Carioca Camelots: The Construction of “Kennedy Villages” in Rio de Janeiro under the Alliance for Progress

Vila Kennedy was a project of the Kennedy administration’s Alliance for Progress. Sponsored by Guanabara State Governor Carlos Lacerda, with technical and financial assistance from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the neighborhood opened in 1963, forming part of Lacerda’s life-long campaign to eradicate the city’s favelas, or shantytowns.  A feat of social as well as political engineering, designers sought to inculcate a work ethic in its residents via streets named for occupations, such as “Carpenter’s Road” and “Mechanic’s Lane,” and tried promote close ties to the United States with a main square named Miami and, in it, a 19-foot tall bronze replica of the Statue of Liberty.

This paper examines the history of Vila Kennedy and its sister neighborhood, Vila Aliança in order to explore the various dimensions in which project designers expected to bring about cultural and attitudinal changes. On one level, Brazilian officials, urban planners and Church officials sought to use the relocation plan to draw the supposedly “marginal” favelados into mainstream society and modernity. Hoping to foster a sense of responsibility through mortgages and eventual homeownership, and to replace the crooked “disorder” of the favela with the grid-like design of Vila Kennedy, they contrived to transform both the physical and mental life of the vila’s residents. On another level, the program aimed to influence not only the favelados, but also expected to transform “traditional” Latin American understandings for all those who came into contact with the “modern” society of the United States.  In short, the paper examines how the process of creating Vila Kennedy was conditioned by the different yet overlapping assumptions, ideologies and goals of the various interacting parties.  And it explores how this process shaped ideas about the urban poor, ideas that found material expression in their mandatory new neighborhood.