Defining the Planalto Central: Surveying the Site for a New National Capital in Brazil, 1946–56

Between 1956 and 1960, the Brazilian government, led by president Juscelino Kubitschek, built Brasília, Brazil’s planned capital, in a vast stretch of high-altitude savannah in the middle of the country. Proposals for changing the capital city from coastal Rio de Janeiro to the Brazilian interior had existed since the early 1800s, and between 1891 and 1894, the Brazilian government launched two expeditions to the country’s interior to select a suitable location for the new capital. Yet after the two 1890s expeditions, the idea of moving the capital to central Brazil lay dormant for fifty years. The 1940s witnessed a resurgence of campaigns for an interior capital. This paper analyzes the surveys carried out by the Brazilian state on the site chosen in the 1890s, preparing the terrain for the building of Brasília after 1956. Between the mid-1940s and mid-1950s, the Brazilian government conducted three new surveys to study the landscape, soil, water supply, and weather patterns of the site explored by scientists in the late nineteenth century. Two of the surveys were carried out by the Brazilian Army. A third was based on aerial imagery produced by a Brazilian contractor in the 1940s. To interpret these images, the Brazilian government hired an American firm led by Donald J. Belcher, an engineering professor at Cornell University. Belcher’s 1956 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.