"Tanto cemitério!"

In Palmas, the new capital designed for the State of Tocantins, Brazil, people tell as a truth story the following. When a small child and his father came to the city from the provinces of the State, after having observed carefully the townscape, he asked: “Dad, why does this city has so many graveyards?” As in the story of the naked king, the child has perceived something that the professional corporation does not seem to have perceived so far. Or, if they have, they consider what they are making as something of good quality. They seem not to be aware of the bad effects of their actions for the urban spaces they design. Palmas is constituted by large “introspective” superblocks, designed by well-known Brazilian architects or otherwise. The buildings open to the interior of the superblocks. Only the back blank walls of the houses face the urban areas of the external surroundings and the main avenues. The exception to this are the small number of entrances for the interior of the superblocks – usually 2, sometimes 3. “Graveyards”, therefore, in the intelligent perception of the child. Palmas was designed quickly in 1988 and implemented from 1989 onwards. It rescues many of the typical aspects of the modern urban design but it also presents specificities that deserve careful attention. (It is a great injustice to Brasilia, the National Capital, to compare Palmas with the former.) The text reflects about the specificities, particularly as the “modernity” in Palmas is being subverted, thus re-qualified, in some superblocks where lower income families predominate. One of the most important morphological changes is the “extrospection” of some blocks – they have their external blank walls perforated by apertures (doors, windows) in buildings of varied types, particularly of commercial and services uses, which now open to the main avenues. This is a clear example of two contradictory logics coexisting in the same city (as it happens more often than not in other cities). It is true that, for postmen, the “introspective” superblocks are a true nightmare, because of the labyrinthine character of their street system and the lack of visual references towards the external urban spaces that surround them. But it is also true that they do not displease a good part of the people that inhabit them. It has been some time now that the semi-enclosed, gated-condominium-like configuration of such places, is part of the values of much of the urban populations in Brazil and elsewhere, particularly when high middle-classes (but not only that) are concerned – the trend tends to generalize. The text analyses this dynamic and considers the Palmas project in the wider context of the discussions about the configuration of public spaces in contemporary cities.