Crossing Histories: Brazilian Planners of São Paulo and their transnational references (1910-1930)

This paper examines how some pioneering planners in the Brazilian state of São Paulo, Victor Freire, Prestes Maia, Ulhoa Cintra, and Anhaia Mello disseminated and appropriated the dominant principles of international urbanism in the period 1910-1930. The education in city planning is directly associated with the repertoire of engineering courses and professional associations. In this environment, where public debates on urban issues were intense, it is worth noting the presence of English urbanist Barry Parker, who lived for two years in São Paulo, implementing innovative projects and debating with local planners. The access to urban planning manuals and reviews, and the presence of these Brazilian professionals in international seminars, led to the dissemination of the international ideals and some resulting essays on they way these ideals could be applied in many fields: urban regulations, projects in downtown areas, housing, sanitation, town extension plans, city management, zoning, among others. Contradictions among practices, actors and references are requesting a conceptual and methodological effort attentive to historical dimension of the “circulation” of ideals or their limits of intelligibility and reception in other scales of time and place, such as the one proposed in this paper.


Introduction
São Paulo is Latin America's largest metropolis. However, its rapid growth started less than a century ago and, if at the local level the historiography of urban design has been developed over recent decades 1 , in the international literature little is recorded about the men who reflected on and wrote about this city during its growing process. Most of the theorists or city planners were engineers from the Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo, and also professors seldom involved in urban management issues. They were acquainted with several international city planning proposals thanks to the dissemination of books and periodicals, and to the meetings that brought them together in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Today a global perspective is methodological consensus in several fields of knowledge. However, some particulars of the histories of these urban planners remain absent from the standard widespread bibliography. In this sense, although everybody identifies "the top" authors, the professionals who practiced the discipline in European and North American countries, along with their theoretical essays, and their planning practices, there is still a vast field to study more deeply and investigate how South-American urban planners have appropriated this material 2 .
We all know that urban and architectural designs travel a lot and their propagation and international character dates from previous centuries, but at this panel, we will focus on the pioneers of the early twentieth-century in the city of São Paulo. Historians consider this period as the founding moment of city planning as a discipline. Methodologically speaking, we know that the case studies and analyses of the trajectories (ideas and designs) of these authors who have adopted reference works and models, have been used as the tenets for historical studies since the 1980s, when cultural transfers became part of the analyses, attentive to the possibilities of local contexts, or specific understanding of the countries that were importing these ideas 3 . Therefore, we will present here some aspects of the trajectories of the Brazilian city planners who worked in the urban environment of the city of São Paulo between 1910 and 1930, one of the most important periods of the history of Brazilian urban planning 4 . We quote topics discussed in their publications, the projects and interventions proposed for this metropolis which was then in full development. Crossing histories and intellectual references of some professionals, their role in the urbanization of the city debate and in founding the urban planning discipline, will certainly help bring to light some new facets of the thinking of Latin America's pioneers.

City Planners of São Paulo and their Transnational References
São Paulo's astounding growth between 1870 and 1930 was a significant factor in introducing urban science into the remodeling proposals that emerged in that period. Over this sixty-year period, the city underwent a strong economic and population increase as a result of the coffee production peak, intense immigration and well ahead, industrialization. Around 24,000 inhabitants lived in the city in 1870; 240,000 in 1900, and a million thirty years later. A one thousand percent increase in the first interval, and over four-hundred percent in the second. The impact of this accelerated expansion process devoid of any urban planning left deep marks that hinder city management up to the present day.
Other factors favoured the process of modernization which was impending since the nineteenth century. The main factor was the onset of the Republican regime in the country (1889), which organized the municipal sectors of public works and gave them greater autonomy. In the case of São Paulo, the creation of the Polytechnic School in 1894 provided training for civil-engineers and engineer-architects to deal with urban management. These professionals joined the city public administration, contributing to the dissemination and use of many principles and paradigms from the science of urbanism which was then being developed in several countries.
In the early twentieth century, São Paulo's city government faced big urban problems related to three areas: sanitation, road system, and architectural esthetics. Engineers proposed plans and projects based on their professional practice referencing other contexts. These projects were supposed to regulate aspects such as the decongestion of the central area, installation of infrastructure systems (sanitation, lighting, electricity, gas, transport.) the esthetic and technical modernization of built heritage, road connections between the residential districts and downtown, control of urban sprawl, salubrity of private dwellings and public housing, the quality of public spaces (urban furniture, green spaces).
Engineer Victor da Silva Freire stood out in this scenario, not only for his political role but also as the main name in planning international references. He was Director of Public Works for São Paulo for 26 years , and was a professor at the Polytechnic School of Engineering. The Portuguese Freire studied at the Polytechnic School in Lisbon and at the École des Ponts et Chaussées de Paris. Starting in 1905, he frequently attended international city planning conferences 5 , and received the proceedings of congresses held in Europe and the United States, adopting/appropriating these texts and attempting to apply them to the reality of the city of São Paulo.
The library of the Polytechnic School was another source for important references, in special books, urban planning manuals, and specialized periodicals that were consulted by the generation of the pioneer city planners. 6 While he worked as Director of Public Works and a professor, Victor Freire mentored the first São Paulo city planners, and some of them became his assistants in the city government. Worthy of note are engineers João Florence de Ulhoa Cintra, Arthur Saboya, Francisco Prestes Maia, and Luiz Ignacio Romeiro de Anhaia Mello. All of them could be considered, along with the public health engineer Francisco Saturnino Rodrigues de Brito, born in Rio de Janeiro, the main pioneers of city planning in São Paulo.
The main questions discussed and proposed by these pioneers are presented below, focusing on improvements of the central area, controlling the urban sprawl, modeling the city's growth and disseminating the anti-metropolis ideas.

Improvements in the Central Area (1911)
Victor da Silva Freire was behind some important projects for São Paulo, embracing Camillo Sitte's perspective by maintaining the morphology of the historical central area. For the expansion areas he preferred the British "garden-city" standard. For the central area of the city he proposed a plan called "Os Melhoramentos de São Paulo" (Improvements for São Paulo), in 1911, to solve the urban congestion and the connections between that zone and the up-and-coming residential districts. This pioneer document is an example to analyze the transfers from international city planning ideas. In addition to these five books, Victor Freire also used the plans and specifications studied by French city planner Joseph-Antoine Bouvard to intervene in the city of Buenos Aires in 1907. Bouvard was a consultant in São Paulo in 1911 and offered his opinion on the stalemate of the proposed projects. After validating Freire's plan, he proposed to expand it and also joined the City of São Paulo Improvements and Freehold Land Company Ltd. (City Company) which would initiate new ways of land division for housing.

Controlling the Urban Expansion Areas (1913-1923)
The rapid expansion of the urbanized area demanded a great amount of effort by city government to control the approval process of new streets and neighborhoods. Until the 1920s, legislation was inappropriate for the site of the city, whose topography was very irregular, marked by valleys and slopes. The old rules of 1886 recommended that all streets should be straight and 16-meter wide. That would mean an orthogonal road grid for the whole city, which would be a solution for flat areas, but not for São Paulo. Beginning in 1910, Victor Freire conducted the revision of these regulations, and was later supported by British urban planner Barry Parker, who lived in the city for two years to implement the new districts of a real-state company, the above-mentioned City Company.
Freire's technical argumentation was based on the ideas of German Joseph Stubben and those of British city planner Raymond Unwin from the Garden City movement. It resulted in the approval of new modern street network regulations in 1923. Stübben's essay, "Practical and Aesthetic Principles for the Laying out of Cities" had been presented in Chicago, at the Colombian Exhibition, in 1893, guiding principles for new road system networks in expansion areas. In summary, it proposed a general conception of road design based on the radial-concentric model, that is, a central nucleus and radial roads connecting it to the peripheral zones, thus defining different urban sectors. The sectors were subdivided by concentric or ring-shaped roads, and within each of these trapezoidal-shaped subsectors, local lanes would show an orthogonal outline and a diagonal street. The whole system was conceived for traffic flow efficiency.
The profile of the streets should promote drainage and never consider large movements of land. Discrete curvatures were recommended along the street layout, avoiding very long straight lines. The width of the streets should always be designed according to the volume of traffic and circulation. Health would depend on a suitable width, good implementation of the construction on the lot, the existence of open spaces for squares, and green areas along the roads and inside the lots. These principles presented by Stübben and then also recommended in Unwin's work (Town Planning in Practice) improved the city planning rules in São Paulo and permitted occupying large steep areas with a proper road system, as well as savings in paving and drainage works. These principles were put into effect under the new street plan law, nº. 2611 of 1923, which the engineer Luiz de Anhaia Mello greatly influenced. Adapting the City Growth to a New Urban Model (1922)(1923)(1924)(1925)(1926)(1927)(1928)(1929)(1930) During the 1920s, other city planners stood out in the city: Francisco Prestes Maia, João Florence de Ulhoa Cintra and Luiz Ignacio Romeiro de Anhaia Mello, all of them professors at the Polytechnic School, where they graduated. Maia and Cintra worked together in municipal public works. Between 1922 and 1924, they published a study that would forever mark the city's future configuration. The study was based on the works of French city planner Eugène Hénard, already mentioned, Études sur les transformations de Paris, and proposed that São Paulo should adopt the radial-concentric models, from the concept of "perimètre de rayonnement". Based on the idea that structuring the future metropolises followed this pattern, according to the four schemes presented by Hénard for London, Paris, Moscow, and Berlin, engineers Prestes Maia and Cintra developed the Plano de Avenidas (Plan of Avenues) for the city of São Paulo, projecting radial and perimetral avenues including the two main rivers of the city to help arrange this model. The plan, illustrated with photos and watercolours was published in 1930 and had a deep impact, given its graphic quality and the large number of references to German, British, North American, and French city planners. This plan was only carried out during Prestes Maia's terms as mayor of the city (1938-45 and 1961-65) -when the main structural avenues system of the city was implemented -but not without a criticism from a group of city planners who followed other lines of thinking, such as Luiz de Anhaia Mello.

The Anti-Urban Idea. A Comprehensive and Humanistic Urban Thought
Engineer-architect Luiz de Anhaia Mello, professor of the Polytechnic School from the 1920s to the 1960s and a member of the intellectual elite of São Paulo, was the most important theorist in the urban planning field in São Paulo. He considered himself an "urbanist" throughout his career, with the "mission" of sensitizing "public opinion" and promoting education for town planning. In this sense, he defended the creation of civic associations according to the North American model, in which society would participate of urban improvements.
Around 1925, Anhaia Mello conceived a City Plan Commission, quoting models such as the Regional Planning Association of America (he owned all the volumes of the Regional Plan of New York) and was a reader of Thomas Adams as well as others international authors on this subject. However, it wasn't until the 1950s that a master plan would only be widely discussed in São Paulo. In addition to being the executive director of the Engineering Institute, creating some controversies and briefly participating in city politics, Anhaia Mello founded the SAC -Sociedade de Amigos da Cidade (City Friends Society) in 1945: in his opinion, professional circles, councils, and planning committees had to be independent from interference by public government, which generated conflicts with his peers, who as we saw, had been proposing plans for the city following various lines of thought, since the 1910s.
He created regular courses on city planning (called "Aesthetics, General Composition and Urbanism") at the Polytechnic School around 1926, and in 1948 he founded the School of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo, to distinguish engineers from architects, and connect the latter group with city planners and social scientists. Throughout his entire life he was involved in disseminating the principles of an ideal city under a humanistic and civic urbanism, through an active pedagogical series of public conferences (at the Rotary Club and the Engineers' Institute, for instance). His speeches and numerous articles were published in periodicals of professional associations, such as the Boletim do Instituto de Engenharia, among others, and in books, such as his first, Problemas de Urbanismo, in 1929. His ideals are represented on "The Urbanism Tree", image published in this book: the roots are "public opinion" to be formed by propaganda; the trunk represents the "committees" for planning the city; the tree canopy is "legislation" which resulted in the shade that represents "urban progress". In fact, Anhaia disapproved of the then current boastful slogan which said, "São Paulo cannot stop". He was against skyscrapers and automobiles, and his main fight was to contain the growth of the tentacular city, introduce regional planning, and reaffirm statements by foreign authors, ranging from the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren (Les Villes tentaculaires, 1895) to Patrick Geddes and his disciple Lewis Mumford, in the genesis of anti-urban critique, which culminated in reading Oswald Spengler on the decline of the machine civilization. Anhaia Mello's personal library is our main source of study and a relevant evidence of his international knowledge and education, as he quoted numerous authors in his three books and more than seventy texts. He left no personal archives, nor confidential autobiographical notes, so our research strategy was to study his texts and the marginal notes left in the more than one thousand books that belonged to him and today are part of the library of the School of Architecture and Urbanism at USP. His library has classics of city planning history and related fields. The books quoted in his articles reveal how he accepted the view of the authors he read, mainly North Americans, although he also quoted French authors even in his last texts in the 1960s 7 . This approach is part of a cultural history of reading practices, in consonance with an intellectual biography, involving studies and institutional programmes of that time 8 . Some images of the book The City Plan of Memphis, Tennessee, by Harland Bartholomew, published in 1924, can be taken as guidelines to summarize the main directions of Anhaia Mello's reflections, which were also subjects of his courses at the Polytechnic School, supported by international references. These images are inscribed in the holistic view of a "comprehensive plan". They are: Civic Art, which can evoke the aesthetics committees he wanted to create to control the "general composition" of the overall "urban architecture". This expression can be attributed to Pierre Lavedan, whom Anhaia invoked when he recalled the need for a "esprit d'urbanisme" in the city, in addition to the remodeling and "beautification" defended by Victor Freire. The latter had already introduced the overall view where esthetics elements should be aggregated to the plans for sanitation and road system. 9 Another Bartholomew's topic is "streets": Anhaia passed laws for organizing the road network and its relation to the built spaces, since he considered streets as dangerous places, even citing traffic death statistics from American books and periodicals. Instead he defended the green superquadras (superblocks), or the separation of pedestrians and cars. Another central theme in his criticism coming from Bartholomew is "transit". Anhaia Mello referred to the "chaos" caused by vehicles, writing articles on traffic control and regulation; in this case he also wrote about improvement of mass transportation; in this sense he is contrary to the "old circulatory urbanism" of Prestes Maia's Plano de Avenidas (Plan of Great Avenues) that would permanently mark the urban site of São Paulo.
Regarding "Public Recreation" principle he defended a general system of parks with activities, or an active and organized recreation in play-lots, playgrounds, playfields -then "rus in urbe", the city/nature connection by the parkways. Multi-centered urban decentralization and salubrious dwellings were also paramount topics for Anhaia Mello who organized the I Housing Congress in 1931, when he was mayor of São Paulo, showing his interest in housing and zoning policies. Denouncing the blighted areas was inseparable from his criticism of urban density, or overcrowding, to be solved by the garden cities, satellite towns, neighborhood unit cells -revealing in all these themes his readings of authors such as Ebenezer Howard, Raymond Unwin (in the French translation of Jaussely, 1926), F. L. Olmsted, Jean Lebreton, John Nolen, E. Gutkind, F. J. Osborn, Lewis Mumford, James Dahir, Clarence Perry and Clarence Stein. Anhaia Mello always referred to the concept of public spaces connected to city planning and the quest for communitarian relationships among citizens, defended by North American urban sociologists, such as Robert Park and Ernest Burgess. These readings confirm his persistent humanist view of an organic city and the basic functions of common well-being: inhabit, work, amuse body and soul, and circulate, recalling the Athens' Charter.
Likewise, Anhaia Mello also marked the "zoning" regulations in several passages of Harland Bartholomew's book (p. 117) and transcribed them in his own 1929's book; on this matter he was also a reader of Edward Basset and George B. Ford. Anhaia Mello illustrated the topic in his book by translating the ironic image of a pamphlet in Evansville, Indiana: "Zoning Will Prevent This". The zoning law Anhaia Mello proposed in the late 1930s and the master plan for São Paulo and outskirts, although debated in the following years, would only materialize decades later, but in a very distant version from the "new models of urban composition" and regional planning he wanted, as the city had not avoided disorderly growth and the extension of urban occupation, Anhaia Mello's major battles. Figure 6. A cartoon from a zoning campaign in Evansville, Indiana before 1920, exactly translated to Portuguese by Anhaia Mello for his book.

Conclusion
Divergent urban models coexisted in São Paulo where technical, academic, and institutional circles debated the problems of the rapidly growing modernizing city which was booming thanks to agroexport trade, immigration, and then industrialization. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the projects of those urbanism pioneers in São Paulo, mostly teachers at from the Polytechnic School and familiar with works of international authors, began to include German, English and North American ideas -while some of their compatriots 10 and urban-engineers in other Brazilian cities were still using Parisian references. An example is the Pereira Passos's previous reform highlighting grand avenues, such as the Avenida Central, in Rio de Janeiro still carrying the symbolic weight of Haussmann's works in Paris. The abandonment of the traditional orthogonal and geometric layouts, characteristic of the conceptions in force in the nineteenth century, started to be questioned by Victor da Silva Freire, among others, who proposed new improvements paradigms for São Paulo from 1911 on. These emerged not only thanks to the readings of Camillo Sitte's and Joseph Stübben's books but also to British references that defended plans more adapted to the irregularities of the local topography, in addition to creating green spaces. These came through Raymond Unwin and the experience of the garden-cities, soon adopted by real-estate companies such as City Improvements that profited from the growing demand for housing caused by the expressive urban expansion and population increase.
Starting in the 1920s, new actors came onto the stage and foreign references increased with the dissemination of titles in the bibliography of periodicals such as the Boletim do Instituto de Engenharia that had contact with several overseas publishers, especially from the United States. Also, there was the possibility of obtaining classic and recent works on city planning in local bookstores, as shown by the private libraries such as those of Luiz de Anhaia Mello and Francisco Prestes Maia, whose positions on the remodeling of the city were totally opposed. Prestes Maia and Ulhoa Cintra's Plan of Great Avenues prioritized circulation of vehicles, leaving aside social and housing projects that are basic principles of modern urbanism.
Luiz de Anhaia Mello, in turn, in his texts and courses at the Polytechnic School was aware of those times, i.e., the irreversible transformation of the city into a metropolis. He sought to regulate this progress, defending anti-urban ideas and a comprehensive plan against most of the engineers who were conceiving São Paulo with selective, partial and expansionist plans, limited to a road system, as is the case of Prestes Maia. Anhaia Mello was portrayed as a dissident 11 , in fact a theoretical militant of the metropolitan "décroissance" 12 . His forecast about the capital's tentacular conurbation worsened after the 1950s, to the detriment of an organic humanistic urbanity and the general regulatory planning he had idealized.
The engineers mentioned here, and many others who took part in the urban management educated generations of professionals, left unfinished projects, speeches, acts, and partially applied laws, but on the other hand, they wrote a large number of articles and books. These sources, along with the private and institutional libraries they consulted, still wait for new investigations, as for example: editorial lines of periodicals, intersections between intellectual trajectories of local and foreign authors, and even appropriations of divergent adoptions of the same author's ideas. to guarantee divergent ideas. Adoptions of transnational references may imply contradictions, different temporalities, partial coherence and limits of understandable application in each country, and they demanding constant review and deeper research.      Barcelona, G. G., 1975.