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Fordlandia – the failure of Henry Ford's utopian city in the Amazon (2016)
- ccvannorman 8y agoThis is fascinating, I had no idea Ford did this. Reminds me of Startup Societies today, and is a great example of a failed one. Are there any other examples of billionaires starting cities like this one (laws and all)?
- b_tterc_p 8y agoBill Gates is pushing one https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belmont,_Arizona https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belmont,_Arizona
- dccoolgai 8y agoThere is an interesting history of "company towns" from the Robber Baron days that is similar in a lot of ways... also some of the early history of the Mormon church involves them setting up those kinds of settlements (read about the "Mormon Wars")
- xvf22 8y agoHere's one from England. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bournville https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bournville
- jimmcslim 8y agoAnd from Victorian England. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltaire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltaire
- analog31 8y agoEPCOT and Celebration, Florida On a smaller scale, neighborhoods with neighborhood associations can enact restrictions that go beyond the laws of the localities that they reside within.
- Klinky 8y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ave_Maria,_Florida https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ave_Maria,_Florida https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Monaghan#Ave_Maria_University,_Florida https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Monaghan#Ave_Maria_Unive...
- afpx 8y agoThere’s David Hall’s Mormon utopia in Vermont: http://www.newvistasfoundation.org/ http://www.newvistasfoundation.org/ https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-newvistas-mormon-utopia/ https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-newvistas-mormon-uto... He apparently has had to pause the project because of controversy. But, I think he’s still working toward it, just more subtly.
- jeffbax 8y agoCharter cities are things that exist conceptually. Most famously Hong Kong and Singapore “special administrative zones”, but there are increasingly initiatives on the horizon trying to help fix institutions in countries lacking them around the globe: https://www.innovativegovernance.org/ https://www.innovativegovernance.org/
- jecel 8y agoAlso in the Amazon, but a few decades later, the Jari project had some aspects in common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jari_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jari_project
- Jun8 8y agoHenry Ford also admired Nazis and the feeling was quite mutual. For an in-depth analysis you can read "Rethinking the Ford-Nazi Connection" (https://www.ghi-dc.org/fileadmin/user_upload/GHI_Washington/Publications/Bulletin49/bu49_135.pdf https://www.ghi-dc.org/fileadmin/user_upload/GHI_Washington/...) or this article (https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/religion/the-dark-legacy-of-henry-fords-anti-semitism-commentary/2014/10/10/c95b7df2-509d-11e4-877c-335b53ffe736_story.html?utm_term=.a1140b9852de https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/religion/the-dark-le...) for a popular account.
- bdefore 8y agoI highly recommend a listen of Jóhann Jóhannsson's album inspired by it, also named Fordlandia.
- toomanyrichies 8y agoThanks for posting, going to check this album out now. I've been a fan of his ever since listening to the soundtracks for "Sicario" and "Mandy". He was such a talent, gone way too soon.
- edpichler 8y agoUnfortunately not available on Spotify yet.
- maxerickson 8y agoMichigan Tech uses a former Ford town as a field research station: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberta,_Michigan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberta,_Michigan A much smaller scale than Fordlandia.
- mrbill 8y agoThe book about Fordlandia is great. https://www.amazon.com/Fordlandia-Henry-Fords-Forgotten-Jungle-ebook/dp/B00FO7LVHA https://www.amazon.com/Fordlandia-Henry-Fords-Forgotten-Jung...
- blotter_paper 8y ago...and also in the Amazon, I see.
- dtornabene 8y agoJust dropping this in for anyone that comes here afterward, but the author is a prize winning historian who's mentioned maybe a third of the way through the piece. His other work, such as Empires Workshop, are outstanding.
- phront 8y agoI finally understand what has inspired The Mosquito Coast movie. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mosquito_Coast https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mosquito_Coast
- jpatokal 8y agoThe Mosquito Coast novel? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mosquito_Coast_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mosquito_Coast_(novel)
- cfitz 8y ago> But one problem remained: Fordlandia was not producing any rubber. Jungle foliage continued to be cleared, but efforts to plant rubber trees yielded discouraging results. The few trees that took root were quickly beset by blight. This is too bad. With vision clearer in hindsight, it appears Ford should have taken a more "lean" approach in testing his means of production, perhaps at a smaller scale requiring fewer personnel and ultimately a smaller investment. I am no botanist, so I'm unsure if they had the means of fighting blight at that time, but the presence of it would have made me question the resulting scalability (if density of plantings had to be reduced). However, the foible seems understandable, given Ford's ambition and track record of solving problems.
- wcunning 8y agoThis honestly makes me think of Musk -- huge actions/claims/successes/failures. The parallels, while probably all imaginary, work out quite well in my head.
- olau 8y agoWhile many of Musk's endeavors have huge claims/visions behind them, it seems to me that the people behind them are actually good at testing them in a smaller scale and relatively quickly getting to a point where they are generating money, instead of staying up in the ivory tower. Take the Boring Company which after a couple of prototypes landed actual contracts. Working momentum is powerful, even if it takes several times as long as people hope it would from the onset. Who knows, maybe they'll even end up with a hyperloop in twenty years.
- jsight 8y agoI'm surprised that I haven't seen this analogy more often. There are a lot of parallels between what Tesla is trying to do and what Ford did in its early days.
- jlongr 8y agoI'm currently reading "Empire's Workshop" by Greg Grandin which talks about this at some length. Apparently Ford ignored the advice of local experts to avoid blight by planting the rubber trees sufficiently far apart. Ford instead planted them very closely in neat rows, which created a perfect environment for leaf blight.
- chriselles 8y agoWow. I knew a bit about Henry Ford, but I didn’t know about Fordlandia. In some respects, it sounds like a pretty creepy steam punk Industrial Age version of a .com era tech campus.
- adak 8y ago99pi version: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/fordlandia/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/fordlandia/
- thiago_fm 8y agoI enjoy seeing foreigners/Americans reactions to this. Fordlandia looks like a playground to them, generally. Even a bit like fiction. They don't understand that it was real, with real people. Slavery isn't even mentioned once. Just "anti-semitism", to make what really happened just blur in the background of this story. It's all fun and games, if your family wasn't part of this abuse. Basically they mention "Amazon" as if it was a country on its own, it is actually in Brazil. It as if I had trillions and the US would let me explore their population and relax their own laws in order for me to invest on it. I bet Americans would feel mad about it. This happens frequently in Brazil, with big US(and also other companies) which can get away owing billions in unpaid taxes etc. The US constantly throughout history has intervened in Brazil, let it be by politics or markets, thinking that they know better, lobbying corrupt politicians, or helping on a coup. It is kind of sad. In the end the author mentions about in the end of WW2, they filling the city with military personnel. It is a very soulless article. All that for pure entertainment of some.
- forinti 8y agoThis was actually one of the more benign operations of rubber extraction. The previous efforts (not by Ford) in the Congo and in Peru were absolutely atrocious. The book The Dream of the Celt by Vargas Llosa does a good job of describing the horrors that went on in those countries. As for US companies, they really have a long history of misdeeds in Central and South America. Guatemala had to endure 40 years of dictatorship because of bananas. That's just absurd.
- ramon 8y agoImportant business lesson, make sure you include locals in your business because we can always learn something new.