Fordlandia Aerial View in 1934
In 1927, the US industrialist wanted to found a city based on the values they had made their company prosper-and of course produce cheap rubber. Fordland, the city in the jungle that beded its name, eventually became one of its greatest failures.
Almost a century before Elon Musk dreamed built his private in Texas, already Henry Ford He had already tried to lift his own industrial metropolis in a remote corner of the Amazon.
The experience of the American industrialist, known as Fordlandiawould become one of more expensive and striking failures of the business history of the twentieth century.
Henry Ford built his huge empire and reserved a place in history for having invented the assembly line.
This industrial process has revolutionized the production of its cars, allowing you to launch, at much lower prices, your iconic Modelo T, The “cheap car that everyone could buy” which quickly filled the American streets.
It’s hard to overdo airEputation that Henry Ford It had built at the time – either in Brazil, the United States or anywhere else on the planet. At the time, the name Ford evoked the brilliant promise of the technological revolution “So much or maybe even more than Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg did in our generation.”
Henry Ford with a model t in 1921
Ford was convinced that Your role in the advancement of society should go beyond factories and cook entire cities.
Although it has been able to realize some of its concepts of urban planning, its most ambitious project, a huge industrial city To be built in northern Alabama, with energy supplied by the Tennessee River dam, never left the paper.
Ford would eventually choose for his ideal city a place quite south of Alabama: Amazonia. The industrialist also aimed to end the dependence that its automotive empire had from the Asian market in the rubber supplyremember the.
At the time, Ford’s industrial empire was at its peak, and from the engine to the smallest screw, All used parts in the assembly of their cars were produced in a factory of some way controlled by Ford – except for a specific component: the tire rubber.
In 1927, the industrialist bought a Vast extension of Brazilian jungle and planned a city that replicated the American lifestylewith hospitals, schools, prefabricated houses and a rigid work regulation.
The location, chosen for being high altitude to avoid floodingwould eventually present numerous Logistic obstacles.
During the dry season, the ships had difficulty accessing the site, which delayed the arrival of materials. Furthermore, Nature imposed its rules from the beginning: dense vegetation, tropical diseases And the local fauna were a constant challenge.
Most Brazilians hired workers faced extreme conditions. THE Imposition of US standardslike a rigid diet or the prohibition of alcohol, it generated widespread discontent. Cultural differences and lack of adaptation to the environment marked the end of the end of the project.
Fordlandia followed an agricultural model based on the intensive plantation of rubble in uniform lineswithout taking into account local knowledge about Amazonian biodiversity.
As experts and indigenous communities warned, this organization favored the pest proliferation. The result was a devastating infestation of fungi and caterpillars that ruined production.
A Pressure to meet goals led to aggressive deforestation practices, including the mass burn of cultivation hectareswhich caused one of the largest fires ever in the region and aggravated the degradation of the ecosystem. The environmental impact was as deep as the economic failure it generated.
Henry Ford never came to visit Fordland, although the city boasts his name. THE Administration of the Enclave was in the hands of intermediaries who have never been able to master the complexities of Amazon.
Finally, in 1945, his grandson, Henry Ford II, decided to end the city and sell the land, taking estimated losses in the equivalent of what would be currently between 300 and 350 million euros.
Over the years, The jungle rescued part of the territorybut the traces of the utopian city of Ford, where they currently live about 2000 people, persist. The ruins of houses, hospitals and factories recall the failed attempt to impose an external model on an environment that could not stand it.
