From the Sky to the Ground: Seeking the Site for Brazil’s New Capital in the 1950s

Proposals for relocating the Brazilian capital from Rio de Janeiro to the center of the country have existed since before Brazil’s independence in 1822. One of the main issues to be resolved was the choice of the actual site of the future capital. By the late 1940s, different interest groups jockeyed to bring the new capital to their corner of the Brazilian hinterland. In 1954, Brazilian officials hired a team of U.S. specialists to solve the problem of selecting the location of the future capital. Brazilian officials believed that, because the U.S. technicians were far removed from the biases and special interests of groups in Brazil, they would conduct an efficient and technical selection process. This paper analyzes the work of these U.S. specialists—a team comprised mostly of civil engineering and urban planning faculty from Cornell University led by Professor Donald J. Belcher. After a little less than a year of work, the U.S. team selected five possible locations for the new capital in Central Brazil, one of which would be used to build the country’s new capital, Brasília, inaugurated in 1960. The team’s site selection relied heavily on the interpretation of aerial photographic surveys. This paper shows how the team led by Belcher attempted to approach Central Brazil from a greater distance—physically, politically, and epistemologically. Their 1956 final report reveals how new remote sensing technologies helped to shape a discourse about nature that justified the construction of a new capital city in the hinterland. Together, these surveys introduced Brazil’s interior savannah to a crop of policymakers with no knowledge of the environment in that part of the country. They presented a landscape rich in natural resources that would support the population of Brazil’s soon-to-be-built modernist capital.