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Fordlandia – The failure of Henry Ford's utopian city in the Amazon
- sk5t 10y agoThere's a good overview--albeit a much more pessimistic one--of Fordlandia in Bill Bryson's book _1927_.
- lobster_johnson 10y agoGreat soundtrack, too, by Jóhann Jóhannson: https://open.spotify.com/album/2I4uGgkMgN3UGE8ZQjCMjB https://open.spotify.com/album/2I4uGgkMgN3UGE8ZQjCMjB
- abrowne 10y agoI 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 Ses. (It's basically "Jóhann's son".)
- keenerd 10y agoNot to latch on a minor turn of phrase, but it is a shame we've replaced the "employee relations office" with "human resources".
- OrwellianChild 10y agoI 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.
- vram22 10y agoI remember reading in an old issue of National Geographic magazine, about a similar project, also in the Amazon region, IIRC, by the American billionaire Daniel Ludwig. Googled and found it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jari_project https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jari_project https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_K._Ludwig https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_K._Ludwig
- LeifCarrotson 10y agoI 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.
- RangerScience 10y agoIt's definitely coming back, that hopefulness.
- raverbashing 10y agoAnother 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
- madaxe_again 10y agoHe planned a eutopia, and ended up with a utopia instead.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- PhasmaFelis 10y agoThe 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.
- lcarlson 10y agoVery interesting!