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Only settlers from Europe built nation-states and national capitals overseas, and their notions of statecraft and urbanism were naturally imported from their motherlands and/or other parts of Europe.^* However, the socio-cultural and political parameters of their state and city building were fundamentally different, and so were the outcomes behind the surface similarities. The major conflict line in the Americas was not national versus princely sovereignty, but between local settler sovereignty against overseas imperial rule. In the thirteen colonies of British America, opposition against the latter focused on taxation; in Hispanic America, on trade monopolies and high-office discrimination. In British as well as Hispanic America, settler rebellions started as pro-monarchical,† and Brazil entered the world stage of nation-states as a monarchy.

Settler secession was not like the artistic rebellion against the Vienna Kunstverein, which started the artistic and architectural rebellion known in Austria-Hungary as Secession. It was not the launch of a new culture, although it did contain rejections of Old Europe’s aristocratic manners. It was more like the divorce of a middle-aged couple who had spent quite some time together but who had grown apart, with offspring cared for by the American part.

Metaphors aside, secession meant a different conception of the nation than the European one: no longer based on language, religion, culture, history, but on a territorial club of conquerors and settlers. The nation was a club of members, open to anyone entering the territory with the proper ethnic credentials. Like any club, the club-nation engaged in recruiting new members, advertising and subsidizing European immigrants, preferably from Northern Europe. This was a practice of underdeveloped, pre-national dynastic states, for example Frederick of Prussia inviting French Huguenots or Catherine of Russia inviting Germans, and was discontinued by the European nation-states.

In Europe, a central question of domestic politics was how many rights should be granted to the different classes, or orders, of the nation. In the settler nations, the rights of the people were less controversial. Instead, the key issue was: who are the people? Slaves were universally held as non-people, often ex-slaves and their descendants too. Natives and Mestizos were non-eligible for the club nations of the British secession, with the exception of New Zealand and its Maoris, too many and too powerful to be kept out. In Iberian settlement nations, Natives and Mestizos were usually accepted as members of the people and of the nation, even if they were de facto most frequently marginalized.* The settlers on one side against Natives, slaves and slaves’ descendants on the other is the constitutive fault line of all settler nations.

These nations faced two other specific issues, which also have borne the iconography of their capital cities. One has been their relationships to their extra-nation motherland, from which the settlers’ racial pride as well as their language and their culture came, but from which they also seceded. Another derives from the recruitment drives and their production of a multi-ethnic settler club-nation.

Among the nation-states of seceding settlers there is a noteworthy internal division very much pertaining to the construction of their capitals, deriving from settlement history, between secessions from the British Empire and from the Iberian ones of Spain and Portugal.

Centring Former British Settlements

Settler secession from the British Empire always resulted in new capitals being built: Washington, Ottawa, Wellington, Pretoria, Canberra. The reason is the kind of imperial settlement, made possible by imperial power and protection but not exclusively established by imperial conquest. It was also a refuge for religious dissenters, a dump for convicts, or a meeting ground for adventurers from different empires. From very early on, the different settler colonies within the imperial territory mattered, and secession polities had to respect and balance them. This, it came to be viewed, could be achieved only by creating new capital centres.

Within this category, we have to distinguish three groups. First, there is pioneering Washington, capital of a state of ruptural secession by a war of independence, capital of a slavery state and with a very weak and vulnerable indigenous population. Second, there are the capitals of the three White Dominions, with a very gradual emancipation from the motherland, all without slavery and two with marginal Native populations: Ottawa, Wellington and Canberra. Third, there is the capital of the finally failed settler state, Pretoria, South Africa.

The thirteen American rebel colonies seceding from the British Empire were divided into two economic and cultural blocs, North and South, centred on the significance of slavery, which was the basis of the Southern plantation economy. At first the United States had an itinerant Congress; in 1783 it opted to have two capitals: one in southern Virginia, the other in northern Delaware. A statue of the victorious commander-in-chief General George Washington, was proposed that would be transported between the cities.¹

The following year’s Congress selected New York City as its permanent site, but Southerners, including George Washington, started to intrigue against it. Finally, in 1787, a deal about the handling of the national debt secured Northern support for a Southern solution. President Washington was authorized to select an area on the Potomac River (near his home) and commissioners to build a new ‘Federal District’ to be opened by 1800. In September 1791 the commissioners decided that the district should be called Columbia – an oblique way of referring to the European background of the settlers, although Columbus never reached any part of what became the United States. The city itself was to be called Washington.* The President engaged a recent French immigrant, the painter and engineer Pierre-Charles l’Enfant, who had grown up at Versailles, to make a plan for the city.

L’Enfant made a grandiose Baroque plan: a grid with diagonal grand avenues 160 feet wide and roundabouts meant to include monumental landmarks. It had two central nodes, the President’s House and Congress House, the latter soon being given precedence, up on a hill. The two were to be connected by a Grand Traverse Avenue while forming a great triangle, of which the Avenue was to make up the hypotenuse; the Capitol, the President’s House and a Washington Monument would be the three corners, connected by parks as the two smaller sides of the triangle. The central diagonal avenue was named Pennsylvania Avenue, a kind of consolation prize to the main state of the North, which lost the location battle. The federal character of the capital is further emphasized in all the other original main avenues being named after states.

L’Enfant was explicitly planning a ‘Capital of [a] vast Empire’. It took about a century for it to be realized, revived by a Senate Planning Commission of 1902. Congress was always stingy with city finances, and most of the capital’s construction had to be financed by land sales.²

The Supreme Court had no place in the original plan; it did not emerge as a major power until the 1830s, and in spite of its significance ever since and its late, stately building, it has never been properly fitted into the city plan. A major building L’Enfant did plan, on the other hand, was never realized: halfway between President and Congress he had envisaged a non-denominational church and a kind of pantheon for the heroes of the nation.³ Persistent American religiosity has spawned a large number of houses of worship in central Washington, but religious pluralism has not favoured religious monumentality. Only since 1990 has there been one such claim, the Episcopalian Washington National Cathedral, the building of which Congress authorized a century earlier.

When L’Enfant couldn’t (or wouldn’t) produce the engravings of advertising for the land auctions of city plots – the United States already being a country of capitalist commerce – Washington fired him. Thomas Jefferson, Washington’s secretary of state and the third president, became the major architectural influence, which meant, inter alia, ‘antiquity’ for Congress and ‘modern’ for the President’s House.

Jefferson did not at all share L’Enfant’s and Washington’s grand ambitions for the city, which he always referred to as the ‘federal town’. Jefferson oversaw the Capitol building and the President’s House, but for the rest he was very restrictive with respect to the capital. For principled moral reasons, Jefferson was basically anti-urban. In his view, big cities were ‘pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberty of man’,⁴ and he did not want Washington to resemble the ‘overgrown’ cities of the North, like Philadelphia and New York.⁵ The vast Federal District and its city remained, in fact, a rustic area of separate villages for more than half a century, until the Civil War, largely due to frugal policy but also because the big geo-economic plans of George Washington and other Virginia gentlemen dried up. The Potomac silted up and was out-competed by Northern connections to the west, and Baltimore outdid Washington as a port.⁶ Charles Dickens, who visited Washington in 1842, found the Capitol a ‘fine building’ but was full of contempt for the rest: ‘Spacious avenues, that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere; streets, mile-long, that only want houses, roads and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to be complete’. But he was wrong in his conclusion: ‘Such as it is, it is likely to remain’.⁷

Jefferson’s idea of a government town was actually part of a virtually unique US configuration of seats of political power. Most US state capitals are not the largest cities of their states, and many are not even big cities. For instance, the capital of New York State is Albany; of Michigan it is Lansing, not Detroit; of Illinois, Springfield, not Chicago. California’s capital is Sacramento; Texas’s is Austin; Florida’s Tallahassee and Pennsylvania’s Harrisburg. These are all political decisions, not effects of uneven socio-economic city development. Motives were mixed, but basically rooted in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century varieties of fear of and hostility to big private interests, power and/or unruliness. Urban-rural conflicts have been a constant of US politics since then, refuelled by White suburbanization and the Blackening and Browning of metropolitan cities.⁸

The Southern location of the US capital brought one feature of settler city characteristics to the fore: racism. The great African American intellectual and community leader Frederick Douglass gave a lecture on ‘our National Capital City’ in the hopeful years of the mid-1870s, after the military defeat of the slave-holding South, in which he spelled out what the Southernness of Washington meant before the Civil War’s outcome:

Sandwiched between two of the oldest slave states, each of which was a nursery and a hot-bed of slavery … pervaded by manners, morals, politics, and religion peculiar to a slave-holding community, the inhabitants of the National Capital were from first to last, frantically and fanatically sectional. It was southern in all its sympathies and national only in name. Until the war, it neither tolerated freedom of speech nor of the press.⁹

Slaves made up a fifth of Washington’s population in 1800, and the Capitol Building was partly constructed by slave labour.¹⁰ By 1860, Blacks made up 18 per cent of the city, most of them freed.¹¹ Washington, until recently, was never a major port of immigration, and immigrant communities left less impact on the capital than on many other settler-state cities. There were a few, though: The German Schützenfest became the city’s second festive event, after the Fourth of July, and the Societá Culturale Italiana donated a statue of Garibaldi to Congress.¹²

The Natives had been killed or expelled, and in 1853 the major figure of Native ethnic cleansing in the first century of the United States, the military hero and president Andrew Jackson, was honoured by the nation’s first equestrian statue.* But the African American issue soon returned, after the Emancipation decade following the Civil War. From about 1880 until the New Deal, the situation of African Americans steadily deteriorated, politically and legally. Washingtonians were somewhat less badly off than people of colour in other Southern cities: there were no lynchings in Washington, streetcars and public libraries stayed open to all races and in the entertainment district of U Street Northwest, where Duke Ellington once lived, there was an inter-racial ‘contact zone’. But much racial apartheid descended upon the city, upon its neighbourhoods – although not as strictly as according to the South African Group Areas Act – its schools, its restaurants, its theatres and cinemas and its employment structure. President Woodrow Wilson – who would soon be selling slogans like ‘national self-determination’ and ‘a world safe for democracy’ – reintroduced the racial segregation of federal office facilities for the few African Americans still allowed there.¹³

To the White rulers of the state and the capital, Negro Washington was largely a ‘secret city’, having no part in the city’s official layout and monumentality. It did develop a centre of its own though, outside the city centre, of course, in the Northwest quadrant around Howard University – put up in 1867 by the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Howard Theatre and the jazz and entertainment district around U Street. In 1900 African Americans constituted a third of the population of Washington, a larger share than in any other big US city. Since 1957, until recently, they have made up the majority, which, together with legal desegregation of neighbourhoods and schools, started a massive White flight to the suburbs and about four decades of financial plight and drastic social deterioration of the remaining city.

Architecturally, Washington has maintained a sober, modern – in the Jeffersonian sense – style, keeping neoclassicism for important buildings with a public role, like the Supreme Court or the US Chamber of Commerce, abstaining from modernist iconography and keeping skyscrapers at bay through height-control laws.

Over time, an extensive iconographic programme has been deployed. Most imposing are the monuments to the two most famous presidents of the two established parties of the nation – so established that you publicly register your membership in one or the other – Abraham Lincoln of the Republicans and Thomas Jefferson of the Democrats. While more stylish, to Euro-American taste at least, the large quasi-religious monuments to these political leaders have hardly any contemporary near equivalent outside Pyongyang. A huge marble Lincoln has since 1922 been sitting in a Greek temple across the Reflecting Pool at the western end of the memorial Mall, while a bronze Jefferson of triple human height has stood since 1943 in a Roman pantheon across the Tidal Basin south of the Mall, at the end of a not-quite-straight axis from the White House via the Washington Monument. The Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials were the self-celebration of ‘the generation that took pleasure in the mean triumph of the Spanish-American exploit and placed the imperial standard in the Philippines and the Caribbean’, in Lewis Mumford’s comment on the first memorial.¹⁴ The Roosevelt Memorial of 1997 is very different, a pedagogical historical landscape about the issues of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s four presidential periods.^* Currently, a Frank Gehry (biographical landscape) design for an Eisenhower homage is on hold, because of opposition (from his descendants and conservatives) to its perceived insufficient solemnity.

A contemporary visitor to Washington is struck by something which probably would have surprised both Washington and Jefferson: the military character of the city. Across the Potomac is the world’s largest military building, the Pentagon, started in 1941, and a military-cum-national cemetery, Arlington Cemetery, with its iconic Iwo Jima Marine Corps War Memorial of victory in the Pacific. In the centre of the public city is the imposing building of the Department of Veterans Affairs, and in the Southeast until recently a Navy Yard and the headquarters of the US Navy, now with their ‘adult entertainment’ environs redeveloped. On the Mall are three memorials to the veterans of the Vietnam War, one to those of the Korean War and, since 2004, a grandiose monumental layout to the ‘Victory on Land, Victory at Sea, Victory in the Air’ in all the theatres of World War II. Only in Moscow is there anything similar.† More specific to Washington is a 2007 Goddess of Freedom hailing the ‘Victims of Communism’, organized by an anti-Communist activist of Ukrainian background, Dobriansky, and financed by Jesse Helms, Grover Norquist and others of the US far right.¹⁵

The secessions of Canada, New Zealand and Australia were rather like a young adult leaving home than a divorce. Canadians let Queen Victoria choose their capital in 1857. In a five-city race, including two major Québec cities, Québec City and Montréal, and two Ontario cities, Toronto and Kingston, Ottawa emerged as the winner. It was centrally located in the Canada of that time, at the confluence of the Ottawa River and two other rivers and at the border of Anglo-Protestant and Francophone/Irish-Catholic Canada; it was no plausible rival to the commercial centres of Toronto and Montréal. But it had little population weight, and the ratifying Parliament vote was narrow, sixty-four to fifty-nine.¹⁶

The ‘dominion’ status of the White settlements of the British Empire was ambiguous. They were territorial units in which ethnic/national balances and power blocs mattered, but their state sovereignty evolved gradually, finally inscribed as the legislative independence of the Dominions in the Statute of Westminster in 1931. In 1929 it was the British Privy Council which finally settled a contentious issue in Canadian politics: are women persons? The Supreme Court of Canada had said ‘no’, but the supreme imperial court graciously declared ‘yes’.^*

The new capital rapidly got a towering Parliament building on Barrack Hill, built in neo-Gothic style and out of local sandstone, soon turning from its original beige colour to a sombre dark grey. Unlike Washington and Canberra, the city grew without any grand plan. In 1884 a leading politician of the time, Wilfrid Laurier, wrote: ‘Ottawa is not a handsome city and does not appear destined to become one either’. About a decade later Laurier became prime minister, and as such he established an Ottawa Improvement Commission, with a view to making Ottawa the ‘Washington of the North’.¹⁷

Twentieth-century planning has focused largely on bringing out the natural beauty of the city on hills by the rivers. But towards the end of the century, it also developed a new political awareness, giving rise to a distinctive spatial layout and monumentality quite different from that of the imperial capital south of the border. Ottawa did not become a Federal District, but in 1958 the National Capital Act gave special planning powers to a National Capital Commission. One of its results was the Confederation Boulevard, a route, based on existing streets, connecting in a central loop Parliament Hill, the governor-general’s residence and, across the river, the Québec city of Hull – renamed Gatineau in 2000 after an amalgamation – manifesting the confederate unity of multi-national Canada. A noteworthy outgrowth of Westminster parliamentary courtesy is that Ottawa has an official residence for the leader of the opposition, for which the National Capital Commission is responsible.¹⁸

Ottawa monumentality is not militaristic, although there is a huge central commemoration of World War I, with World War II and Korean War additions. The antidotes to the Washington battle monuments are the abstract Canadian Tribute to Human Rights (1989) and the Reconciliation and Peacekeeping Monument, or ‘Peace Tower’, of 1992. Instead of the Caesarean Washington presidential monuments, Ottawa sports a set of modest tributes to its leading politicians on Parliament Hill.

The capital of New Zealand is named after the successful British commander in the Napoleonic Wars, the (first) Duke of Wellington. It was chosen by the settlers as the colonial capital in 1865, for its location on the Cook Strait between the North and South Islands, out of fear for the secession of the latter. Auckland, in the north of the North Island, was then the capital and has remained the economic and population centre of New Zealand.

Rich Australia had capital ambitions, but found it had to handle the rivalry between New South Wales, the oldest settlement with its main port capital of Sydney, and nouveau riche Gold Rush Victoria, fielding Melbourne as a major capital contender. Like Washington, but unlike Ottawa and Wellington, Canberra was built from scratch in a designated rural area, in New South Wales but ‘not within 100 miles of Sydney’. While a site was being determined and built up, it was decided the capital of the federated Australian colonies should be in Melbourne.¹⁹

The Australian Commonwealth and its first parliament came together in 1901, and in 1908 agreed upon an area called Yass-Canberra as the future capital site. The planning went out for international competition in 1911, which was won by an American architect of the Prairie School, Walter Burley Griffin. It was a great design of monumental axes and spatial proportions, but made with an explicitly democratic layout in mind. There was a ‘land axis’, from Capitol Hill and the government district across a built lake made from a dammed-up river, to the city and a hill behind it, and a crossing ‘water axis’. The main building of the government district was to be the Parliament, flanked by residences of the governor-general and (on its right side) the prime minister, with ministries below. At the top of the hill was not to be a building of political power but a ‘Capitol’ of the people, ‘for popular reception and ceremonial, or for housing archives and commemorating Australian achievements’.²⁰ The residential part of the city was laid out according to garden-city ideas.

Like L’Enfant’s great plan for Washington, Griffin’s suffered for decades from the pettiness and parsimony of politicians – and from the Depression of the 1930s. In the 1950s interest was revived, and the planners found that the Griffin plan could not be improved, but needed implementation.²¹ With its ample use of natural space and its low-rise, unpretentious architecture, Canberra has managed to be at the same time monumental and popular. Its 1988 Parliament building has become a democratic icon, partly built into Parliament Hill, with a sloping grass lawn on its back on which citizens could walk and play (at least before 2001), with a low-slung front of modernist columns, dominated by a huge national flagpole.²²

Canberra also features, most prominently, one of the strangest monuments in the world. The land axis from the flagpole and Parliament across the lake continues into the ANZAC Parade, a ceremonial military parade ground (laid out in 1965) ending in a huge part-Egyptian funeral War Memorial (of 1941), later embellished by commemorations of later imperial wars in which Australia voluntarily participated, like the Vietnam War.

It is not the World War I memorial that is so extraordinary, but the ANZAC myth and its iconographic domination of Canberra. ‘ANZAC’ refers to the Australia New Zealand Army Corps, which volunteered to fight for the British Empire in World War I. Its main exploit was a disastrous attack on the Ottoman Empire, two oceans and a continent away, at Gallipoli in 1915. On grounds beyond reason, this military adventure and bloody defeat has become a ‘baptism of fire’ of Australian and New Zealand national manhood, annually commemorated on 25 April.^*

Pretoria had been the capital of the Boer Republic of Transvaal, which the British Empire had finally subdued after a gruesome war. In 1910 it was to become the main capital of the British-Boer Union of South Africa, but sharing functions with British Cape Town almost 1,500 kilometres away, as the site of Parliament and Bloemfontein, the capital of the other Boer Republic, the Orange Free State, allocated the Supreme Court. Pretoria, named after a Boer commander and conqueror, kept its Boer insignia, the republican Raadzaal, becoming a provincial assembly, in the Kerkplein with equestrian statues of Pretorius Senior, the founder, and Junior, a Boer president, with the Boer president Kruger standing in another central square.

The new White settler union got its own monumental executive, on a hill on the outskirts of the city. Herbert Baker, one of the Empire’s leading architects, designed a huge, Roman-inspired building, of two wings with dome-capped towers, connected by a semi-circular colonnade, symbolizing the union of the two settler nations, and with a classical amphitheatre in front of its centre, for political rhetoric.† After World War II, Pretoria got its second landmark monument, the Voortrekker (Pioneers) Monument commemorating the Boer exodus in the 1830s from what they perceived as the too ‘negro-friendly’ British-ruled Cape Colony, and a local Boer victory over the Zulus. It is a huge (40 metres tall, wide and deep) granite building with references to Egyptian temples as well as the Halicarnassus Mausoleum, surrounded by fifty-four ox-wagons in stone, and containing a Heroes’ Hall and a Cenotaph Hall.

Pretoria was a White Afrikaner city, although by 1950, 132,000 ‘Europeans’ were served by 25,000 native domestic servants.²³ In 1994, however, the racist settler state crumbled and South Africa mutated into a democratic ex-colonial state, an epochal popular moment to which we shall return below.

Iberian Secessions

The ethno-cultural context and the political process of Latin American nation-states seceding from their Hispanic and Lusitanian motherlands are quite varied. However, in contrast to the states of the British secession, their new nation-state capitals are all former imperial centres. This reflects a different pattern of settlement, more directly empire-organized – like, later, British India and French West and Central Africa. Adventurers, of course, abounded: from the original Spanish South American conquistadors to their explorers of North America and the Brazilian bandeirantes going west, but religious dissenters, racist purists (like the Boers) and convicts were marginal and/or discrete.

Iberian colonization was urban-based. The first thing the conquistadors did after conquering a territory was to found a city. The cities of Hispanic America were laid out according to the rules of the imperial Leyes de Indias of 1573, in a grid pattern with four straight streets radiating from a central Plaza Mayor. After the plaza, the main buildings should start with the church or monastery – close to but preferably not directly in the plaza, rather by an access of its own – and then the royal house of power, according to the city’s rank in the imperial hierarchy, and the cabildo (municipal council). The sites around the main plaza should not be left to private individuals but preserved for the state and the Church, though merchants’ houses and stalls could be allowed. They were often used for a bishop’s palace and sometimes for an office of the Inquisition. The founder’s mansion had a right to be around and other principal settlers could be allocated central plots, but for the rest, settlers’ sites were allocated by lot. The Plaza Mayor, also known as Plaza de Armas (as a parade ground), was usually the central market, with rows of shops and stalls; nearby there should be military barracks, a hospital and a prison.²⁴

Brazilian urbanism was originally less centrally regulated, and Rio de Janeiro, although of sixteenth-century vintage, had been the colonial capital for only half a century when the Napoleonic Wars in Europe instigated the national issue in Ibero-America.

However, while there was an important urban continuity, national independence in Hispanic America was established through very convoluted politics and only after protracted, devastating wars. The process started with the fall of the imperial monarchy at home, through a forced abdication of the Bourbon king and a Bonapartist usurpation of the throne. But Napoleon’s reach never crossed the Atlantic, except for the Caribbean islands. From the Americas the events must have appeared confusing as well as disturbing.

In August of 1808 a pack of issues of the Gaceta de Madrid arrived in Quito, telling, at the same time, of the uprising at Aranjuez, Spain, through which the prime minister of King Carlos IV had been fired and his son Fernando VII ascended to the throne; the son’s abdication in favour of his father; the latter’s transfer of the Crown to Joseph Bonaparte; the French occupation; and the Spanish insurrection against it.^*

Legitimate imperial rule was suspended. In this situation the municipal councils, the cabildos of the major cities, came to the fore. National independence was not yet in the mainstream. Cabildo power ranged from electing a new viceroy in Mexico to ‘revolutionary councils’ (juntas) claiming temporary governmental power in the name of the legitimate king.† Hispanic America thereby became implicated in the convoluted vicissitudes of Spanish politics for the next twenty years. Anti- and post-Napoleonic Spanish politics added another conflictual dimension: liberalism or absolutism?

The first moves toward independence in Hispanic America began in 1808, upon news of the lapse of a legitimate monarchy. The final decisive battle against the Spanish imperial army took place in Ayacucho, Peru, sixteen years later. Callao, the port city of vice-regal Lima, surrendered only in January 1826. In Mexico the wars of independence started in 1810, under the leadership of a priest, Miguel Hidalgo, and succeeded only in 1821 under a defected imperial general, Agustín de Iturbide. The Mexican vice-regal capital was not a centre of the strivings and struggles.

The two decades of almost incessant sub-continentally inter-connected wars laid waste to much of American society and fatally fractured its military and political elites, issuing into decades of post-independence coups and civil wars. By 1855, Mexico, for instance, had had fifty governments in thirty-four years of independence, eleven of those governments headed by General Antonio López de Santa Anna, a burlesque, tragic-comic figure who lost Texas, California and the other north-western territories to the United States.^*

These wars did not destroy, or even much damage, the major cities. Earthquakes, such as in Lima, were much more destructive. Urban colonial continuity was not broken, but the political turmoil delayed the nationalization of the colonial capitals.

The ethnic configurations and conflicts characteristic of settler states differed in the Iberian countries from the British ones, in particular before the later waves of mass immigration. Whereas the British mainstream was dichotomous – either you are 100 percent White or you are non-White – the Iberian view and practice was hierarchical: White, less White, a little White, non-White. There were African slaves and ex-slaves in Hispanic America, but not that many, and in some areas, like Uruguay, they were killed off as cannon fodder in the independence wars. Surviving Afrodescendentes, as they are now called, were usually barred from Hispanic American citizenship, like in the United States before the Civil War. The most significant groups were Spanish-born peninsulares (or, pejoratively, gachupines), American-born (more or less) White Creoles, Mestizos and Indians. Centuries of ethnic intercourse had made Hispanic America a third Mestizo, a fifth White, half Indian and 4 per cent Black.†

The size and the cultural weight of the Native population in Hispanic America induced some respect among the colonial conquerors, particularly in Peru, and most of the new nation-states took them into account. In both Mexico and Peru, independence meant an abolition of the special legal status of Indians – subordinate but also protected and locally autonomous – into national citizenship.

Hispanic American independence, and Mexican independence in particular, was not exactly a straight settler secession. The popular nationalist movement in Mexico was launched by two rural priests, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla and José María Morelos, one Creole, the other Mestizo, under the banner of the dark-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe and to the call of ‘death to the gachupines’. In the final Act of Independence (of 1821), reference is made to ‘the Mexican nation, which for three hundred years [i.e., since the colonial conquest] has had neither its own will nor free use of its voice’.* The Mestizos were, of course, descendants of the settlers and part of the settlements created by the conquering Europeans, societies very different from colonized indigenous communities, in the Americas as well as in Africa and Asia. But mestizaje has been a very important part of Mexican national rhetoric, imagery and urban iconography, at least until World War II.†

Brazil was part of the American slavery belt (from Washington to Rio de Janeiro), abolishing slavery only in 1888. However, it operated Black and White relations in a hierarchical Iberian way, meaning that if you were a light-skinned, non-enslaved mulatto/a, you were on your way up.

Mexico City, built on the Aztec metropolis Tenochtitlán, was the prime city of Hispanic America. On the eve of the beginning of the wars for independence, the city had about 135,000 inhabitants, the largest of the hemisphere. Half of them were White, a fourth Indian, a fifth Mestizo and some 10,000 were what was then called ‘mulattos’. It was a uniformly planned city of baroque palaces, surrounded by artisanal and shopkeepers’ neighbourhoods with an Indian periphery.^* Its enormous, austere, horizontal sixteenth-century Vice-Regal Palace was the grandest building of the colonial Americas, 197 metres long. To its right side on the Plaza Mayor was the exuberantly baroque cathedral. Mexico was the capital of New Spain, the richest and the most unequal of the Indias, as the Americas were called in imperial Spain.²⁵

The palace later became the National Palace, originally housing the two legislative chambers and the ministries as well as the president. Now it functions partly as a museum, with great Diego Rivera murals of national history, and occasionally as a ceremonial public building. The presidential residence, after some time in Chapultepec Castle, has been located somewhat off-centre since the mid-1930s. The cathedral is still in use.

The large plaza in front of these buildings was once intended to house a grand independence monument, at the equestrian site of the Spanish King Carlos IV. This was an initiative of the perennially unlucky Santa Anna in 1843. In the end there was no financing and no power to complete it; only the pedestal or zócalo was completed. But the name has stuck: the central public place of current Mexico, the central gathering place of all protest rallies and national celebrations, is the Zócalo. There is no national monument there, only a big flagpole flying a gigantic national banner.

However, the true nationalization of Mexico City came later, with a national liberal period known as the Reforma, after Mexico defeated a bizarre European imperial adventure by Napoleon III to install a Habsburg prince as Emperor of Mexico on the basis of unpaid Mexican debt. The national iconography was laid out in a monumental programme of the late nineteenth century along the Paseo de la Reforma (previously del Emperador/Emperatriz), running northeast from the huge castle park at Chapultepec Castle. The iconographic cast included a large roster of liberal and classical national politicians, military men and intellectuals, with three major stars: Miguel Hidalgo, ‘Father of the Nation’ at the feet of the Column of Independence, topped by Winged Victoria, later known as the Angel of Independence; second, the last Aztec king, Cuauhtémoc – as a majestic statue, but with a bas-relief depicting his torture by the Spanish; and finally Cristóbal Colón (Columbus) as a peaceful navigator bringing Christianity to the Americas. Mexico does not monumentalize its conqueror, Hernán Cortés. Also standing by an abstract neoclassical semi-circle, is the great, diminutive (137 centimetres, or about 4 feet 6 inches) liberal president during the years around the French imperialist interlude, Benito Juárez, to my knowledge the first Indian president in the Americas.*

Mexico City is one of the best cities to see the historical layers of urban formation. There is the Aztec and Mexican capital, the lacustrine layout of which can still be enjoyed in the southern lake area of Xochimilco, viewed from the large, visible archaeological excavations, from the central Templo Mayor to the Plaza of the Three Cultures, and experienced through the deep knowledge on display in the most stunning anthropological museum of the world. Imperial splendour is centred on the Zócalo, where the colossally horizontal Vice-Regal Palace was given a third floor by President Plutarco Elías Calles in the 1920s. Further north, alongside the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Basilica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, dedicated to the patron saint of Mexico, a huge new modernist one was added in the 1970s. Mexican nationalism, a third layer of the city, did not find its urban and iconographic form until the last decades of the nineteenth and the first of the twentieth century, under the liberal quasi-dictator Porfirio Díaz. This was when Paseo de la Reforma was made the parade street of the city and when the Avenida de los Insurgentes, referring to the classical nationalist rebels, was laid out as the main north-south thoroughfare of the city – originally as Avenida del Centenario, reflecting the focus on upgrading the capital for the coming centenary of 1910.

The revolution of 1910–17 is another stratum of Mexican urban geology. It started under the modest slogan of ‘Effective suffrage and no reelection’ – reflecting the particular political problematic of the settler nations: the main issue is not, as in Europe, ‘What rights should the people have?’ but ‘Who are the people?’ as well as respect for their rights. Nevertheless, it became the most epic story of the twentieth-century Americas. In today’s Mexico City, the most original enduring visible effects are perhaps the indoor public murals of Diego Rivera and José Orozco, the outdoor ones of the Políforo Siqueiros of culture and Juan O’Gorman’s at the Central University Library. Furthermore, they also include a recycling of an unfinished parliament building into a (sepulchral) Monument to the Revolution and the Petroleum Fountain, commemorating the nationalization of oil in the 1930s by President Lázaro Cárdenas.

However, it was also after the revolution, including during its most radical period in the 1930s, that Mexico got (most of) its current polarized pattern of neighbourhoods, segregated between, on one hand, ‘stupendous splendour’ in California Colonial style, and, on the other, colonias proletarias without potable water, sewage or paved streets, both built by private developers. Mexico City expanded in a particular way, through new urban neighbourhoods, colonias, sometimes mixing upper-class mansions with middle-class apartment buildings, but seldom mixing the middle and popular classes. Decent working-class housing came onto the public agenda, but there were too few resources and too little political energy devoted to it for much of an impact.²⁶

Conservative, liberal, revolutionary – Mexico has always been an executive country. After their early location in the national executive palace, the legislative chambers were rehoused in modest colonial palaces in the city centre. With the Centenario festivities in mind, the Porfiorato regime launched a project for a new, more grandiose Legislative Palace. The revolution put a stop to the building. Only in the 2000s did the Senate build itself a proper building.

Under Cárdenas, capital accumulation was largely restricted to private residential land and building. After World War II, capital power became more public, signalled in 1956 by the Torre Latinoamericana, at the time Latin America’s tallest building (built for an insurance company). The most recent globalist layer of Mexico City will be treated in the ‘Global Moment’ chapter below.

Lima was the second vice-regal capital of Hispanic America; its late-eighteenth-century population of 64,000 was less than half of Mexico’s. Spanish Lima was intensely royalist – ‘the City of Kings’ – and Catholic, full of religious buildings and street processions, ‘an immense monastery, of both sexes’, as one commentator wrote in the seventeenth century;²⁷ another, in the early nineteenth century, found it misty with incense. It was here that the empire had its ultimate core of loyalists, led by a forceful viceroy. It also had a White and Mestizo population fearful of Indian rebellion, which had materialized as a large-scale event during the late eighteenth century. A significant minority of the city’s inhabitants sailed off with the last Spanish troops. On the other hand, like the Mexican Creoles, the Peruvian Creoles included their pre-Hispanic culture and royalty in their pedigree. Colonial Lima was painted in Indian costume and monarchical chronologies were created, starting with Inca rulers and continuing with Spanish kings. An Indian nobility had been re-established, educated by Jesuits and living in the city.^*

Peru had no independence heroes of its own, and independence was first proclaimed by José de San Martín in 1821, at the head of an army originating in Argentina, and finally won by Simón Bolívar, arriving in Ayacucho in December 1824 with an army from Colombia. Social change was slow after independence, with both African slavery and Indian tribute – in spite of San Martín’s proclamation that the Indians were Peruvians – remaining in force for some time. Some of the mid-nineteenth-century national republican changes to Lima were toponymic, substituting national geographic names for religious ones in the centre.²⁸

When a national monumentality programme was initiated in the late 1850s, financed by the short guano boom, it featured first Bolívar, in Plaza Bolívar (formerly the Plaza de la Inquisición) in front of a Congress built earlier, and Columbus (Colón). San Martín returned as a monumental hero only for the centenary of 1921.

After the end of the guano boom and a disastrous war against Chile, followed in the late nineteenth century by a recovery under an ‘aristocratic republic’, urban development took off during the Oncenio, the eleven years of the authoritarian, more middle-class presidency of Augusto Leguía. Wide avenues were opened up, named after the president and progress; sewage and piped water were installed (by a US company). The centre of the city began to move to a new, neoclassical Plaza San Martín, with the Liberator on horseback above a colossal marble pedestal, and an international luxury hotel, Bolívar. The country finally got a Legislative Palace, a national pantheon (out of a converted church), an Inca Museum of Archaeology and, off centre stage, a somewhat downsized replica of the huge Brussels Palace of Justice. The bourgeoisie showed off its wealth and power in imposing corporate buildings, such as those of El Comercio newspaper and the insurance company Rimac (named after the river of the city), and in their ostentatious elite clubs, the Nacional in Plaza San Martín and the Unión in the Plaza Mayor. The buildings around the latter were rebuilt or repaired from the 1920s to the 1940s (after the 1940 earthquake), including two beautiful neocolonial buildings in yellow sandstone, with loggias and Moorish carved wooden balconies (the City Hall and the Union Club), as well as the cathedral, a boastful colonial-style Archbishop’s Palace and a neo-Baroque Palace of the President.*

An extensive iconographic programme was launched in connection with the centenaries of 1921 (the Republic) and 1924 (the decisive battle against the Spanish). As so often in the settler capitals, alongside national founders and heroes it included a number of gifts from ethnic immigrant communities. In Lima’s case the gifts included the ‘Worker’ sculpture by Constantin Meunier from the Belgians, a statue of the Inca Manco Cápac from the Japanese and a museum of Italian art from the Italians. The Washington monument and square signalled the president’s admiration of the United States and his eagerness to attract US capital.²⁹ As part of a Hispanist conservative reaction, an equestrian statue of Francisco Pizarro, the conqueror of Peru and the founder of the colonial city, was placed in the middle of the Plaza Mayor in 1935.

Originally, the vice-royalty of Peru included all South American Hispanic America – and the Philippines – but in the late eighteenth century, the Spanish crown created two new vice-royalties: New Granada, centred on Santa Fe de Bogotá and comprising today’s Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador; and La Plata, with Buenos Aires as its capital, including today’s Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia. In 1810 the two new vice-regal capitals were in the hands of new revolutionary powers, although not yet of independent nation-states.

National Buenos Aires got a uniquely rapid demographic start, thriving on its trade with Britain and the revenue from its customs. Under the slogan ‘to govern is to populate’, Argentina was actively promoting a policy of building a nation by immigration. The city population, which by independence in 1816 was 46,000, had by the census of 1869 increased to 187,000, half of it foreign-born.³⁰ However, the political structure of the nation remained violently contested until 1880, when a certain balance between the coast and the interior was established by separating the city of Buenos Aires, as a federal entity, from the big (and also rich) province of Buenos Aires.

Remodelling of the Gran Aldea (big village) started in the 1860s, when the modest vice-regal fort was renovated, expanded and painted pink, which gave the presidential office the name it still holds today, Casa Rosada. The building originally included both ministries and legislature. From the 1870s, Florida became the street of porteño elegance. However, the main reshaping took place after 1880, directed by a local follower of Baron Haussman, Torcuato de Alvear, as presidentially appointed intendente of the city. Under him, the modern political centres were laid out: the Plaza de Mayo in front of the Casa Rosada, by uniting the previous Plaza 25 de Mayo (after the revolution of 1810, before that the Plaza Mayor) and Plaza Victoria, and by opening up the Avenida de Mayo, leading up to a Washington-like Congress.

In the decades around 1900, the population of Buenos Aires exploded, from 187,000 in 1869 to 664,000 in 1895 and to 1,576,000 in 1914, half of whom were foreigners.³¹ Unsurprisingly, Buenos Aires was not settling down as a successful and prosperous national capital. The centenary festivities of 1910 were held under a state of siege in the midst of massive strikes (which were repressed) and targeted killings by anarchists.³² The city was dominated by an immensely rich oligarchy of commercial landlords-cum-merchants, who built neo-Baroque palaces for themselves around Plaza San Martín of a size and opulence this writer has not seen since the Saint Petersburg of Catherine II. At the other end of housing were the notorious conventillos, tenement houses, where families lived in single four-by-four-metre rooms without kitchens and mostly without running water.³³ The repressed labour movement had strong, militant anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist currents.

Like similar celebrations everywhere in Latin America, the centenary in Buenos Aires was an occasion of ambitious efforts at urbanistic upscaling and iconic celebration. Settler culture got a new centre: the opera and music theatre Teatro Colón, of hemispheric fame. The various immigrant communities – German, French, Italian, Spanish and others – organized monumental tributes to the capital of their new homeland, though only the French managed to get theirs ready in time.³⁴ The city also commissioned a sculptural ensemble called ‘Song to Labour’, but put it up only afterwards, in 1921. It shows a curious group of naked workers seemingly pulling a big stone, with great effort and ending in success.³⁵ Apparently, it is still a rallying point on May Day. Like Meunier’s ‘Monument to Labour’ in Brussels (now virtually abandoned), the Buenos Aires ‘Song to Labour’ has no class or movement referent, but its triumphant end pose points to competitive sports instead of the serene piety of Meunier’s work.

After World War I, Buenos Aires got a more middle-class character, politically expressed by the Radical Civic Union, a middle-class politics without the urban impact of the coeval Lequía government in Lima. The ostentatious ancien régime palaces of the oligarchy have become public buildings, from the foreign ministry to an officers’ club. But Argentina never became a hegemonic middle-class society, with two political parties competing peacefully within a narrow, pre-defined field. The radical middle class and the privileged old right had already fallen out by 1930, and the Radical government was ousted by a military coup. The ensuing ‘Infamous Decade’ of military rule and massively fraudulent ‘elections’ developed several ‘pharaonic’ projects for Buenos Aires, most of them unrealized. Its major urban footprint was the opening of ‘the broadest avenue in the world’, the Avenida 9 de Julio, and its gigantic obelisk for the quadricentennial of the foundation of the city in 1536.³⁶

To Buenos Aires’s very particular popular moment, in the form of post–World War II Peronism, and to its more conventional global moment, we shall return below.

Bogotá, the fourth vice-regal capital of Hispanic America, was a provincial town in a mountainous region with bad communications in an economically little developed realm between the two centres of the empire. Towards the end of the eighteenth century the city had no more than 13,000 inhabitants. However, it had two religious colleges of higher learning – the national congresses later assembled in the chapel of the ex-Jesuit college – as well as a small Enlightenment milieu, and played a major part in the official botanical exploration of South America. The city has been referred to as ‘the Athens of the South’.

Post-colonial Colombia had a difficult birth and got its major outline only in 1830, after Ecuador and Venezuela broke away from Gran Colombia (formerly New Granada). In the nineteenth century the country was riven by eight nationwide civil wars, fourteen local wars and two international wars. Bogotá developed slowly in violent, conservative aristocratic Colombia. By mid-century, central Bogotá was still without sewers, piped water or paved streets.³⁷ It had about the same number of inhabitants, 40,000, in the 1870s as it did at the final establishment of Colombia in 1830.^* It became a major city only in the twentieth century, when its growth rate was explosive. From 1905 to l951 its population increased more than sevenfold, and from 1951 until 2016 its population has multiplied ten times, reaching about eight million.³⁸ Cundinamarca, the provice around Bogotá, has been part of the coffee boom since the late nineteenth century. Later Bogotá became the industrial and the financial as well as the political capital of the country, and for all its violence, now under some control, it has offered escape from the persistent mass violence in the countryside. It is spread out on a high plateau (more than 2,500 metres above sea level), with mountains to the east. Apart from its official buildings, Rogelio Salmona’s modernist redbrick architecture and the occasional colonial construction, its business centres, its small British-looking enclaves, and the gated and/or guarded upper-middle-class apartment complexes in the northeast, Bogotá today looks like a vast agglomeration of small towns from the 1950s, comprising two- or three-storeyed, more or (usually) less rundown buildings. Kennedy, a populous lower-middle-class area, bears witness to the fading but enduring US alignment. The large popular district in the south, Ciudad Bolívar, is not a slum, and testifies to collective urban mobility. But at the Bogotá city boundary all urban services in the metropolitan area end.

The power centre is still around the colonial Plaza Mayor (now Bolívar), but its buildings have had to be rebuilt several times due to earthquakes and fires, and the, not very impressive, cathedral is the only point of historical stability. Unplanned changes had already started in 1827 when the Vice-Regal Palace was destroyed by an earthquake, inaugurating a century and a half of temporary presidential accommodation. The current one was inaugurated in 1979, an upgrading of a building from 1908 on the site of the house of the great Colombian Enlightenment figure Antonio Nariño. The presidential Casa Nariño is behind, and slightly below, the Capitolio (Congress), initiated in 1846 and completed in 1926, a heavy neoclassical construction without a cupola, which has a seemingly commanding presence in the plaza. In front is the more modern Palace of Justice, twice severely damaged by urban violence, in 1948 and in 1985. On one side of the Plaza is the rather austere cathedral and the archbishop’s palace, and on the other is the City Hall, a long, horizontal French nineteenth-century-style building from the early twentieth century, originally a commercial market.

Except for some liberal and anti-clerical moments, when some buildings of the rich Church were nationalized and secularized – like in Lisbon and Madrid – Colombia has been a predominantly conservative nation, and as late as the early twentieth century the cathedral was Bogotá’s agora of political discussion.³⁹ Its old but circumscribed Enlightenment tradition has been reproduced, though, for instance in the White City (University City) of the 1930s, followed by a series of universities after World War II. The country’s famous modernist architect, the late Rogelio Salmona, has in current times been commissioned to provide the city with several impressive buildings of cultural institutions: for instance, the Virgilio Barco Library, a modern kind of palace of learning, and the characteristically inviting Centro Cultural Gabriel García Márquez, close to Plaza Bolívar.

In a way unique for Latin America, political conflict in Colombia has been largely structured around a two-party system of liberals and conservatives, both led by wealthy oligarchs, going back to the 1820s, with allegiances transmitted through family inheritance to a not insignificant extent until today. Long civil wars have continued to plague the country in the twentieth century, usually won by the conservatives. The communist FARC guerrillas grew, in 1964, out of remnants of the liberal guerrillas in the Violencia, with capital V, which erupted after the assassination of the progressive and non-elite Liberal presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948.

In Bogotá the murder caused the most massive and violent urban riots in the history of the Americas. Among the buildings destroyed were the Palace of Justice and the central railway station, which led to the end of railways in Colombia. Another effect of the Bogotazo was the flight of the middle and upper classes from the city centre, mainly to the northeast of the city and to the Andean slopes. This means that a few blocks from the political centre of the country are some of the most dangerous, dilapidated streets of the city, the worst one known as the Bronx.* A visitor to the Plaza Bolívar today is reminded of the destruction of the Palace of Justice in 1985, in a mysterious, non-revolutionary guerrilla operation crushed by military storming, killing not only the guerrilleros but also the judges of the Supreme Court.†

Chile was part of imperial Peru, so Santiago was no vice-regal city but the seat of the general-captaincy of Chile and of a high court, a Real Audiencia. By Independence, in 1817, it was a rather poor outback area of the Iberian settlement. However, Chile and its capital can claim some special interest, because it was arguably the first Hispanic American nation-state to consolidate after the convulsive secession, and in routing the Peruvian-Bolivian alliance in the War of the Pacific (1879–81) it demonstrated its capacity to punch above its weight.

The national consolidation was conservative, oligarchic and Catholic, and coalesced in the 1830s after the liberal liberator–hero (Bernardo O’Higgins, Chilean-born of Irish descent, illegitimate son of a Peruvian viceroy) had been forced to abdicate in 1823. The social basis was the rich landowners and the import/export businessmen of the Central Valley, soon to be sustained by huge mining rents.* This regime was remarkable, for its time and place, for two main reasons. First, it created an institutionalized polity with regular parliamentary and presidential elections (‘managed’ from above, true, by the executive). Second, it succeeded, throughout the nineteenth century – not in the twentieth – in subordinating the military to civilian rule.†

Like all the Hispanic American capitals (except Buenos Aires and Montevideo), Santiago is not a port city. It was founded on the insignificant Mapocho River in 1541, for half a century sharing its central role of the ‘Nuevo Extremo’ with Concepción a good 400 kilometres to the south. In 1800 it had something like 18,000 inhabitants, swelling to 50,000 by the end of the independence wars. Chile was not a big receiver of immigrants, but the country urbanized rapidly. In 1865 the capital had a population of 115,000, in 1900 of 300,000, and it became a city of a million in 1941.⁴⁰

Santiago was built according to the imperial rules around its Plaza de Armas from the 1540s on, but the public architecture bequeathed to the new nation was late-born, from the last half-century of the empire. The cathedral, the fifth church on its site, was from the mid-eighteenth century, the city hall from 1789. The court, which also housed the captain-general, was late eighteenth century. Most inherited public buildings were designed by an Italian architect, Joaquín Toesca, or his disciples. Toesca then built the more impressive La Moneda Palace some blocks southwest of the Plaza de Armas, which was not only a mint but also included bureaucratic offices, a bodega and a chapel.⁴¹ After first using the Royal Court Palace, Chilean presidents moved into La Moneda in the 1850s.

The conservative character of the state was expressed in the prominent mid-nineteenth-century Archbishop’s Palace in the Plaza de Armas and, above all, in the iconographic sequences of public homage. The first national monument, decided in 1837 and inaugurated in 1860, celebrated Diego Portales, the businessman who – as minister of the interior, external relations and war and the navy – was the strongman of the state-formative regime of the 1830s. The liberal Bernardo O’Higgins, later remembered as the padre de la patria (father of the fatherland), died in exile in Peru and was officially rehabilitated only in the late 1860s. In 1872 he got a prominent equestrian statue, sixteen years after a monument to the commander who deposed him.⁴²

The institutionalist orientation of the Chilean state has an interesting correspondence to the early infrastructural priorities of capital-city planning, pushed primarily by liberals like O’Higgins and, in the 1870s, Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna. The former laid out the first part of the new main street of Santiago, the Alameda, as an agora-promenade, with benches, fountains, cafés and provisions for civic information. It has been extended, widened and given a due official name which nobody uses: Avenida Libertador Bernardo O’Higgins. It runs straight east-west but functions more like Vienna’s Ringstrasse than the Champs-Élysées, through its public institutional buildings, including the state and the Catholic universities, the military headquarters and the Presidential Palace, with the government complex of the early-1930s Civic Quarter around it and the Citizenry Square in front of it.

Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna is the most famous of Santiago planners; he governed only for three years, but his immediate successors continued his work.* He was the first of the great Latin American city planners inspired by Baron Haussmann, followed by Alvear in Buenos Aires, Francisco Pereira Passos in Rio and others. In his concern with streets, promenades and public space, Vicuña Mackenna was an eloquent, focused, nineteenth-century republican modernist – before twentieth-century CIAM modernists wanted to turn city streets into automobile highways: ‘After his house, where he spends a third of his life, nothing interests man more than the street, where he passes two-thirds of his life’.⁴³ In today’s Santiago, Vicuña Mackenna’s imprint is most visible in the Cerro Santa Lucía, a central rocky hill turned into a much-beloved public promenade space with a historical scenography of monuments. His plan also included a vast modern sewage system.

The conquistador and city founder, Pedro de Valdivia, is in the Plaza de Armas, but his statue was an early 1960s gift of Francoist Spain. Conservative Chileans seem to have had a somewhat less subservient stance to the motherland than their Colombian compadres. The indigenous issue is still a wound kept open by the militant Mapuche people of the south, but like the settlements of British secession, post-dictatorial Chile came to recognize the other side of the conquest in a monument to the indigenous peoples in 1992.

There is no space here to follow the establishment of all the other Hispanic American capitals, from the colonial beauty of central Quito to the post–World War II Yankeefied ugliness of Caracas. I shall return to some of them in the context of popular and global moments, and I shall enter into Havana in connection with the urban coming of Communism. Before leaving the capitals of the Hispanic secession, we should note an exception to the rule of national capitals rising from previous imperial centres: the legal centre of Upper Peru, as today’s Bolivia was then called, was Chuquisaca, the seat of the Royal Audiencia (Court) of Charcas, not far from the silver wealth of Potosí, once the largest city. Under the name of Sucre, after one of Bolívar’s most able commanders, it became the capital of Bolivia. It still has a special constitutional status and was used for the Constituent Assembly of 2007, but with mineral wealth shifting from silver to tin further north, and after a regionally fractured civil war, the Bolivian capital was in the 1890s relocated to La Paz, also an old American city, founded in 1548.

The capital foundations of Brazil are not only 120 to 150 years apart, they were at the opposite ends of their own epochs. Rio de Janeiro started out in 1808 as the temporary dynastic capital of a European king in exile, the Portuguese king fleeing from the Napoleonic armies in a convoy of the British Royal Navy. Under his son, Brazil was in 1822 proclaimed a monarchical nation-state, based on slave labour and presided over by a titled aristocracy. In other words, Rio was the capital of the most traditionalist of all the settler secessions, British and Iberian. In 1960, the government of Brazil moved to Brasília – at that time, and even today, the most modernist capital city ever built. On both cities there are extensive, separate literatures which need no repetition here. What we have to do is to try to capture their manifestation of national power and, without dabbling too far into the dense floresta of Brazilian history, the bridge between these two polarized national moments.

Rio was never much of a state vitrine. Unlike Salvador/Bahia in the northeast, Rio was not built as a colonial capital, but as a fortified regional outpost. With the shift of the gravitation of the Brazilian export economy, it was made the capital in 1763. In 1799, the city had 43,000 inhabitants, a fifth of them slaves. The arrival of the Portuguese royal court, about 8,000 people, was an enormous boost, and by the time of independence the city had a population around 70,000, half of them slaves or domestic servants.⁴⁴ The king was taken aback by the appalling quarters of the governor-general, in a swampy, insect-infested area by the harbour. Some extensions were made and another floor added, but the shabbiness and the climate stayed. A partial solution was a hilltop summer mansion donated by a rich merchant. This set something of a Rio pattern of executive buildings. After the end of the monarchy the President was housed in two aristocratic palaces bought by the state, first the Itamaraty Palace (later Foreign Office) and the Catete Palace. The republican Constituent Assembly in 1891 assembled in Quinta da Boa Vista, the mansion once given to the king. Before the Chamber of Deputies got its semi-neoclassical building in the late 1920s, it was located in the Monroe Palace, initiated as the overloaded Beaux-Arts Brazilian pavilion at the Saint Louis World’s Fair of 1904, then shipped back to Rio and reassembled under the name of the US president for the occasion of the Pan-American Conference before being recycled as a national Congress building.

Between the Congress of Vienna and Brazilian independence, Rio was the official capital of the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves, and in late 1815 a set of French artists and architects, easily available because they were associated with the now fallen Napoleonic Empire, were invited to Rio. The architect Auguste-Henri-Victor Grandjean de Montigny had the most impact, in spite of the fact that most of his projects were never carried out; he did build and found the first school of architects in the Americas.⁴⁵

Under its two emperors, Rio grew, educated itself, grappled with its tropical diseases and gradually evolved towards a wage society; slave trading was abolished in 1850 and slavery itself in 1888, but neither emperor had much interest in projecting imperial power. The republic (from 1889), on the other hand, became increasingly aware of regional competition from Buenos Aires, for immigrants as well as for international capital and prestige.

In the first decade of the twentieth century Rio joined the late-nineteenth-century Haussmann admirers from Mexico to Buenos Aires in a major overhaul of the central city and sanitary system. In Rio the key figure was the prefect Francisco Pereira Passos. Rio’s equivalent to the Avenida de Mayo was the Avenida Central, a thoroughfare running Southeast from the centre and opened in 1906 after a series of brutal demolitions and evictions. In 1912 its name was changed to the current Avenida Rio Branco, in memory of a major political figure of the dying Brazilian aristocracy.

Like its Hispanic American sisters, Rio substituted a variety of individual – but all historical – architectural styles for the strict uniformity of the Parisian boulevards. It issued in a new cultural district with a fine arts school, national library, the Municipal Theatre (paying homage to the Parisian Palais Garnier) and Cinelândia, a cinema quarter (in 1908!). Politics was somewhat secondary, but not absent. What started being built as the Archbishop’s Palace became the Supreme Court upon completion; the Monroe Palace was placed here; the square in front of the Municipal Theatre was dedicated to and monumentalized by the second president, Floriano ‘Iron Marshal’ Peixoto, and to the right of the theatre, the Municipal Council was soon erected.⁴⁶

The presidential capital-city programme which Pereira Passos was appointed to implement focused on immigration and capital, not on tourism.⁴⁷ But in 1912 Sugarloaf Mountain became accessible by cable car, and in 1917 construction started on the Copacabana Palace Hotel, emulating the Negresco Hotel in Nice.

At midnight on 21 April 1960, a bell rang in Brasília, the same bell which in 1792 had rung the execution of Tiradentes, the first fighter for the independence of Brazil. Now it announced the ceremonial inauguration of the new capital of the nation. The city was illuminated, a message from Pope John XXIII was read and a religious communion and benediction of the city were given.⁴⁸

This was not secularized Europe, but the elaborate thirty-six-hour ritual should not let us forget that what was inaugurated was an avant-garde of capitals. The city itself was planned by Lúcio Costa as a ‘sign of the cross’,⁴⁹ and the initiation of construction in 1957 was celebrated by a Mass on the same day as the Mass Pedro Álvares Cabral organized in 1500 to celebrate his discovery of Brazil.*

The contrast between the tropical languor of Rio and the dashing daring of Brasília is stunning. How did the same country manage to move from one to the other in little more than half a century?

The twentieth century unleashed a new economic dynamic of Brazil, away from the land-rent economy of slave-worked plantations and mines to entrepreneurial coffee cultivation and processing, using wage-labour and investing in manufacturing. This dynamic became increasingly concentrated in São Paulo. Its Avenida Paulista, opened in 1891, became the main street of the country, and its Week of Modern Art in 1922 was the launching-pad of artistic modernism in Brazil.

Brazil never lived by the frontier myth of the United States, but it was, like the US, a country of continental proportions with the mystique of unexplored wilderness. Parts of the Brazilian elite developed a notion of cultivating and civilizing the largely uninhabited interior of the country. Already in 1891 the Republican Constitution stipulated an ultimate goal of moving the capital to the interior.

Here we have a new societal dynamic and a vague geo-cultural goal. But this is not enough. The politics have to be specified, and the cult of the interior has to get a vanguardist architectural push.

The entrepreneurial Paulistas had no interest in a new capital, but they were not running the country’s politics, having been violently defeated in 1936. The political dynamic of Brazil derived from the presidencies of Getúlio Vargas (1930 to 1945 and 1951 to 1954): statist, anti-oligarchic and developmentalist. Although he was not a chosen successor, the ‘populism’ of Vargas was the political formation and base for Juscelino Kubitschek, the president who built Brasília. It was probably not without significance that JK, as he became known, had been mayor of Belo Horizonte, itself a daring political construction of the nineteenth century as the new capital of the rich state of Minas Gerais and where JK in the early 1940s pushed radical urban modernization. Brasília was a monument to presidential developmentalism.⁵⁰

A crucial part of Brasília was Brazilian architecture. It developed early, because, as noted above, imperial Brazil initiated architectural formation in the Americas. In the 1920s Brazilian architecture started to embrace modernism. Lúcio Costa, an extra-curricular disciple of Le Corbusier, became head of the Belas Artes School in 1930. Through public commissions, modernism soon became a national style of Brazilian architecture. A world-pioneering modernist building was the Ministry of Education and Health in Rio in 1936, designed by Costa and a team including Oscar Niemeyer and the landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, also active in Brasília later. As mayor of Belo Horizonte, Kubitschek put forward Niemeyer to create a luxury tourist area in Pampulha, the most remarkable part of which is its stunningly original modernist church. US curators acknowledged the extraordinary achievements of Brazilian modernism in the exhibition Brazil Builds at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1943.⁵¹

The crucial contextual factors mentioned above coalesced, quite contingently, in Kubitschek’s 1955 presidential campaign. He was running, on the basis of the heteroclite Vargas coalition, for thirty objectives of fifty years of development in five years. Building a new capital was not among his thirty goals. Only in the course of the campaign trail did it emerge as a ‘synthesis goal’.⁵²

Kubitschek won the election, then turned naturally to his old collaborator from fifteen years back, Oscar Niemayer, who had left the directive plan (Plan Piloto) to an international competition (won with an artistic sketch by Lúcio Costa), but kept the role of main architect. Kubitschek made Brasília his life’s project, but left almost all design matters to Niemeyer and Costa while recruiting an able entrepreneur, Israel Pinheiro, to run the state construction company. The uniquely trusting relationship between the powerful Brazilian president in the midst of a large-scale national developmentalist decade (with 80 per cent growth from 1956–61) and the world’s most creative architect at that time – who was basically given a blank cheque for deploying his extraordinary creativity – created Brasília, the city of twentieth-century modernism.

What is the power message of Brasília? First of all, that Brazil is a nation committed to radical change and development – but without indicating what kind of change and development, apart from a belief in automobiles and their possession of cities.* Costa’s plan sketch was basically aesthetic, and honoured as such. Niemeyer was a card-carrying Communist and his commitment to democracy is manifested in the balance of the three powers, executive, legislative and judiciary (clearly dominated by the legislative), in Praça dos Três Poderes (‘Three Powers Plaza’), but his buildings principally display a plastic creativity, with few, if any, political indicators.

The residential area plan did include an egalitarian vision of uniform ‘super-blocks’, oriented inwards to a social life away from the streets, which were left to cars according to Le Corbusier modernism. Contrary to the explicit stratification of New Delhi or Islamabad, the residential ‘super-blocks’ of Brasília were originally intended to house government employees of all kinds, although Costa hinted at the possibility of some social ‘gradation’ by amenities. Favelas were to be avoided, even on the outskirts and in the surrounding countryside.⁵³ However, little thought was given to housing the workers from afar who were building the city. Temporary encampments were put up for them, meant to be destroyed once the capital was standing.⁵⁴ The capital was meant for government functionaries, the president insisted.⁵⁵ This was not only naïve but contradictory. Brasília was launched as a grand project of developing the almost empty interior of the country. To the extent that the project was successful, vast migrations would occur. And they did, attracted by the opportunities of the city construction and pushed by the devastating 1958 drought in the poor Northeast. Novacap, the powerful state construction company of Brasília, tried to stop the wave of desperate migrants by erecting police barriers on the access roads – but in vain.⁵⁶ A set of informal satellite towns grew on ‘invaded’ land around the city of the Plan Piloto before the latter had been inaugurated. By the end of the twentieth century, their population amounted to three fourths of the whole Federal District’s.

The naïve or myopically aesthetic vanguardism of the Brasília project could flourish under the protection of a trustful president, delegated generous wide powers by his party coalition in Congress. But the stark realities of Brazilian inequality and fragile democracy soon caught up. The succeeding short-lived presidencies of Jânio Quadros and João Goulart stalled the Brasília project and did not reside there. Then there was a military coup in 1964. It was actually the military regime which sealed the fate of Brasília, in a positive as well as a negative sense. It decided the capital issue by moving there and continuing construction. It also presided over upper-class private appropriations of most of the lakeshore, originally meant to be accessible to all. Marketizing the apartments of the designed city in addition to accelerating economic inequality made the Federal District more unequal than the country as a whole.⁵⁷ In 1970, the per capita income gap between Brasília proper and Ceilândia, the poorest of the satellite cities, was equivalent to four times the minimum wage; in 1976 it was thirty-one. In the oldest satellite city, Núcleo Bandeirante, the jump was from two to twenty-three times the minimum wage.^*

Nevertheless, half a century later, it is clear that Brasília has been a sort of success, as a thriving metropolis, a strong pole of regional economic development and a full-scale monument of architectural modernism – but also as a showpiece of Brazilian inequality.

The Capitals of Secession

It took several decades, usually more than half a century, for the capitals of the seceding settler states to get their national form. There were two reasons for this. One was the economically difficult construction of new capitals under competing political bipolarity in the new nations out of the British Empire. Pretoria was an exception to the lag, the former capital of a defeated and disappeared nation-state. The other reason was due to the travails of constituting nation-states in Hispanic America, long convulsed by civil wars. Chile was here an exception, with an early conservative establishment, strong enough to send its liberal national liberator, Bernardo O’Higgins, into exile. Rio de Janeiro could thrive on being the site of the imperial Portuguese court in exile and of the new Brazilian nation. Although the main urban municipal governments, the cabildos, of Hispanic America had initiated the national uprisings, once the nation-state was proclaimed they were, like all the secession capitals, under the thumbs of national parliaments and governments.

The new capitals imported their architectural styles from Europe, neoclassicism (in particular for public buildings) and nineteenth-century French Beaux-Arts and historicist eclecticism; neocolonial Spanish styles, as in Lima, came only later in the twentieth century. Occasionally they added a significant legislative accent, as in Washington, Bogotá, Montevideo, Brasília and Canberra, with a signal of popular power over the legislative.

But more striking is the brash assertion of national pride and power in several of the new capitals. There are the spectacular temples to Lincoln and Jefferson and the large and lavish war victory monumentality in Washington; the ANZAC Parade ground in Canberra with its seemingly endless celebrations of participations in imperial wars overseas. The late-nineteenth-century Mexican layout, in the Paseo de la Reforma, of the triumphs of liberal nationalism has no European equivalent. In Buenos Aires, the main avenues are wider and the equestrian statues are higher than anywhere in Europe. The governmental Union Building of Pretoria has no European match, nor does the monumental recentring of Lima to the new Plaza San Martín.

The White Dominion volunteers for the British imperial wars and the Hispanic paseos, statues and theatres to ‘Colón’ illustrate the reproduced ties to the motherland. Such ties were reciprocated when London in 1921 accepted the Virginia gift of Washington in Trafalgar Square, or when the Spanish government donated a ‘Moorish Arch’ to the new Leguía Avenue as a gift at the centenary of the Peruvian secession.

The specific ethnic issues of the settler capitals developed along two lines. One was the integration of the permitted immigrant communities, which proceeded quite well across enduring cultural diversity – by immigrant-language newspapers, for instance – and ethnic competition for jobs and positions. The ongoing integration in diversity was expressed in the typical ethnic-community mobilizations for gifts to the city on occasions of celebration, as well as in citywide celebrations of ethnic landmark events.

The other ethnic issue, how to relate to slavery, ex-slaves and Natives, was much more difficult. To this day, it remains a sore spot in Washington, which is half Black and since the mid-1970s under African American home rule but subject to budgetary supervision by Congress, which is mostly White and conservative. The race issue is much less articulated in Brazil than in the United States, but given the much larger proportion of the non-White population – about half, according to self-identification – it has more explosive potential, and the core of Brasília is very White. The Natives were not dying out, even in the British secessions, where they were denied civic rights. The centres of the Hispanic Empire – as well as, more explicitly, their national successors in Mexico and Peru – did recognize pre-Columbian America, in part even seeing themselves in a historical line of succession to it. However, the Native question was not just symbolic. It was also, and above all, socio-economic. The export- and foreign investment–oriented capitalist market and land and mining rent-based development did not give Natives much of an economic chance. But, while not part of the national foundation, the Natives have returned as part of a popular moment distinctive of the settler capitals.