agency.4 Turning the IAP into a housing agency using a self-financing mechanism also helped the state to obtain data about industrial activity. The IAP’s profit came from four different sources: a mandatory monthly contribution made by the workers, a mandatory annual contribution made by the industrial company, a symbolic percentage deducted from each project undertaken by the company, and donations (FGV/CPDOC, IAP). Created in 1964 by the new military regime, the National Housing Bank (BNH) fulfilled the IAP’s promise of centralising housing construction in the hands of the federal government. Actively influencing regional states such as Rio Grande do Norte, the BNH became the most important agency of the military regime between 1964 and 1985. During these two decades, Natal’s labour power also participated in a couple of self-built house construction schemes called mutirão and autoconstrução (Filho, 2011). However, in contrast to cities such as São Paulo, Brazil and Bogotá, Colombia, Natal’s government did not focus its efforts on assisted self-built housing. Most of the self-built initiatives were autonomously organised by neighbourhood associations or the owners, which is not this chapter’s focus. Constructed by the Catholic Church along with residents and the municipal government, Bairro Mãe Luíza and Rocas were the only assisted self-built experiments that stood out and still, they did not provide the expected number of homes (de Araújo, 2014). In conversation with Holston (2008), I understand here, that before 1960 with Vargas and after 1960, the state of Rio Grande do Norte used housing construction to reformulate the citizenship of workers in order to organise labor laws, foster the region’s industrialisation and to stimulate a certain dependence on the government’s structure.5

As part of the state structure, the IAP supported workers from different industries: banking staff, industrialists, public servants, maritime workers, and commercial workers benefited the most. These sections of the IAP established a degree of transparency in all of the construction phases through newspaper announcements. In Natal, local newspapers such as Diário de Natal and Tribuna do Norte published competition advertisements for companies to tender and win the right to build housing complexes for the state. The creation of the IAP along with the establishment of labour legislation such as the Consolidação das Leis do Trabalho (CLT) [Consolidation of Labour Laws],6 and the construction and funding of private homes for the same social class meant an expansion of the state in registering the new working class. The state used CLT to gather data on unemployment and employment to build a social profile of its citizens as workers while improving its demographic census.

In contrast to Holston’s discussion of citizenship formation with its focus on mass movements, my research examines the ideas and practices of architects, urbanists, governors, mayors, land surveyors, and sanitation experts who participated in the history of public housing construction in Natal. In order to present this analysis, the present chapter discusses the connection between urban planning and the construction of sanitation infrastructure up to 1940, the role of urban experts and housing agencies, the peak of public housing development in the 1960s, the electoral uses of residential complexes in the Cold War context, and the dismantling of housing investment after the mid-1970s.

Sanitation and public housing

Vargas’s first government implemented reforms in the fields of public administration, education, and city planning that reinforced the urban renewal destructions and constructions of the early 1900s. As the federal state prioritised housing, Vargas provided enough support to his state intervener, Rafael Fernandes Gurjão, who governed Rio Grande do Norte from 1935 to 1943, to invest in a few comprehensive urban projects that intended to improve city hygiene, the water supply, and sewage systems (A Ordem, 13 May 1939). The urban project, Plano Geral de Obras, was partially implemented through a public-private partnership between the private engineering office Escritório Saturnino de Brito and Gurjão’s state department of sanitation under the guidance of the sanitary engineer Saturnino de Brito (Dantas, 2003).

The Plano Geral de Obras (1935–43) did not focus on housing, but it had two main neighbourhood plans that influenced local engineers after the 1950s: the Bairro Residencial and the Vila Operária Saneamento. The projects followed a historical trend in Natal’s urban history of creating planned communities such as Cidade Nova in 1904, Bairro Operário by Henrique de Novais in 1924, and Bairro Jardim by Giacomo Palumbo in 1929. However, more than following a local trend, Escritório Saturnino de Brito’s plan for the Bairro Residencial followed the concept of neighbourhood units developed in the USA by Clarence Perry. The precepts of neighbourhood units emerged with the construction of cul-de-sacs, the separation of community leisure facilities from homes, and heavy car traffic, allied with the local tradition of sanitary interventions such as wide avenues and open public squares (Dantas, 2003). Defending the construction of infrastructure such as schools, public spaces, and avenues within workers’ villages, Brito believed that ‘educating people with the good principles of hygiene’ was the role of the engineers, urban experts, and authorities (de Brito, 1943).

The Plano Geral de Obras, produced by Gurjão and de Brito in 1935, was inspired by the 1924 Plano Geral de Obras de Saneamento created by the engineer Henrique de Novais that implemented the elites’ discourse of reforming and expanding Natal through a sanitarian urbanism (Governo do Rio Grande do Norte, 1924). The plan fomented by the governor and the architect referenced the 1904 Cidade Nova’s spirit by emphasising sanitation. According to the plan’s writers, a good sanitation system connected other public projects without neglecting the aesthetics and the technical aspects of urbanism (Dantas, 2003). The Plano Geral de Obras kept alive the idea that hygiene signified progress and the necessity of implementing a comprehensive set of interventions in the city (Dantas, 2003).

The fact that until 1940 state actions focused more on sanitation projects than housing provision proved to be an initiative to educate people for a well-defined concept of cleanliness connected to modernity and progress. Land surveyors, sanitation technocrats, engineers, and politicians, in a public and private partnership, set up a cultural and social mentality in which sanitary conditions became a state priority in Natal.

The housing crisis turned out to be a recurring subject in the news within state sectors and among Natal’s residents throughout the 1940s. Reporting the inauguration of Vila dos Estivadores on 22 July 1940, the local newspaper A Ordem pressured authorities to extend the right to housing not only to dockers and to move towards maritime, railway, transport, commerce, banking, and industrial workers (A Ordem, 22 July 1941). In a section called Reflexões, the newspaper posited that the state had to prioritise housing provision for those on low incomes (A Ordem, 22 July 1941). In 1948, supporting President Jânio Quadros’ call to action concerning the lack of housing, the largest newspaper of Rio Grande do Norte, Diário de Natal defended the ‘construction of cheap and hygienic housing for the poor classes’ (Diário de Natal, 13 January 1949). The population increase in Natal from 60,203 to 103,215 between 1940 and 1950 demonstrated the lack of infrastructure in the city and contributed to the increase in housing deficit (IBGE, 1940). The alliance of the USA and Brazil in World War II emerged as one of the main factors related to this growth. As the war began to influence South American countries, worried about the expansion of Nazism in France and Africa, the USA built the Parnamirim Field military base, in the city of Natal.

In order to build the base, the USA pushed for infrastructural transformations. In 1943, the city implemented a bus transportation system that rapidly replaced the trams, and the international military commando at the Parnamirim Field demanded that the Electricity and Power Company of Northeast Brazil install 500 telephones all over Natal (Souza, 2008). Even with these infrastructural changes, the city’s capacity remained insufficient to support the US base. Lacking enough homes, sewage, and water infrastructures for the incoming residents, the city of Natal became overburdened by this military presence and influx of people. At the end of the 1940s, a series of claims denounced a continuous housing crisis: the financial instability of the IAP (Diário de Natal, 8 August 1949), a 22 per cent hike in the cost of housing (Diário de Natal, 17 September 1948), and a structural reform at the Fundação Casa Popular to remedy institutional deficiencies (Diário de Natal, 13 January 1949).

Although World War II and the Cold War enhanced the political use of affordable housing construction in Natal, communist expansion in north-eastern Brazil had already attracted the attention of the elites and the authorities in the 1930s. During the Coluna Prestes communist threat in 1935, Getúlio Vargas already feared agitation in Natal (Camara, 1935). With Vargas back in power in 1951, the federal government soon reintroduced heavy investment in residential units for workers through the Instituto de Aposentadorias e Pensões dos Industriários (Retirement and Pension Institute for Industrialists). Vargas understood that state-sponsored housing could be a way for the state to control workers’ and socialist movements. The political use of housing was manifested when the minister of the Civil Office of the Presidency, President Vargas’s assistant, Lourival Fontes, affirmed to the national president of the IAPI, Gabriel Pedro Moacyr, that ‘constructing houses to sell for members of the institute gives immunity against communism as it gives the member a sense of homeownership’.7 Almost four months later, the Rio newspaper A Noite reported that Moacyr had authorised thousands of industrial workers, residents in the north-eastern state of Maranhão, to acquire a state-sponsored housing unit (A Noite, 4 June 1952). Although not heavily emphasised, Vargas’s administration regarded the construction of conjuntos habitacionais as a means of taming communism in Brazil. However, the political use of housing provision against communism only became clear during the peak of the Cold War in the 1960s.

Alliance for Progress and the case of Cidade da Esperança (1960)

The national housing crisis was once again a frequent topic in Rio Grande do Norte newspapers throughout the 1960s. Capturing electoral anxieties and the importance of housing in Brazil, Juscelino Kubitschek’s party’s presidential candidate, Marshal Henrique Teixeira Lott wrote an address to the nation, on the front page of Diário de Natal entitled ‘O problema da habitação’. Lott dissected the 1950s context in which large Brazilian cities ended up having a housing shortage due to demographic growth (Diário de Natal, 23 September 1960). Using data from the demographic census and analysing the crisis, Lott advocated the building of at least 2.5 million homes to end this shortage (Diário de Natal, 23 September 1960). Lott advocated that the construction of affordable housing for poor people needed to be a task for private companies with state leadership allied to the stimulus of capitalists’ interests. According to Lott, the key factor responsible for the emergence of favelas, mocambos, or occupations, was the ‘mismatch between the high cost of construction in the main cities that generated expensive rents and the reduced income capacity of the workers that forces them to occupy empty properties and build informal settlements’ (Diário de Natal, 23 September 1960). The marshal concluded his article advocating the collaboration of all governmental spheres, the use of worker collaboration to build their own homes, the fostering of construction credit and mortgages, the development of low-cost building methods and standardised construction materials, and the prioritisation of federal funding to produce mass housing (Diário de Natal, 23 September 1960). In one way or another, Lott’s piece explained the public housing construction zeitgeist and predicted the incoming changes in the relationship between the state and housing.

Capturing the 1950s solidification of urban studies research centres and public housing agencies all over Brazil and in Rio Grande do Norte, federal and local authorities along with US housing experts and diplomats signed the Alliance for Progress, an economic and technical document in August 1961. The alliance was designed at the height of the Cold War to tackle communist insurgency in Latin American countries demonstrating capitalism’s ability to enable a welfare state. In April 1962, the USA and Brazil signed the North-east Agreement in which the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) promised US$131 million over two years to the Development Superintendency of the North-east (SUDENE) (United States Senate, 9 February 1968, 90th Congress). One year later, Rio Grande do Norte’s governor Aluízio Alves and the chief of the US mission for technical and economic cooperation, John Dieffenderfer approved 12 billion cruzeiros of foreign aid support specifically to implement the plans of the Alliance for Progress in the state (Diário de Natal, 13 April 1963). For public housing, USAID contributed 1 billion and 200 million cruzeiros (Diário de Natal, 13 April 1963). As the alliance allocated funding for state-led housing in the north-eastern region and the state of Rio Grande do Norte, urban experts and authorities got together to plan and build the necessary infrastructure.

In September 1963, the government of Rio Grande do Norte sent four people to the Centro Interamericano de Vivendas y Planeamiento (CINVA) in Colombia, an international aided self-help housing workshop sponsored entirely by the Organisation of American States (OAS) (A Tribuna do Norte, 26 September 1963). As an international hub of urban experts, CINVA consisted of researchers from Rio de Janeiro, Recife, Natal, Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Lima, La Paz, and many other cities. Among those selected were Natal architect Ubirajara Galvão, the technocrat Domingos Gomes de Lima, the social worker Eunice Pereira de Araújo, and the military police construction worker Eneas Pereira dos Santos (A Tribuna do Norte, 26 September 1963). A month later with the support of USAID, SUDENE announced the investment of 400 million cruzeiros for the creation of the housing agency Fundação Casa Popular, an institutional reform demanded by the USA (Diário de Natal, 12 October 1963). Alliance for Progress bureaucrats, technocrats, and diplomats understood the importance of assisting Latin America’s affordable housing projects for low-income families in not only providing shelter. Social housing for them signified establishing ‘a base in well-being and in tangible standards of living that also contribute[d] to productivity’ (United States Senate, 9 February 1968, 87th Congress, 1963).

Created in 1951, CINVA became a workshop in the early 1960s that prepared professionals to participate in the Alliance for Progress/USAID housing construction all over the Americas. It was a hub of different professionals based on the work of Jacob L. Crane, a veteran of US public housing administration who had participated in Puerto Rico’s home construction projects in the 1940s and coined the term ‘aided self-help housing’ (Offner, 2019). In this case, ‘aided self-help housing’ construction meant that governments could consistently help families build their own homes. This was different from the idea of ‘self-help housing’ in which low-income families built their own dwellings themselves entirely without support.

The Alliance for Progress helped to jumpstart housing projects elaborated by Aluízio Alves and Carlos Lacerda, allies of the USA, the governors of Rio Grande do Norte and Rio de Janeiro, and political opponents of Brazil’s left-leaning president, João Goulart. Born in Rio de Janeiro, Lacerda was a journalist and a liberal politician who made his career in national politics by opposing Vargas’s and Goulart’s administrations, becoming Rio’s governor in 1960 – approximately at the same time that Aluízio Alves became governor of Rio Grande do Norte (FGV/CPDOC, Carlos Lacerda, Online). Aluízio and Lacerda were friends, partners, and key political actors in Latin America’s Cold War that reached its peak in 1959 after Fidel Castro came into power in Cuba.

Nothing reveals the connection between Cold War politics and the housing of rural migrants in urban areas in north-eastern Brazil more clearly than the case of Natal’s Conjunto Residencial Operário Cidade da Esperança. As part of this post-war developmentalist context fostered by SUDENE and the Alliance for Progress, Cidade da Esperança appeared to be one of the largest state-sponsored housing enterprises in Brazil during the early 1960s (de Almeida, 2007). In order to realise this project, the state governor Aluízio relied on USAID, and the recently created regional housing agency Fundação da Habitação Popular do Rio Grande do Norte (FUNDHAP) (de Almeida, 2007).

Along with the construction of Cidade da Esperança between 1964 and 1966, two other neighbourhoods also followed the spirit of the time and tried to emulate international urban planning in Natal. A little bit different from Cidade da Esperança, the neighbourhoods Mãe Luíza and Rocas emerged as state-led self-built housing experiments with much less support from the state. In Mãe Luíza’s case, municipal authorities renovated the bus station, built a public space, and a school (Diário de Natal, 20 May 1964). Through a working group led by the Catholic Church, the community developed a process through which residents with little construction knowledge were in charge of building their own houses (Diário de Natal, 13 March 1966). By 2 March 1965, counting on the labour of 115 men and women, the group had built some new roads and four houses (Diário de Natal, 13 March 1966). Because of a lack of cement in the area, donations running out, and the Aluízio Alves government and the mainstream media focusing solely on Cidade da Esperança, the Mãe Luíza neighbourhood self-built experiment ended, leaving many residents without new homes (de Araújo, 2014).

Contrasting with Mãe Luíza, Rocas’s case benefited from greater state participation through FUNDHAP’s support of residents’ self-built housing promoting the assisted self-help housing advocated by US housing expert Jacob Crane. Alluding to Bogotá’s self-built Ciudad Kennedy without mentioning it, the newspaper A Tribuna do Norte reported on 5 January 1965, the beginning of Rocas’s reconstruction of low-cost houses through a ‘mutual support’ system, which was ‘used in many countries of Latin America’ (A Tribuna do Norte, 5 January 1965). Originally intended to be funded by USAID, Rocas’s was entirely financed by the local government and implemented by the community’s residents (A Tribuna do Norte, 11 June 1965). In contrast with most self-build projects of the Cold War era that developed new homes, the Rocas’s plan only renovated houses (A Tribuna do Norte, 26 March 1965). Rocas’s renovation was supervised by Domingos Gomes, a local technician who had recently arrived from the transnational housing workshop at CINVA (A Tribuna do Norte, 11 April 1965). The restoration processes counted on an estimated 12 groups formed by FUNDHAP’s engineers, social workers, a couple of master masons, and residents (A Tribuna do Norte, 11 April 1965). FUNDHAP’s characterisation of Rocas’s reconstruction as ‘the project that changed Brazilian housing policy’, appeared to be an exaggeration in comparison to other self-build plans in Latin America, such as Ciudad Kennedy in Bogotá, and Cajueiro Seco in Recife since both involved more residents, built completely new houses instead of adapting them, and added more urban facilities than Rocas (A Tribuna do Norte, 9 June 1965). The Alves-family-owned newspaper A Tribuna do Norte was the main medium responsible for spreading the news that housing developments such as Rocas and Cidade da Esperança were projects elaborated by Aluízio Alves’s group, Comando da Esperança (A Tribuna do Norte, 7 August 1965). In contrast to Cidade da Esperança that ended up with almost 3,000 houses after its last construction phase, Rocas only managed to rebuild around 200 houses (A Tribuna do Norte, 25 July 1965). Following the same path as the Mãe Luíza neighbourhood, the Rocas project stopped its development with the government focusing on finishing Cidade da Esperança.

The literature on Natal’s housing construction paid attention to municipal, state, and federal relations with architects and institutes. However, these accounts often missed the transnational connections in which many of the urban experts and financial actors were involved.8 Alliance for Progress funded planned communities in places all over Latin America, such as Buenos Aires, Bogotá, and Rio de Janeiro. Although different from each other, Natal’s Cidade da Esperança and Rocas fitted into this pattern. In particular, the Cidade da Esperança project constructed residential units with facilities such as an elementary school, a chapel, a public market, a local commercial block, a mother’s club, a community centre, police headquarters, a football pitch, among others (Galvão, 2007). Inspired by President Juscelino Kubitschek, Rio’s governor Carlos Lacerda, the city of Brasília, and the CINVA workshop, Natal’s urbanist Ubirajara Galvão created the initial plan of the neighbourhood (Galvão, 2007).

As a technical agency sponsored by the OAS, CINVA trained housing officials from all over the Americas. One of these experts, Galvão was trained to develop the housing sector of the Alliance for Progress in north-east Brazil, more specifically in his hometown Natal (Galvão, 2007). The workshop fostered the idea of sharing knowledge among technocrats and housing experts in the Americas and creating new ways of providing self-built homes for low-income families (Galvão, 2007). Under the Alliance, Galvão and FUNDHAP’s Director, Agnelo Alves, also went to Maceió, in the north-eastern state of Alagoas to learn about the low-income housing condominium of 1,000 residential units under construction funded by the USAID (A Tribuna do Norte, 11 July 1964). After Galvão’s experiences in Colombia and Maceió, he went back to Natal to design and build Cidade da Esperança.

As part of the process to build USAID-funded housing projects, the state government began the registration process for home ownership in Cidade da Esperança in 1964 (A Tribuna do Norte, 14 July 1964). The conditions for registration were as follows: not having previously owned any property of any kind, being married or having a family formed by your household, having a family income based on one minimum wage, being over 21 years of age, having been resident in Natal for at least two years, and being in a regularised military situation (A Tribuna do Norte, 11 July 1964). Besides these conditions, the applicant needed documentation of their personal life details such birth certificates, marriage certificates, proof of income, professional, residential, and electoral records (A Tribuna do Norte, 4 August 1964).

The construction of Cidade da Esperança in the mid-1960s perpetuated the authorities’ concerns with sanitation developed in the late 1800s. Hired by the municipal government, the sanitary physician José Carlos Passos developed and implemented a sanitation programme with an informative magazine called How to Inhabit Public Housing and a schedule of activities for the Health Centre of Cidade da Esperança (A Tribuna do Norte, 21 July 1964). As part of the registration of new residents, the state conducted a survey that collected information on 3,000 applicants in order to reassure the ‘sociological and meritocratic character’ of their choice (A Tribuna do Norte, 19 August 1964). According to FUNDHAP, the socio-economic survey researched the real status of the urban population in Natal and the future residents of Cidade da Esperança (A Tribuna do Norte, 19 August 1964). The use of the surveys and the sanitation workshop in these 1960s housing projects demonstrated the interest of the state in learning about the workers of the city. Moreover, it showed a continuation of the practice of registering and learning about the Brazilian working class initiated in the 1890s by private companies and emphasised during Vargas’s administrations between 1937 and 1954. Authorities used this information to decide who could live in Cidade da Esperança and encourage the community to promote a modern, healthy lifestyle among the residents.

Similar to Rio de Janeiro’s housing development,9 in Natal the USAID and the Alliance for Progress served specifically to jumpstart the construction of the first batch of residential units. On 30 January 1966, Aluízio Alves left his position as governor while inaugurating Cidade da Esperança with 540 units built out of the 1,000 planned in the first project.10 Cidade da Esperança had two more construction stages after the first one in 1966; both were implemented by Governor Cortez Pereira without foreign aid and with the help of the federal state and the local agency FUNDHAP.

In 1966, the National Housing Bank (BNH), the largest state habitation development agency, took over the construction of Cidade da Esperança by incorporating FUNDHAP. However, even though the BNH funded most of the housing construction in Natal, the political character of FUNDHAP as a regional state agency lasted for several years. It endured mainly because all three state deputies and Natal’s mayor Agnelo Alves were Aliança Renovadora Nacional (ARENA) members – making Rio Grande do Norte the most solid ARENA state in the union with a cohesive pro-US agenda aligned with conservative values.11 Taking into account the fact that ARENA governed the state, the strong US relations with Natal through the military base in 1943, and President Roosevelt’s visit in 1944, by 1967, the US State Department considered Natal, of all the north-eastern cities, ‘the most pro America’ (United States Department of State, 1967). This political agreement between the US and the Rio Grande do Norte governments strengthened pro-US allies in Brazil and made housing an insurance policy against communism during the Cold War era.

This solid alliance was vital to kickstart the building of Cidade da Esperança during a time of housing insufficiency and an electoral campaign. In fact, Aluízio Alves’ plan of building the housing complex was his main campaign promise and helped him to become governor of Rio Grande do Norte in 1961 and elect his ally Walfredo Gurgel in 1966, just like Vila Kennedy and Vila Aliança helped Carlos Lacerda continue in power as Rio de Janeiro’s governor in 1964, at least until he was ousted by the military dictatorship.

USAID, electoral politics, and Cidade da Esperança

Between 1961 and 1966 Aluízio Alves created a series of plans for infrastructural changes in the state of Rio Grande do Norte and more specifically its capital, Natal (Medeiros, 2015). However, among all of these projects, Aluízio chose the construction of the planned community Cidade da Esperança as his main campaign platform in 1961. Predicting support from the USA, Aluízio used his concept of housing to attract foreign capital. Soon after his election, he went to the newspapers to appeal for funding for the building of social housing in the west-side of Natal (Jornal da Tribuna, 30 August 1964). Contradictorily, during the Alliance for Progress meeting in Punta del Este in 1961, all the north-eastern states sent project representatives to receive funding from USAID through SUDENE, except Rio Grande do Norte. The state alleged a lack of infrastructure to implement any project and rejected the agreement (DeWitt, 2009).

One year after the approval of the alliance in Punta del Este, the US ambassador Lincoln Gordon told President John F. Kennedy that they needed to trust Rio Grande do Norte’s governor Aluízio Alves. After Gordon’s seal of approval, Alves travelled and convinced Kennedy in person that his state wanted to collaborate in a direct agreement. In 1962, a committee from USAID visited Rio Grande do Norte and declared that the USA wished to establish an agreement with the state without mentioning SUDENE or the Northeast Development Master Plan (DeWitt, 2009). Two years later, through an auction notice in a newspaper, Aluízio publicly announced his intentions of building Cidade da Esperança through a direct agreement between the state of Rio Grande do Norte and USAID, leaving aside the mediation of SUDENE and the Brazilian federal government (Jornal da Tribuna, 30 August 1964). While Getúlio Vargas managed to implement his housing policies in Natal in the early 1950s with the support of the state governor Sylvio Piza Pedroza (1951–6), João Goulart (1961–4) did not have the same luck when Aluízio Alves disobeyed the federal government’s directions (Pedroza, 1953). Since the beginning of his electoral campaign, Aluízio focused on the modernisation of Rio Grande do Norte using foreign funding and his media companies. With Cidade da Esperança’s population slowly growing, Aluízio managed to elect his brother Agnelo Alves mayor of Natal in 1966 and named him president of FUNDHAP (United States Department of States, 1967). The Alves family established a successful method of using housing for political purposes with the support of their own media.

Coalition of media and politics: spreading the modernisation discourse

Aluízio Alves’s campaign was inspired by Lacerda’s campaign (Trindade, 2003). Five years after Lacerda created the newspaper A Tribuna de Imprensa in Rio, Alves formed A Tribuna do Norte in Natal. Alves’s newspaper followed similar editorial lines to Lacerda’s with a regional focus. Both also had slots in local radio stations. In the radio station Rádio Poty, Alves had 15 minutes every day for his political speeches (Trindade, 2003).

The media played an important role in building the image of Aluízio with the masses. Combining radio and newspapers, Alves had the power and the means of communication. With headlines such as ‘Aluízio: I know that the people are with me’ and ‘On foot, Aluízio followed the people in the first March of Hope’,12 A Tribuna do Norte, the Alves family’s newspaper, followed the line established by Aluízio in the rallies, motivating the voter and captivating his allies. In contrast with A Tribuna do Norte, Diário de Natal offered space in their daily editions for political propaganda from other candidates for the state governorship such as Djalma Marinho (Diário de Natal, 23 September 1960). Local mainstream media established its role in society not as neutral, impartial, or in favour of people’s common good, but politically engaged with one candidate or another.

A couple of years before Aluízio Alves, Lacerda became the governor of Rio as a stepping stone to his attempted presidential candidacy (Benmergui, 2018). He wanted an efficient modernising administration, focused on expertise and technical knowledge while caring about the poor and the masses by providing affordable housing and trying to renovate favelas. Using the same modus operandi as Alves, Lacerda understood that the transformation of favela residents into homeowners was a way to modernise and formalise the urban poor (Benmergui, 2009). In Rio de Janeiro, the governor created the Guanabara Housing Programme with the financial and technical assistance of the Alliance for Progress. The programme included four communities: Vila Aliança, Vila Kennedy, Vila Esperança, and the initial stage of Cidade de Deus (Benmergui, 2009). Redefining citizenship as purchasing power, governors Aluízio Alves in Rio Grande do Norte and Carlos Lacerda in Rio de Janeiro believed that homeownership would help people living in poverty to become a new middle class.

The Alliance for Progress defined a construction pattern for these housing projects, and the same concept in Rio de Janeiro also took place in Natal. According to Leandro Benmergui, in Rio’s case ‘the blueprints of individual dwellings already prescribed the layout for future additions as a way to control improvisation, a characteristic of spontaneous construction in the favelas’ (Benmergui, 2009). Guanabara Housing Programme conceived Vila Kennedy as an ideal community open to reforms and changes according to different needs of different residents’ lives, in other words, a modernism different from the rigid vision of modernist Brasília (Benmergui, 2009). This flexible characteristic of the affordable housing complexes in Rio was the basis of Cidade da Esperança in Natal: the Fundação Casa Popular and the BNH built two-bedroom houses in a scheme that allowed the construction of another bedroom by the owner (A Tribuna do Norte, 15 July 1964). In this sense, affordable housing developed by Aluízio in Natal and by Carlos Lacerda in Rio emerged as a pillar in the structure of the Alliance for Progress. As a product of the Cold War context, the economic agreement landed in Latin America to promote a liberal citizenship through homeownership in opposition to communism.

Another influence of Aluízio’s politics was Brazilian President Juscelino Kubitschek’s way of combining politics and urban planning as a main electoral campaign promise in the late-1950s. Kubitschek’s 1955 presidential campaign and his building of Brasília directly influenced Aluízio Alves to build Cidade da Esperança to win the Rio Grande do Norte state elections of 1961. Unlike Getúlio Vargas, who focused mainly on state and national private funding, Kubitschek promised an economic national development scheme in alliance with foreign private capital. His speeches during the campaign promised the acceleration of Brazilian development towards this imagined world of modernity with his Targets Plan. His politics incorporated two approaches that could be seen as conflicting: on the one hand, the capacity to deal with the traditional political system based on patronage, and on the other, bringing a new sense of hope for Brazil’s development with an economic programme of modernisation that had to overcome state bureaucracy (Maram, 1990).

Kubitschek’s programme signified the feeling of hope that represented the political zeitgeist used by institutional politicians to captivate hearts and minds (Benevides, 1991). Brasília’s unofficial and official anthems, written by Capitão Furtado, claimed that the city was the capital of hope.13 The spirit of Brasília as a cidade da esperança was shown in the documentary Brasilia: City of Hope by Robert W. Schofield and Leona Carney produced by Tangent Films and funded by the Standard Oil Company.14 Analogous to Kubitschek, Alves emerged as the candidate of hope, the one who campaigned for the integration of the north-east in the national economy and to show the importance of the region, or at least of Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil.

The fact that in the 1960s politicians used their own media outlets and their presence in inaugurating housing complexes in their election campaigns set up a cultural and social mentality in which workers’ home construction became a priority for authorities. Public housing in Natal thus emerged as a tool of electing and keeping in power politicians who managed to raise funds and promote their actions through mainstream media. The Alves family and Carlos Lacerda were perfect examples of that.

Post-1970: mass housing and economic crisis

After the 1964 coup d’état that ousted left-leaning President João Goulart, Brazil faced a military dictatorship that suspended national elections and centralised all local agencies. In contrast to Getúlio Vargas’s coup, the military regime attacked unions and froze wages. Similar to the Vargas governments, this new regime continued to invest in affordable housing and anti-communist projects. However, instead of developing the social aspects of housing, authorities used it more as economic leverage, following the same strategy used in the automobile industry.15 In the early years of the dictatorship, the recently created federal housing agency, BNH, incorporated local housing agencies. The military control of national institutes meant the reduction of local state autonomy and people’s participation (Diário Oficial Lei no. 6.008, 26 December 1973). This centralisation signified a top-down approach that emphasised mass housing construction with a lack of urban facilities.

After years of foreign aid being reallocated to build housing in Brazil,16 the 1970s authoritarian regime started to use other economic development mechanisms such as the Sistema Financeiro de Habitação [Housing Finance System] (SFH), voluntary savings, and the Fundo de Garantia do Tempo de Serviço [Severance Indemnity Fund for workers] (FGTS) (A Tribuna do Povo, 21 January 1965). Between 1970 and 1991, the federal agency SFH together with the BNH built approximately 50,000 housing units in Natal (Bentes et al., 2005). Organised into large and medium-sized condos, these groups of units appeared scattered throughout various neighbourhoods on the periphery of the city, leading to the urban expansion of infrastructure networks throughout the municipal territory. The outcome of this mass investment could be seen in 1980 when Natal was considered completely urbanised.17 As post-1964 Brazil faced an aggressive investment in infrastructure construction, industrialisation, and an operation against communist agitation, the military regime proved to be a more efficient choice to implement the US Cold War interests in Latin America than a highly polarised international economic cooperation such as Alliance for Progress.18

After the transfer of power from General Emílio Garrastazu Médici to General Ernesto Geisel in 1974, the federal housing agency BNH lost regulatory capacities in the mortgage and loan system to the private sector (de Mendonça, 1980). While in 1968 BNH dedicated 96 per cent of its loans to housing construction, by 1975 the National Housing Bank only used 60 per cent, and even less in the next year with only 47.1 per cent (de Mendonça, 1980). Moreover, the military regime progressively shifted from providing housing to low-income and destitute families to focusing on the middle and upper-middle classes with a regulatory power transfer to private funds and individuals instead of working-class associations such as the IAPs of the 1940s (Bolaffi, 1981). This change relied on the creation of massive bank loans for workers to purchase a home in a public housing complex. Similar to Argentina’s public housing construction, the modernisation of the mortgage market in Natal considered the individual responsible for saving money instead of the collective notion in which groups such as unions (IAPs) were responsible for a general welfare. Post-1970 changes in the public housing market created new economic habits in which individuals searched more often for loans and mortgages, and accumulated debts.

Before housing losing its appeal, the BNH faced its peak of house construction by expanding its programme to the interior of Brazil. Although the BNH focused more on rural towns, the population of Natal still managed to grow. The number of affordable housing residents in Natal, in 1981, impressed regional authorities: only the neighbourhood of Candelária alone with 2,140 houses and 10,700 residents was larger than 125 towns in Rio Grande do Norte, a state with 150 towns by the end of that year (de Andrade et al., 1987). Similar to the Alves family in the 1960s, between 1975 and 1982, the Maia family controlled the state’s and the capital’s politics with constant investment in affordable housing for middle and low-income earners and used the constructions as promises in their electoral campaigns (Petit, 1990).

Natal’s largest conjuntos habitacionais were built between 1975 and the 1984 as the table on p. 118 shows.19 Among all of these housing complexes, Natal received three important conjuntos habitacionais that became large neighbourhoods and represented the infrastructural and economic decline that emerged in the 1980s and culminated with the demise of the National Housing Bank: Soledade with 2,485 homes, Ponta Negra with 1,837 homes, and Cidade Satélite with 3,545 homes. All of them were built in different regions of Natal and for different kinds of people. Together with Cidade da Esperança, these projects were connected by similar challenges. All of the neighbourhoods found themselves in a state of decay, with a lack of urban infrastructure and poor public provision by the mid-1980s. Residents of Cidade da Esperança complained about the lack of paving and water (A Tribuna do Norte, 25 June 1982). Soledade’s residents mostly complained about lack of secondary schools and teachers (A Tribuna do Norte 16 April 1985). All of the residents complained about the precarious sewage system, rubbish disposal services, and lack of safety, with growing violence and burglaries (Medeiros, 2018). Throughout the 1980s, Natal’s daily newspaper headlines announced that poverty and neglect provoked riots and demonstrations in Cidade da Esperança, Soledade, Ponta Negra, and Cidade Satélite (A Tribuna do Norte, 15 November 1984).

The process of abandonment and growing poverty in these four neighbourhoods provides a snapshot that was reflected all over Natal, a feature that denounced the sensation of the ‘lost decade’ in Latin America.20 As Brazil faced a deep financial crisis; suffering from corruption claims, the BNH experienced a large disinvestment campaign that forced its closure by the new democratic transitional government of José Sarney in 1986.

Conclusion

The history of state-sponsored housing in Natal is the history of Brazilian politics. Irrespective of the regime in power, housing infrastructure manifested the political. However, when it comes to analysing the Cold War era, housing infrastructure received special attention from local, national, and international authorities and elites. In Natal, as the state prioritised the construction of affordable homes for workers, the authorities aimed to promote the importance of homeownership. Legally owning a house engendered a new relationship between workers and their dwelling. As a result of constant migration of people from rural to urban areas in search of jobs and escaping from droughts and floods, authorities redefined homeownership as a way for the state to acknowledge and control a new urban working class while satisfying their demands. As state-led public housing led Rio Grande do Norte workers into a consumer society by establishing where they were going to live and work, planned communities became a way of shaping identity and citizenship. As anti-communist politicians used mass housing projects as promises in electoral campaigns and to remain in power, housing provides a glimpse into the intricacies of electoral politics. Given that foreign funding and expertise in the housing construction circulated throughout the Americas – moving mainly from the United States to Latin America – Natal’s housing construction demonstrated the state’s attempt to define what it means to be a worker, a voter, and a homeowner in modern Brazil. The state, with the help of private urban planning companies and foreign aid, responded to popular demand and attempted to reconceptualise citizenship.

James Holston’s (2008) studies on citizenship and city formation in Brazil provide a helpful guide for interpreting Natal’s public housing history. By limiting habitation provisions to regulated workers only, authorities used homeownership to foster a conditioned citizenship. At least until 1970, if residents of Natal wanted to have a house and access to public services, they needed to be a registered worker, thus leaving out of the equation a mass of informal workers and the unemployed. Afterwards, public housing access became even more restricted. Housing agencies tailored housing provision mostly to middle-class citizens. Rather than investigating the agency of citizens as Holston has, the main purpose of this chapter has been to unveil the ideas and practices of authorities directly or indirectly connected to the construction of affordable homes.

Natal’s housing experience places the north-eastern city in the debate about the Latin American city as a cultural construct fuelled by battles between modernising reformism and revolutionary actions (Gorelik, 2005). Researching Natal’s affordable home construction is vital to understand city formation in Latin America between 1950 and 1970. As Adrián Gorelik argued, the Latin American city became a place of the ‘encounter between the discourses and material practices of modernisation and development’ during the Cold War (Gorelik, 2005). Like Ciudad General Belgrano in Buenos Aires, Ciudad Kennedy in Bogotá, and Vila Aliança in Rio de Janeiro, the public housing complex Cidade da Esperança, in Natal, emerged as an outcome of the transnational engineering and architecture workshop, CINVA. A key insight here is Leandro Benmergui’s discussion about the Argentinian housing complexes Ciudad General Belgrano and Villa Lugano and the Guanabara Housing Agency’s constructions in Rio de Janeiro as contact zones21 for the encounter between local, national and international flows of power, capital, aesthetics, and expectations about the modernisation of the working masses of Latin America (Benmergui, 2012). Just like the examples of Rio and Buenos Aires, I posit that Cidade da Esperança in Natal, a smaller city than both of these, also emerged as a contact zone, an abstract site of transculturation that may represent, what Gilbert Joseph considered, a place in which the external was absorbed by the local and received new meanings through exchanges and borrowings of a diverse amalgam of behaviours and discourses (Joseph, 1998). Cidade da Esperança, thus, appeared in the middle of the Cold War built by local engineers influenced by foreign expertise. Similar to Amy Offner’s analysis of Bogotá’s housing construction, fostering public planned communities of private homes in Natal emerged in its own unique form, as a way of transforming ‘an unruly population, endowing the poor with new social and political loyalties that would restore order to the country’ (Offner, 2019).

In light of the discussion about modernisation efforts, considering the patterned infrastructure that came along with houses, state-led housing in Natal became a way for the authorities to try to attract development to the city and to the state of Rio Grande do Norte. Housing during the era of developmentalism was key in the search for modernisation – a hub that served as an excuse to disseminate a new way of living that left behind radical politics and congregated new hygiene habits with the expansion of the middle class. Shying away from James Scott’s (1998) condemnation of high modernist projects as failures, this chapter shows that assessing failure or success would require an examination of many historical actors’ evaluations about their places of living, an analysis I did not attempt here.

Although the United States maintained a self-interest by funding housing through the Alliance for Progress (1961–74) in Latin America because of the Cold War, Brazil’s adoption of state-sponsored housing at the beginning of the 1960s appeared not as a one-sided demand coming from the USA, but one also proposed by Rio Grande do Norte anti-communist politicians such as Aluízio Alves, Agnelo Alves, and Walfredo Gurgel, who understood the effective political and ideological use of housing provision by the state. Hence, Rio Grande do Norte government’s historical use of housing as a way of taming communism was a continuation of a strategy also used by the Getúlio Vargas administrations between 1930 and 1954, that also served to fulfil people’s demands for cheap housing. In a closer reading of urbanisation practices and speeches, the political adoption of common signifiers such as hope tied to the construction of housing infrastructure and modernising ideals between 1950 and 1970 helped politicians elaborate a sophisticated manner of doing politics and winning elections.

Taking into account the Vargas regimes (1930–45 and 1951–4), the Juscelino Kubitschek administration (1956–61), the João Goulart government (1961–4), and the military regime (1964–86), the provision of housing infrastructure by the state emerged as a convenient insurance policy against communism in Brazil and in Natal, Rio Grande do Norte. Vargas’s use of IAPs to register the working class, Kubitschek’s creation of SUDENE, Aluízio’s co-option of FUNDHAP, the USAID funding of the Alliance for Progress, and the largest investment in Brazil’s history in housing through the military regime’s BNH, all of these ventures considered, directly or indirectly, along with state provision of modern public housing fostered a sense of private homeownership and a new citizenship.

By planning and building public housing infrastructure while establishing ideals of sanitation, fighting communism with homeownership provision, registering a new urban working class, and using the construction industry for electoral purposes, local, regional, and foreign experts allied with politicians in private and public partnerships, understood that state-led public housing could shape the urban workers of Natal and Rio Grande do Norte into a consumer society based on Cold War moderate politics that could result in a new, modern society in an urbanised and integrated Latin America.

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