Goiania
Planned from scratch in 1933 on empty cerrado savanna because the old capital was in the wrong place. Now Brazil's 10th-largest city, distributing tractors and fertilizer to the soybean frontier that made Goiás the country's third-largest agricultural producer.
Goiânia exists because the old capital of Goiás was in the wrong place. By the early twentieth century, Brazil's cerrado interior—a vast savanna stretching across the country's central plateau—was opening to agriculture, and the colonial-era capital of Goiás sat 110 kilometres from where the action was. In 1933, Governor Pedro Ludovico chose a site on the Campinas plain and hired architect Attilio Correia Lima to design a new capital from scratch. The mayor of Campinas donated 242 acres. On 24 October 1933, Goiânia was founded—a planned city on empty cerrado, part of President Getúlio Vargas's programme to modernize Brazil's interior.
Lima's art deco plan gave Goiânia wide radial avenues and a monumental civic centre, 22 buildings of which are now listed as National Heritage. But the city's real architecture is agricultural. Goiás state became Brazil's third-largest producer of soybeans, corn, sugar cane, and cotton. The cerrado's deep red soils, once dismissed as too acidite for farming, yielded to lime correction and Brazilian tropical agriculture research (EMBRAPA) in the 1970s. Goiânia became the distribution node for this agricultural explosion—a city whose economy runs on selling tractors, fertilizer, seed, and agrochemicals to the farms that surround it. The supply chain that feeds Brazil's agricultural export machine passes through here.
The population reached 1.5 million in 2020, making Goiânia Brazil's tenth-largest city and the second-largest in the Central-West region after Brasília. The metropolitan area exceeds 2.8 million. Growth has been relentless: the city that started on empty savanna in 1933 is now one of Brazil's fastest-growing urban areas. Sertanejo music—Brazil's country genre—has its commercial heart here, generating a cultural economy that mirrors Nashville's relationship to American country music. Goiânia is also the unlikely capital of Brazil's sushi scene, with more Japanese restaurants per capita than São Paulo.
The cerrado that Goiânia was built to exploit is now Brazil's most threatened biome. Over half has been converted to cropland, and the agricultural frontier continues pushing north into the Amazon transition zone. Goiânia's economy depends on the productivity of a biome it is helping to destroy—a metabolic contradiction that no amount of art deco planning can resolve.