Shawn William Miller. The Street Is Ours: Community, the Car, and the Nature of Public Space in Rio de Janeiro. Cambridge Latin American Studies Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Illustrations, maps. 362 pp. $120.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-108-42697-8.
Reviewed by Yuri Gama (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
Published on H-LatAm (March, 2019)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)
In The Street Is Ours: Community, the Car, and the Nature of Public Space in Rio de Janeiro, Shawn William Miller invites us for an everyday walk down memory lane in downtown Rio de Janeiro by telling the history of urban changes in the city from the mid-1800s to the late 1900s. Drawing from materials small and large, national and local, from newspapers, magazines, films, and documentaries, to songs and poems, Miller examines the cultural production of space, unveiling the negative role of the car in shaping people’s lives in the spheres of labor, socialization, commuting, and leisure. Through an environmental lens, Miller guides the reader toward a denaturalization of the street as a place born solely for the car. The street emerges as a natural resource, a common public good continually fought over. By dissecting the diverse usage of Rio’s streets by locals, the author demonstrates how people have taken this open space, divided between the asphalt and the sidewalk, for granted.
Explaining how residents constantly occupied the streets of Rio and illustrating how the car eliminated or reduced these activities, Miller demonstrates how the car paved its own way within cities as automobile accidents killed ever more people. Although Miller’s criticisms of the car sometimes overshadow his other arguments, his work also asserts that the emergence of automobiles has caused streets to become a space of limited cultural utility and meaning. Cars paved and solidified their space in cities, and places and people resisted their devastating expansion. Laws imposed speed limits, gated communities reduced space for cars, and urbanists along with pedestrians constructed and protected plazas and squares in attempts to tame the car’s power. Miller affirms that, even though this resistance was in the end unable to stop a comprehensive change of the city, “many never gave up on the idea that the street belongs to everyone, or that the street is ours, a popular assertion that preceded the car but that had become a militant national philosophy by 1920” (p. 18). Despite belonging to elites and symbolizing modern political and social powers, cars suffered setbacks as communities used multiple tools to impede their progress.
The Street Is Ours is divided into seven chapters in which each section is titled after a street or a public space of downtown Rio. Each of these places serves as a snapshot to understand the push and pull between urban renewal, the automobile, and street dwellers. Reading stories of these places, one finds the importance of public spaces in changing the sounds of the city, transforming the health of residents, and influencing how people spent their leisure time. Even though the automobile did not drive all the city’s changes, the most important features of the city were affected by the car industry. A close analysis of the mundane and daily practices, such as neighborly gossip, street kiosk socialization, or even public demonstrations of affection, shows how the use of the downtown public space was reduced as the car gained centrality in everyday life. By emphasizing the importance of the automobile in Rio’s modernization, The Street Is Ours is in dialogue with such books as Joel Wolfe’s Autos and Progress: The Brazilian Search for Modernity (2010). However, unlike Wolfe, who argues that automobility helped regional integration and forged national unity, Miller focuses on the automobile’s negative impact on Rio’s daily routine. To support his thesis, Miller contrasts traditional and modern streets. Although Miller recognizes that traditional and modern often converge, he asserts that Rio’s life before the automobile, what he views as a time of the traditional street, represented “community in its broadest, civic sense, a place shared by everybody” (p. 24). According to Miller, the traditional street was “a place for productive work and entrepreneurship. Basket weavers, spinners of thread, stocking knitters, lace makers, and other such cottage artisans worked in the street” (p. 53).
One of Miller’s strengths lies in his vivid descriptions of street life. In chapter 7, for example, he relies on a heavily nostalgic tone to elaborate a close reading of three films of Cariocas angry and disappointed with traffic. The author demonstrates how by the 1950s, Rio’s residents started to lament the state of their city’s public spaces. Elsewhere he uses personal accounts of characters who lived in or foreigners and outsiders who visited Rio in the mid- and late 1800s, such as a slave called Henrietta, Johann Moritz Rugendas, Jorge Americano, and João Pinheiro Chagas, Portugal’s first prime minister who visited the city at the end of the 1890s to describe the changes on the streets.
Concluding his book, Miller outlines an ongoing debate about changes in the public space in Rio, as well as São Paulo and Brasília. He broadly criticizes modernism by adopting a dramatic take that modernists wanted to abolish the street forever, a view he draws from Lúcio Costa’s design for Brasília. In this view, Brasília appears as a replacement for Rio de Janeiro, not only as the capital of Brazil but also as its model city. Symbolically, the new Brazil of the 1960s needed to be a modern place where multi-use streets had been replaced by highways and lengthy sparse blocks instead of straight alleys and tall buildings.
The Street Is Ours belongs to a broad scholarship that interweaves cultural and urban history to reveal people’s views of the modernization processes in Brazil. It will be of interest to Cariocas as well as researchers thinking about how to tell the social history of cities through close readings of the production of space and the daily routine of their dwellers.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-latam.
Citation:
Yuri Gama. Review of Miller, Shawn William, The Street Is Ours: Community, the Car, and the Nature of Public Space in Rio de Janeiro.
H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews.
March, 2019.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=53379
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. |