Tropical Homes: Housing, Urban Planning, and Citizenship during the Cold War in Northeast Brazil

Analyzing the production of urban policies in Latin America during the Cold War, this paper explores the construction of public housing projects in the states of Pernambuco and Rio Grande do Norte in the 1960s. These planned communities were part of a period of abundant circuits of foreign economic aid and technical assistance that changed the landscape of Latin America. Examining the period from 1950 to 1974, housing proliferated in Northeast Brazil through the will of different government units to meet not only the demand for a roof, but to materialize their own ideas. This paper inserts the cases of Recife and Natal in what the researcher Adrián Gorelik (2003) called the "cultural construction of the Latin American city.” State housing in Pernambuco and Rio Grande do Norte during the Cold War meant much more than just providing a roof for the emerging urban working class. Through discourses and practices that fostered anti-communism, regional development and industrialization, and a credit economy, authorities and elites used social housing during the 1960s specifically to attempt to shape the identity of Pernambuco’s and Rio Grande do Norte's workers and integrate the region into the national economy. This paper examines the role of economic trends such as Modernization Theory and Import Substitution Industrialization in the development of new public housing endeavors. Moreover, the text discusses the local, regional, national and international connections among different actors that shaped the housing history of Northeast Brazil. In doing so, this paper demonstrates how during the Alliance for Progress urban planners, politicians, diplomats and academics used different economic, architectural and political ideas in the state provision of housing. They did so to try to culturally shape the working class and insert the region in the broader plan for national development.