Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

La modernización entre cafetales: San José, Costa Rica, 1880 – 1930

2009; Duke University Press; Volume: 89; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2008-108

1527-1900

Mark D. Szuchman,

Latin American Urban Studies

This is a solidly researched work dealing with a set of well-mined issues regarding urban modernization. Florencia Quesada Avendaño notes that modernization studies associated with the export boom period appear to have bypassed the historiography of Costa Rican and other Central American cities. She proposes to correct this gap in our understanding of the era between 1880 and 1930 by analyzing urban development in the Costa Rican capital of San José.San José’s development reflects the characteristics of a latecomer to the Spanish American urban landscape. More a village than a town, its foundation in 1737, late by the standards of colonial settlements, signaled its limited functions within the broader strategic visions of Spain’s empire. Tobacco and coffee would eventually provide San José with significant linkages to the Atlantic economy, but even here, the pace of economic activities was languid, and it would not be until the era of intensive coffee cultivation toward the end of the nineteenth century that officials spoke of aspirations for a new urban design and expanded municipal functions. The author employs a cultural approach to analyze the objectives of urban designers; she looks at space as a function of urbanists’ visions of the modern, Europeanized city. These included, above all, a goal of order and progress, in a sense encompassing political, socioeconomic, and physical dimensions. The ordered city would be represented by neatly compartmentalized functional regions, such as green spaces for outdoor leisure activities and administrative areas for the distribution of public services, but it would also result in residential segregation along socioeconomic lines. The distribution of technical infrastructure and municipal services followed along the fault lines of evolving residential segmentation. Urban planners delivered new services, such as water, sewerage, electricity, and urban transportation, first to the more affluent neighborhoods developing north of the city’s center, while the southern extensions, populated by the poor, would wait for many years to enjoy such benefits. A former village of easy and fluid social exchange was becoming a more differentiated urban space, stratified along new distinctions that would become permanent features of the modern city.The earliest proponents of specific modernization projects represented a technocratic vanguard, specifically hygienists. Along with technical improvements, the modern city imagined by these agents of liberalism was also the orderly city, the emblem of proper morality, mannered sociability, and the symbolic practices associated with public space, necessitating the exercise of social control. Thus, San José’s earliest modernizing visionaries combined the imagination of physicians, engineers, and politicians, all working toward the common objective of changing public habits. Quesada Avendaño emphasizes the elite’s interest in centralizing authority as the clearest demonstration of the constructed nature of public space.In the end, the principle of hegemonic power as the defining characteristic of the modern liberal state was largely absent from San José’s planning capabilities. The state showed little initiative in implementing modernizing urban projects and was hardly an actor in funding them. Unlike turn-of-the-century Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico, where the state took a leading role in infrastructural modernization projects, Costa Rica’s economy did not allow the state to lead such efforts. Instead, growth and modernization of San José depended almost entirely on private initiative and financing. The municipality only generated plans and visions, and its oversight of projects was sporadic and ineffective. The result was a series of small growth projects, a reflection of the calculated opportunity costs borne by private investors. Urban elites were the principal beneficiaries of the city’s transformation; that is, the concentration of initiatives in the hands of private speculators meant decades-long delays in comprehensive plans. Furthermore, while health specialists had been the earliest advocates of modernizing infrastructure, starting in the 1870s and 1880s, physicians and health professionals were absent from the projects as they were devised and implemented by private developers who favored northern elite neighborhoods.An especially appealing element of this work is the analysis of a significant collection of 329 images depicting the city, culled from magazines, newspapers, postcards, photographic albums, and the city’s Blue Book — published in Philadelphia, New Orleans, and Paris, and listing businesses and presenting urban images portraying a dynamic and wholesome urban environment attractive to potential investors. Most photographs depicted the city’s central business districts and the northern and northeastern residential areas of the well-heeled josefinos. Very few images depicted the poor neighborhoods concentrated in the city’s south. Most often, images were devoid of people: emphasis was placed on structures and parks. The author puts these images to very effective use. Drawing on the pathbreaking works of Robert M. Levine (Images of History: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Latin American Photographs as Documents, 1989), Peter Burke (Eyewitnessing: The Use of Images as Historical Evidence, 2001) and others, she emphasizes social space as a social product as she analyzes the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of the photographs.This is a valuable work of urban history and urbanism in an area of Latin American history long dominated by agrarian questions and lacking studies of its politically dominant cities.