Book Review Contemporary urbanism in Brazil: Beyond Brası ´lia Vicente del Rio and William Siembieda (eds.) University Press of Florida, Gainesville, FL, 2009, 368pp., hardcover $69.95 and paperback $34.95, ISBN: 978-0813032818 URBAN DESIGN International (2010) 15, 129–132. doi:10.1057/udi.2010.2; published online 24 February 2010 Brazil is unique among the emerging economies as having been firmly on the radar of the design professions for 80 years as a paradigm for the successful creation of a national style of modern architecture. Beginning in the 1930s when Le Corbusier worked with Brazilian architects and continuing with such figures as Niemeyer and Burle Marx, it reached its zenith with the building of Brasilia in the 1960s. The critic Rayner Banham, in a 1962 survey of modern architecture was able to characterise its architecture as no less than ‘the envy of the world’ (p. 36). If its more recent architecture has been neglec- ted in the foreign media (Andreoli and Forty 2004) then, with the notable exception of Curitiba, even less is known about recent Brazilian urban- ism. Contemporary Urbanism in Brazil: Beyond Brasilia must therefore be welcomed both as an updating of some very well-publicised projects, such as Curitiba and Brasilia, and as an introduc- tion to some less well-known experiences. Brazil is bigger than the continental United States and in population it is the world’s fourth largest democracy. One of the BRICs on which the future of the global economy will depend (with an absence of civil wars arguably the happiest) it is a nation of startling contrasts, from the slums depicted in the movie, ‘City of God’ to the glamour of Copacabana beach. It is therefore very different from most developed countries. However, the experiences described in this book have a resonance with current practice in many other nations and the fact that they are from a context which seems to exaggerate the tendencies in other countries only helps illuminate problems nearer home. As the countries of the West become more unequal, have to rely on an underclass of cheap immigrant labour, with more marked social segregation, a rise in gun and gang crime with more gated communities, worse traffic congestion and shoddier privatised public transport and housing shortages, they are facing, in a less dramatic way, some of the same problems as Brazil. So we can look with benefit at the way this sub-continent is dealing with these issues on a far exaggerated scale. The transition from a colonial agrarian society to an urban industrial one took place at great speed (by 2006, 86 per cent of the population was considered to live in urban areas) without Brazil ever having gone through the bourgeois revolution which was so important in creating the nineteenth-century infrastructure, which is still so important in defining European and North American cities. Both the Estado Novo, an authoritarian and modernising regime (1937–1945) and the military, who ruled from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, found that modernism perfectly fitted their national aspirations. It was only in 1989 (the same year that the Berlin wall came down and a century after the establishment of the first Brazilian republic) that constitutional government was restored. Del Rio describes the decade after the restoration of democracy as particularly difficult with a hiatus in planning activity following the abolition of the institutional frameworks and the closing of the federal and metropolitan planning agencies that had operated for more than two decades. This volume is therefore concerned with an urbanism which had to be reconstituted in the last two decades and which had to ‘overcome the hegemony of the modernist paradigm’. As Jon Lang writes in his forward to the book, the Brazilian urban design experience has paral- leled that in more developed countries with a shift from major architectural projects to a concern with enhancing the life of the citizen. This is being implemented through the revitalisation of city and town centres and existing residential neighbour- hoods. In the case of Brazil the latter are favelas (squatter settlements); in the developed economies they are large public housing estates of the 1960s. The 12 case studies drawn from eight different cities bring both a critical perspective and set the experiences in global professional context. They r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1357-5317 URBAN DESIGN International Vol. 15, 2, 129–132 www.palgrave-journals.com/udi/