
Fordlandia – The failure of Henry Ford's utopian city in the Amazon - mobiletelephone
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/aug/19/lost-cities-10-fordlandia-failure-henry-ford-amazon
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PhasmaFelis
The article really softpedals the whole "civilize the heathen savages" angle.
When Ford said he wanted to "develop" South America, what he meant was that he
wanted to teach the locals how to behave like his idea of proper white folks.
Racial segregation was built-in. Not just alcohol but tobacco, women, and--for
some reason--football were forbidden in Fordlandia, and inspectors could
demand entry at any time to make sure you were following the rules. Workers
were required to work through the traditional (and very sensible, in that
climate) midday siesta. Ford was even determined to make them _eat_ like
American whites--they were given only American food to eat, nothing local. The
riots the article blames on a bricklayer's dispute with a supervisor were,
according to Wikipedia, a revolt against the food--menu concessions were only
made after the riots.

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lcarlson
Very interesting!

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OrwellianChild
I recently read Grandin's book after learning about this from a Priceonomics
article. It's fascinating not just for the way that it ultimately failed, but
also the level of power and influence that Henry Ford had at the time to be
able to do it at all...

The Ford Company was privately held, and what Henry Ford said, went. Enormous
amounts of time, money, and manpower went into developing this colony, on the
back of ideology as much as the promise of economic return.

The closest examples I can think of in modern times for this kind of project
are in folks like Musk and Allen (and his Vulcan real estate development
group), but they are much more capitalistic in motivation.

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LeifCarrotson
I have heard that pre-WW1, pre-WW2, and pre-atom bomb, there was a culture of
hopefulness and idealism that we could soon cure all humanity's ills with
technology and progress.

Unfortunately, those events served to at least partially extinguish that
dream.

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RangerScience
It's definitely coming back, that hopefulness.

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keenerd
Not to latch on a minor turn of phrase, but it is a shame we've replaced the
"employee relations office" with "human resources".

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lobster_johnson
Great soundtrack, too, by Jóhann Jóhannson:
[https://open.spotify.com/album/2I4uGgkMgN3UGE8ZQjCMjB](https://open.spotify.com/album/2I4uGgkMgN3UGE8ZQjCMjB)

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abrowne
I came here to suggest the same album. Here's the artist's page for it:
[http://www.johannjohannsson.com/discography/fordlandia/](http://www.johannjohannsson.com/discography/fordlandia/)

And this is nitpicking, but you did include the accents ;-) — it's Jóhannsson,
with two _S_ es. (It's basically "Jóhann's son".)

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raverbashing
Another example of how culture eats strategy for breakfast

Ford wanted to make Fordlandia a model _american_ city, forgetting about the
culture of those brazilians he was employing

It also seems he never asked the locals how to plant rubber trees. And even
though it was "in the Amazon" it might have been a bad place for the rubber
trees

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sk5t
There's a good overview--albeit a much more pessimistic one--of Fordlandia in
Bill Bryson's book _1927_.

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madaxe_again
He planned a eutopia, and ended up with a utopia instead.

