The houses in Ceilândia¹

Abstract

This article is dedicated to living in Ceilândia, the satellite-city with the largest population in the Federal District. It refers back to when the city was created in 1970, and 80,000 people were transferred from the Vila IAPI Settlement. This transfer foresaw the construction of temporary housing by reusing material from the dismantled homes at the settlement, which, over the years, were replaced with masonry houses. Fifty years after its creation, Ceilândia bears little resemblance to its beginnings; it has not been constrained within its original layout; new neighborhoods have been added, and the original dwellings have been replaced and altered in order to adjust to the requirements of the families. This research understands living as being within two complementary dimensions: the city and the home. Thus, it is dedicated to the history of the city and, subsequently, to the homes of its residents. In order to address these two aspects, the urbanist responsible for the original Ceilândia project was interviewed, and narratives of the pioneers, held at the Federal District Public Archives, were analyzed, together with testimonies and drawings by primary school students, expressly collected with the aim of sketching a framework of living in Ceilândia.

Keywords:
Ceilândia Houses; Ceilândia; Satellite city; Brasília (DF); Urban History

Resumo

Este artigo dedica-se ao morar em Ceilândia, a cidade-satélite com maior população do Distrito Federal. Ele remete à sua criação em 1970, com a transferência de 80 mil pessoas, vindas da Vila do IAPI. Essa transferência previa a construção de casas provisórias utilizando o material das casas desmontadas da vila referida e que, com o passar do tempo, seriam substituídas por casas de alvenaria. Passados cinquenta anos de sua criação, Ceilândia pouco remete ao seu início: não se limitou ao traçado original, novos bairros se somaram e suas primeiras moradias foram substituídas e alteradas, para permitir o ajuste às demandas das famílias. A pesquisa entende o morar em duas dimensões complementares: a cidade e a casa, por isso se dedica à história da cidade e, em seguida, às moradias de seus habitantes. Para abordar esses dois aspectos, foi entrevistado o urbanista responsável pelo projeto de Ceilândia, além de analisadas as narrativas de pioneiros disponíveis no Arquivo Público do Distrito Federal, bem como os depoimentos e desenhos de estudantes do Ensino Fundamental, coletados especialmente com o fito de esboçar um quadro do morar em Ceilândia.

Palavras-Chave:
Casa Ceilandense; Ceilândia; Cidade-satélite; Brasília (DF); História Urbana

Preamble

It’s not the house where we live that’s important. But rather where, inside us, lives the house.

Mia Couto (2003), Um rio chamado tempo, uma casa chamada terra.

House (Casa in Portuguese)²: one syllable in English, two in Portuguese, through which we may encounter the immensity of the world. Synonymous with home, dwelling, residence and habitation, the use of the word has a long history. In the early centuries of colonial Brazil, the term casa was used to describe any room of a residence. As time went by, it became a compound noun to designate some particularity: “a townhouse”, “a manioc flour-making house”. Before the twentieth century, the word casa was established as a dwelling place for a family, of all different types, since every house/home signifies living under one roof. Thus, it became customary to speak of “someone’s home”, of “arriving home”, “being at home”, “make yourself at home”, “is anyone at home?” (BRESCIANI, 2014), expressions that designate the desire to either share a world or to be apart from it. It may be any home: one from the past, from the present or even one that is dreamt of.

Far beyond what is physically measurable or morphologically recognizable, the home sets itself as a moral entity permeated with values, codes and emotions contained in speech: “a happy home”, “a home of respect”, “a home-loving girl”. The home is an orderly, protected world. It is sacred (ELIADE, 1992), considered a cosmos, since it brings order to chaos, the unknown, the disturbing. Curiously, this space is linked and, at the same time, opposed to the world of the street: the home-loving girl is antagonized by the woman of the street (DAMATTA, 1991). The ways of reading, speaking and explaining the world are different if the perspective is of the home or of the street, but both refer to the city, after all: “[...] the home, between ourselves, puts order into a world apart. A universe where time is not historical, but cyclical, time that lives on durations unmeasured by clocks, but by faded portraits and corroded by moths [...]” (DAMATTA, 2001, p. 28).³ With the overlapping of times, the home is a storehouse of memories to which its dimensions contribute - material/space, representation/image (BACHELARD, 1996).

In thus asserting itself, we have, herein, demarcated the distinction that is awarded to the home, in order to escape the vanquished battle between history and memory, which inseminated the debates towards the end of the twentieth century. A battle that took place between authors who affirmed the definitive capture of memory by history. The captive memory, therefore, could only exist in specific places, consecrated as its own. The position taken by this article, however, is quite the opposite, since we believe, along with Jeudy (2004), that with memory there is a kind of rabbit always being pulled from inside the top hat. It survives the unexpected, affective relationships, jumps in time from the past to the present, accomplished with the elegance of tigers (BENJAMIN, 1994; SEIXAS, 2001) - and what better place for this magic to take place than in the space of the home? It is a cultural artifact, which is linked to the constructions of a group and to what is shared. Added to the way it is built, to the materials used, to how the different environments have been arranged, is the manner in which it is used - for that lunch served on the sofa in the living room in front of the television, for the forbidden games in the bedroom, for the smell of soap wafting from the bathroom. The way of building and of using the home is intertwined with the representations that are built from it, such as coziness, safety, conquest [...] These contextures, to a greater or lesser degree, are present in the lives of the vast majority of people.

Introduction

In this article, we have involved ourselves with the houses in Ceilândia, a satellite city created during the 1970s. Lucio Costa’s plan for the new Brazilian capital provided for the expansion of the city through the creation of satellite cities. However, before the so-called Plano Piloto had been occupied, this type of city emerged as a consequence of the migratory flow generated by the construction of Brasília. The areas close to the Plano Piloto were occupied, either in a planned or spontaneous manner, by the construction companies of the capital, who set out encampments for their employees, professionals with or without a university degree.

These provisional occupations (the encampments and informal settlements) accommodated a population, which considered itself to be temporary since, once the work was completed, a substantial part of it - one third - was supposed to return to the places of origin. Thus, just one third of the migrants was to remain in Brasilia, while the other third was supposed to become involved in agricultural activities around the Plano Piloto (HOLSTON, 2010). This is not however, what actually happened. Informal occupations, in particular, even under very precarious conditions, were dotted around the territory of the Federal District (FD). The solution for this was to bring forward the creation of satellite cities. The first to appear on the FD map was Taguatinga, in 1958. It predates the Plano Piloto in occupation and was added to the encampments of the construction companies and of the Companhia Urbanizadora da Nova Capital (knonw as Novacap), constituted by Gama and Cidade Livre, around which the worker settlements appeared (COSTA, 2011). In 1965, there were eight satellite cities; by 2019, there were 33, although they are currently designated as Administrative Regions.

During the 1970s, the Campaign for the Eradication of Land Invasions (CEI) was organized, giving rise to the satellite city of Ceilândia, currently the IX Administrative Region of the Federal District, the houses of which we wish to discuss. By understanding the home as the ordering of a world apart, we believe that it is necessary to discuss what goes on beyond its threshold. Thus, we present Ceilândia, recall its history and the saga of its population during its transference to this city. We then dedicate ourselves to their homes, indicating the first houses, precarious and provisional, their subsequent replacement by masonry houses built according to standard models and, finally, the changes they have undergone throughout time, aiming to promote adjustments for the particular requirements of the family groups.

The documentary sources to achieve these objectives consist of testimonies from the Oral History Program of the Federal District; an interview with Ney Gabriel, who authored the Ceilândia project; field surveys of the two blocks in the center of the city, QNM 17 and QNM 18, in which seven hundred houses were built; texts by primary school students, telling of their homes; as well as drawings they produced on the same theme. With this material, we intend to attain a level of understanding on the city, its houses, and its people.

Throughout, Ceilândia is presented from within a historical perspective, while at the same time discussing its dwelling places within their twofold condition: material and representational.

1. Ceilândia and the first houses

1.1 The Urban Plan

Although our starting point was an investigation into the current situation of blocks QNM 17 and QNM 18 in Ceilândia, so as to construct a movement towards the past, this text starts out chronologically by including a history of the city, in order to better situate the reader.

Ceilândia, located approximately 30 km from the Plano Piloto, was created in 1970-71, giving continuation to the practice of accommodating less-favored populations within its surroundings, which thereby implied removing families out to the satellite cities, which often had not been properly urbanized. The urban plan for Ceilândia was designed by Ney Gabriel, an urban architect on the staff at Novacap.

According to an interview with Gabriel, his design references were the Plano Piloto and the book by Giorgio Rigotti (1955) on urbanism. The basic structure of the city may be described as proposing two axes aligned according to the cardinal points (north/south and east/west) along which the spatial elements, constituted by the neighborhood units, were organized. The proposal of the plan resorted to Rigotti, possibly, for the technical solutions, in particular for dimensions.

Ney Gabriel observed that Rigotti’s book on urbanism acted as a basis for professionals of his generation. Entitled Urbanismo: la Técnica (1947), it was conceived in two parts, according to what the author considered appropriate to this field of study. The volume contains 546 illustrated figures organized into four sets related to urban realms, namely: circulation, buildings, parks and gardens and public services. Based on references from several cities, Rigotti indicated the dimensions of roads, alignments, residential typologies, hotels, shops, buildings for worship, as well as green areas and, lastly, drinking water services, urban cleaning, gas, and lighting.

The urgent need to provide shelter for 80 thousand people, a task attributed to the Novacap architect, credits this book with a particular value, since the way the references are presented, similar to those presented in the book Architect’s Data, by the German architect Ernst Neufert (1936), facilitates consultation for those in a hurry to resolve the issues of a city project. The drawings communicate easily, as presented below (Figure 1).

Figure 1
The streets of Genova, Liverpool and Paris

Ney Gabriel’s design for Ceilândia was given a nickname: the pioneering nucleus became known as the “barrel”, because of its shape. Structured by the two abovementioned axes, which crossed orthogonally, the plan defined four strips for subdivisions, totaling forty residential blocks. The large areas between the arched bands of the “barrel” were intended for the implementation of public equipment and housing, as attested by the original plan found at the State Secretariat for Territory and Housing Management (SEGETH, 2019). The Neighborhood Units (NUs), in the center of Ceilândia (the barrel), are formed by fourteen lines of residences, separated into two sets of seven lines by an institutional area for the inclusion of equipment - schools, churches and shops. Each set of seven lines is made up of fifty lots, totaling 350 lots and 700 in the total NUs. As the longitudinal subdivided strips were lengthy, pedestrian circulation from one lane to the next was hampered. In order to solve this problem, Gabriel proposed a system of quincuncial alleyways, to allow the movement of pedestrians in the transversal direction of the units (Figure 2).

Figure 2
Quincuncial alleyways in Ceilândia

The NUs in Ceilândia differ from those of the Plano Piloto. The first differentiating aspect is the fact that, in the case of the second, the super blocks are not subdivided into lots - remembering that the land is not private property, but public. They are occupied by six-storey residential blocks on pilotis, with each four super blocks forming a NU. In addition, the super blocks are encircled by rows of trees, in line with the bucolic intentions that Costa had envisioned for the city. In Ceilândia, there was no similar concern; the NUs are devoid of trees, which are almost entirely restricted to its main avenue. The streets and sidewalks are always of minimum dimensions, enabling us to consider that it was not only urgency that had weighed on the city’s design, but also the cost of land and of future infrastructure installation. The profiles presented below offer a clear idea of the differences between the dimensions of the main axes of the Plano Piloto and of Ceilândia (Figure 3).

Figure 3
Street profiles: Plano Piloto and Ceilândia

Over the past fifty years, Ceilândia has continued to grow and, with Taguatinga and Samambaia, constitutes the most important pole - known as Taceisa - for attracting new urbanizations. The surprising expansion of the city may be observed through a timeline presented in the form of maps (Figure 4).

Figure 4
The urban evolution of Ceilândia

It was in this city, built in the Cerrado, where the wind howls and lifts swirls of dust, that, in a short space of time, 80 thousand people were installed. Let us see how this came about, according to the testimonies of the first residents in the city.

1.2 The removal

Cerradão, bush, snakes, strong winds, endless rains, families under canvas roofs. These are the recurring words and expressions that appear in many of the 24 reports by the first residents of Ceilândia available at the Federal District Public Archives (2019). Between March 27, 1971 and March 9, 1972, 14,607 houses in the IAPI complex were dismantled, and their residents transferred to Ceilândia (GDF, 1973). Life in the IAPI complex had not been easy: precarious housing, a water supply through collective taps, a lack of sewage and lights from motors imposed difficulties, making day-to-day living a constant effort. Located in the vicinity of what is now the Núcleo Bandeirante, the advantage of these settlements was that they were close to the Plano Piloto, where work and medical services were concentrated. School buildings, much like the houses, were fragile, although they served their purpose of providing education for the children. There were nine schools for a total of 5,729 students (GDF, 1973).

The difficult housing conditions seem to have had an impact on convincing the population of the IAPI complex to move to the new satellite city. A further factor which also weighed heavily in favor of the removal was the promise they had received of owning an individual lot in a legalized area. The removal of 80 thousand people was supported, therefore, by an argument built on health and their aspirations for a better life. A governmental initiative took place to strengthen the Master Plan for Water, Sewage and Pollution Control (Planidro) of 1970, which determined the construction of the Park Ring Road (EPTC), which surrounded the Plano Piloto, the objective of which was to place limits onto urban occupation so as to protect the Paranoá water basin (OLIVEIRA, 2007).

The transference of so many people was established through a method: families were registered, the houses were numbered, and guidelines were provided for dismantling them, whereby the wood was to be reused for the construction of temporary housing at the new destination. Those who were able to move on their own, did so. Others, however, depended on the government, which offered removal trucks. With the removal date set, two teams were organized: the Executive Removal Group (GER), responsible for dismantling the houses at the IAPI settlement, and the Executive Consolidation Group (GEC), based in Ceilândia, which directed the installation of the new arrivals.

In order to obtain the agreement of residents, strategies were applied, such as that described in the report by Francisca Coelho Pereira (FP) (2002, p. 9-10):

(SR) - Didn’t anyone want to leave there to come here?

(FP) - Not at all, it was sorted out so that, first it was the churches, they spoke, they told Avelino that the others ... that preacher ... there was Father Liro, who was also part of it, that pastor ... let me see if I remember, Pastor Joel was also part of it, and there was another Reverend who also took part in the meetings.

[...]

(FP) - I know that they agreed with the preachers to unite the churches, to remove the churches first, that came first, and then to remove the people.

(SR) - Which is also a way for the people to believe.

(FP) - To believe?

(SR) - That they had a spiritual strength.

(FP) - Yes, exactly.

The arrival in Ceilândia is also recorded in the narratives available at the Federal District Public Archives:

(AS) There was nothing, just a load of dirt, mud in the rainy season, and the rest was just dust. So much dust that at times, it was like [...]well, at this distance here, you couldn’t see one another, you really couldn’t see anything, because it wasn’t dust [,] it was earth, there was a howling wind, that went like this - wee, wee, wee, - we kept looking around to see if it was a plane. It was the wind. (SILVA, 2002, p. 14)

(DR) - To start with we had to clear the land.

(DR) - There were a few small markings, but you couldn’t even see them because of the cerrado.

(DR) - Marking it out, we had to clear it so as to build, it was in December, raining such a lot.

(DR) - It would rain solidly for eleven days (RODRIGUES, 2002, p. 9).

There is a convergence of memories regarding the lack of infrastructure in the new satellite city. With no lighting, sewage, treated water or health services, people dealt with their everyday life as best they could. With kerosene lamps and gas lights - candles were avoided to prevent fires -, the ex-residents of the IAPI Settlement mentioned that access to water was one of the greatest difficulties encountered in the beginnings of Ceilândia. Water was brought in on trucks, and then carried in buckets to fill the drums placed in front of the houses. According to Ribeiro (2002, p. 9):

[...] the lack of water, that was the biggest horror in Ceilândia, dark streets and no asphalt, no sewage and a whole list of other benefits that hadn’t yet reached the city, so we would have to come out ... well, this work was done by Caesb [the Federal District Environmental Sanitation Company], by Social Services, by the Foundation, represented by the CDS [Social Development Center], we would have to come out and run after water trucks to fill the public water fountains.

The daily struggle with buckets of water and the constant fight against stealing from the barrels in front of the houses was sufficient justification to elect Ceilândia’s water tower as the city’s heritage. It epitomized the insane effort of the residents for survival, and their political struggle to be recognized. Antônia Alves da Silva (2002, p. 15-16) is an example of the constant tussle over water:

Ah! this was the most serious part of the story, because we used to put the drums outside, and sometimes every eight or so days, the water truck would pass by to bring us water, that water was like gold dust. Mothers would have to bathe their five, six children in just one basin. She’d pour in the water, bring in the boy, she’d start with the smallest, bathed the smallest, and then go through each one, calling the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth, all into the same water [...].

The neighborhood centers in the IAPI Settlement were not taken into consideration when transferring to the new city, which leads us to reflect that the links of solidarity, which had been built there were then broken. According to the narrative of Ilton Ferreira Mendes (IM) (2002, p. 14-15), no privileges were handed out, although the corner lots were reserved for those who had been involved in commercial activities in the settlement.

One point to highlight: the lots were not donated to residents, but were purchased and paid for. The values initially promised, and then later readjusted, gave rise to the movement that became known as the “Indefatigable of Ceilândia”.

(IM) - At first, people received an occupancy order, and they occupied that lot, then after, the lot was sold to them.

(SR) - At a symbolic price.

(IM) - It was sold at the price of the time, and they were only paid a long time later, in fact there was a lot of trouble up ahead, as [,] well for example, the Tenants’ Association was started here in Ceilândia. It started up for this reason, because, at the beginning, some paid one price for the lot, then others came to pay a completely different price and [,] when we set up the Tenants’ Association, it was exactly to guarantee the price that it had been sold for at the time.

Transport and moving people to their places of work was yet another drama. The shortage of buses and their declared condition of being obsolete, full of large holes, did not enable passengers to arrive in a clean state at school or work.

The beginning of Ceilândia seems to confirm Eliade’s image (1992) when he sets the home in opposition to the disturbing outside world. The narratives build a representation of an inhospitable, harsh reality, a primitive territory to be built up and populated.

1.3 Houses from the beginning of the city

The occupation of Ceilândia was planned to take place in four stages. The first was to receive the plot of land. The second, building the temporary housing at the back of the land in order to leave space for the definitive house to be built, which would in turn, define the third stage. The fourth stage was completed when the temporary housing was dismantled. Occupying the new satellite city in these stages was justified by studies developed at the time, which considered the income level of the residents of the IAPI Settlement.

The construction of the temporary houses in the new city seems to have been somewhat frantic: “That’s what it was like here, day and night, all you heard were the saws going ‘errr uh errr uh err uh’, and the hammer, ‘bang, bang bang’, all through the day and night. One went and, helped the other, then another made up a task force” (BORGES, 2002, p. 12). Amongst the residents, there were those who managed to set up their homes quickly, while others depended on help. In these cases, there is mention of a minimum construction standard, with a single room of 3 m x 4 m, made with either donated or purchased material: refurbished pine boards from Paraná, sold for a symbolic price. Over time, these boards became full of holes where the knots had fallen out - Ilton Ferreira Mendes (2002) compared them to a “honeycomb”. These makeshift houses included huts made of canvas or other flimsy materials, such as cardboard, on top of compacted soil. The descriptions of the temporary houses reinforce the idea of an insufficient support framework for the population.

In 1971, the Home Ownership Office (Ecap) was installed in the city, under the command of the Ceilândia Consolidation Executive Group, with the function of facilitating the construction of the masonry houses, which were to replace the temporary ones. The owner of the lot could choose one of the two programs coordinated by Ecap. The first, and the most sought after (GDF, 1973), was to build using the owners own resources, which offered certain advantages, such as tax deductions, designing architectural projects and discounts on purchasing materials. According to the Documento Ceilândia (GDF, 1973), several residents who chose this program had previous experience with civil construction, hence its popularity, since it enabled houses to be built in line with the financial possibilities of the owner. Moreover, it did not require proof of income, and thereby avoided running into debt with financial institutions.

The other program was carried out through mortgages by the National Housing Bank (BNH) via the Social Housing Society (SHIS), linked to the Secretariat for Social Services. Created in 1964 and extinguished in 1994, SHIS was responsible for building popular houses in the cities surrounding the Plano Piloto, where it left its marks. In Guará, more than 3 thousand houses were erected between October 1967 and August 1968. In Ceilândia, according to the GDF (1973), this society received the charge of 1,300 lots for building two housing estates and three commercial complexes.

The photograph from 1973 (Figure 5) shows the central area of Ceilândia and the land where today the Central Market, the water tower and the SHIS houses are located. It is possible to observe the manner in which the lots were occupied: semi-detached houses and detached houses with spacing on both sides. The highlight may be noted regarding the pedestrian streets, which enabled movement across the blocks. The low walls and layout affirm a physiognomy common to most of the dormitory cities that surrounded the Plano Piloto.

Figure 5
Aerial view of Ceilândia

The plan obtained from the Ceilândia Regional Administration (1976) shows a pattern of what was to be offered by SHIS. Dated 1976, it presents a model with an architectural program: three bedrooms, one bathroom, kitchen and laundry area. The required frontage distance was at least 3 m, with a side clearance of 1.5 m on one of the sides. In the house designs, suggested by implementing very little detailed design, the dimensions are 8.50 m x 8.0 m, totaling 68.00 m². This architectural model was used on neighboring plots of land to form semi-detached houses. The thickness of the walls indicates the use of masonry and a roof with fiber cement tiles, which may be deduced due to the low roof pitch presented in the cross-section (Figure 6).

Figure 6
Plan and cross-section of the SHIS housing model

The SHIS housing typology may be considered as a second moment in Ceilândia and its dwellings, defined by the gradual replacement of the temporary houses. Few houses within the SHIS standard have lasted until the present day in their original form.

2. The houses of today

In order to discuss the current houses in Ceilândia, we consulted three types of documents. The first was a survey carried out on blocks QNM17 and QNM18, located in Traditional Ceilândia, the oldest part of the city designed by Ney Gabriel. The intention was to verify the occupation of the lots, in order to confirm the number of houses in each. Thus, the Segeth cartographic bases were taken, updated with the aid of satellite images, available on the Google Maps (2019) and Google Earth (2019) platforms. Many of the lots, when compared to the images from these platforms, reveal the disappearance of the setback distances and a 100% occupancy rate (Figure 7).

Figure 7
Example of a survey carried out in the Ceilândia sectors

Once the update was conducted, it was not entirely possible to reach a complete conclusion on the number of houses built in each lot. In order to clarify this issue, we went to the field to investigate the presence of more than one house per land based on water meters, a fact confirmed by data from Caesb (Table 1).

Table 1
Ratio of the number of lots per block/consumer Units

	Lots	Consumer Units (CUs)	Mean CUs per lot
QNM 17	326	1.125	3.45
QNM 18	330	934	2.83

• Source: Caesb data. Table produced by Alana Waldvogel.

The second type of documents we consulted consisted of reports and drawings of the houses prepared by 9^th grade students at the Center for Primary Education (CEF) 19 in Ceilândia, as a result of activities proposed by the research “School Life and the Metropolitan Dynamics of the Capital of Brazil”, whose team we are part of.

The reports were collected during 2018 and consisted of an exercise in which students described their homes. It is important to mention that the students are not residents of the mapped blocks, but, nevertheless, they offered a sense of living in Ceilândia. The anonymity of the descriptions reproduced below has been maintained.

Report 1 My house has a lot of space. At the back, there is a shack which we let out to a couple. The kitchen space is perfect. Because there are two rooms, there is never a fight to watch TV or play video games. [...] I have to share my room with my brother, and my sisters share theirs. This house belongs to my grandmother and grandfather, so my aunts and uncles, and their children, lived there at the time when Brasília was being constructed.

Report 2 Where I live, there are two houses on one lot. In the front house, the main house, I live with my father and grandfather. My cousin lives in the house at the back. This house has been in my family since 1980. My grandfather, who’s a retired engineer, made some changes to the house.

Report 3 Where I live, it’s one lot, with 6 shacks. I used to live in the last house at the back. I lived in that shack until I was 11, then we went to another shack. Why did we move? Because the rent was expensive. [...] My uncle lives with us [...] This shack has 1 bedroom, 1 kitchen, 1 living room and 1 bathroom. The living room and kitchen is in an American-style.

Report 4 […] I am 14 years old and I live in Ceilândia, I live in a big house, as only 3 people live with me: my father, my mother and me. There is 1 bathroom, 2 bedrooms, 1 living room, 1 kitchen and 1 garage.

Report 5 Well, I’ve lived here for 14 years, [...] but there have been several changes to my house. Before, it was a house at the back, [...] they made me a makeshift bedroom for a while, and so, my house has a store behind it, [...] the store faced on to the street; [...] That’s why they stopped letting the back house and made a bedroom and another ensuite bathroom. Except that my mother wanted to have a beauty salon, and so, for that, she had to use the front room for the salon, in other words: that left 2 bedrooms + the makeshift bedroom. I needed a room, because I was already a big girl, so they made a bedroom at the front and now it looks like a normal house, because before it didn’t.

Report 6 [...] I’ve lived here since I was born [...] Where I live, there are many people, it is quite a big house: 4 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, living room and kitchen - which, in reality, has become a little small, since 5 other people live there with me: my grandfather and grandmother, my mother, my brother and my uncle. In the house out at the back, another 9 people live. The house at the back has a first floor, but it is smaller. My aunt lives upstairs with her husband and their two daughters; and, downstairs, my aunt lives with her 3 children.

Report 7 I don’t know the history of the house where I live, but it is the best one since I moved to Brasília. Where I live there are 3 apartments, and my relationship with the neighbors is non-existent. Well, it doesn’t exist because I don’t know any of them.

Report 8 My house started to be built in the 80s. My street wasn’t even paved, it was built by my great-uncle [...]. In the beginning, my house only had one floor. Later, my great-uncle added some floors and he let the first and moved onto the second and built the third (laundry).

Added to these reports are the drawings by students from the same school, made in 2019, which reveal important clues about living in Ceilândia. The expectation, by the proposal for students to draw their homes, was to catch a glimpse, in slightly more detail, of how the houses were divided and how they functioned. For this, a chart with graph paper was prepared, in the hope that a proportional ratio could be observed. We explained to the students how an architectural plan is drawn up. Not all students carried out the work: ten were counted and classified, considering the environments present and the number of residences built in the lots. Some of these drawings contained information on the layout, with a sample of the furniture and equipment (Figure 8).

Figure 8
Drawings by students from CEF 19

The set of these drawings and reports provides elements to identify the materiality of the houses and indicates social parameters, characterized by the ways that people live in Ceilândia (Table 2).

Table 2
Houses and rooms identified in the “School Life and the Metropolitan Dynamics of the Capital of Brazil” survey (2018-2019).

	Garage	Bedrooms	Service area	Ensuite bathroom	Occupation of lot	Observations
House 1	Yes	3	Yes	No	+ 2 houses
House 2	No	3	No	No	+ 1 house	Barbeque
House 3	No	3	Yes	No	+ 1 house	Two bedrooms, shares the bedroom with other residents; pioneer’s house
House 4	No	1	Yes	No	+ 3 houses
House 5	No	3	Yes	Yes	Houses let	Living room with American-style kitchen, veranda, other floor (staircase)
House 6	No	3	Yes	No	-	2 rooms (TV, visitors)
House 7	No	2	No	No	+ 1 house
House 8	No	2	No	No	+ 3 houses
House 9	Yes	2	No	Yes	No
House 10	Yes	2	Yes	Yes	No

• Source: Produced by the authors.

Based on the documents presented, it is possible to affirm that it was extremely frequent to observe more than one house built on the same lot, which was identified through the surveys carried out in blocks QNM17 and QNM18, together with data from Caesb (2019), and confirmed by the highlighted reports and drawings made by the students at CEF 19. This situation may be explained by the arrangements that the families created in Ceilândia and that are no different from those found in other cities and their working class neighborhoods. Sometimes houses change over time to house a growing family, other times they change to meet income needs, through letting or providing services. Within these arrangements, there are multiple configurations, even on small lots: houses that expand vertically, by constructing extra floors; two or more houses built on the same lot, amongst other possibilities. When faced with these situations, the voices of these adolescents expressed no peculiarity, as if it were part of their daily life (Figure 9).

Figure 9
Facades of houses in Ceilândia

With regard to the perception of the house itself, in the reports, a distinction is made between the house and the shack, which is important to note. When referring to a house that shares the space with others on the same lot, shack seems to be a common term, while the term house assumes a better housing condition. The shack suggests the possibility of precariousness, absent in the solid image of a house. The first term is widely used in the state of Goiás and refers to a construction with a low-pitch roof, located without being separated from one or more boundaries of the land, often resembling a service building, but sometimes with functioning as a house.

The divisions of the houses correspond, with a greater degree of flexibility, to the functional tripartite zoning - service, social and intimate areas. Without the orthodoxy of the bourgeois house, the arrangements of the residences may result in a bedroom or even a bathroom door opening onto a living room. In assessing the materiality of these houses, garages and ensuite bathrooms are not common, and appear simultaneously in units that do not share the lot, thereby suggesting the specialized uses of some spaces. Similarly, both through the reports and drawings, there is an overlap of some activities in certain environments, such as the living rooms and bedrooms, where video games are played, meals are eaten, and visitors are received. For one, the kitchen is ideally sized, which should mean that all the furniture and equipment fits. For another, it is important to note that the kitchen is American-style, in reference to this room opening onto the living room.

Also worthy of mention is the presence of a house in the same family, which constitutes a property that has been handed down from grandparents and parents to children, or the sharing of houses by extended families. Thus, the testimonies suggest that the house represents a place of strength (ASSMANN, 2011), of transmitting memories, through the simple fact of the extent and longevity of its existence. Similarly, it is possible to detect family or close relationships amongst the residents of the same lot, which enables the formation to be inferred of a web of interdependence.

While the expressive reports and drawings by the adolescents do not say everything, they nonetheless relate something about their homes. Not only the living that expresses their lives, but also the living of those who came before and who, amongst other difficulties, faced animals and dust.

3. To finish that which has no end

Memory is a landscape seen from a moving train. We see the dawn light creeping over the acacias, the birds pecking at the morning, like a fruit. We see, beyond, a serene river and the grove that embraces it. We see cattle passing slowly, a couple running hand in hand, boys dancing around a football, the ball shining in the sun (another sun). We see placid lakes where ducks swim, rivers with heavy waters where elephants quench their thirst. These are things that happen before our eyes, we know they are real, but they are far away, we cannot touch it. Some are so far away, and the train is moving fast, that we are not sure what really happened. José Eduardo Agualusa, O vendedor de passados, 2018

The Ceilândia of 2020 is very different to that of the 1970s. Its past recalls the images that Agualusa (2018) describes on the journey of the “train” time. Fleeting, they succeed one another at the speed of movement and leave doubts regarding their actual existence. This article has sought to create the possibility of catching a glimpse of Ceilândia through a multiplicity of images, based on its beginning and on its current condition. From being a peripheral city, today, it disequilibrates the demographic game of the Federal District, concentrating the vast majority of its population. It is a consolidated center of reference and cultural production - rap groups, hip-hop, cinema and the June festivals are inseparable expressions of this city.

Despite this and all the other changes that its residents have brought about, their achievements and the sense of pride in belonging, the social differences of their residents with those of the Plano Piloto are easily expressed in the urban spaces and in the homes. In the immense urban stain constituted by the metropolis of Brasilia, Lucio Costa’s plan resembles the paradises of closed condominiums. The wall separating it from the real city is its protective perimeter. In this small representative fragment of the whole city, one event takes place that is able to illustrate the fracture between Plano Piloto, Ceilândia and other satellite cities. On certain weekends, an event is promoted called “Chef on the Axes”. On these days, kitchens and stalls are set up along the Highway Axis to sell dishes prepared by chefs at affordable prices. There are dishes from both Brazilian and foreign cuisines - e.g., Brazilian shrimp bobo, carbonara in cheese, chicken wrapped in gruyere cheese fondue. However, other dishes are served at the Ceilândia Central Market: boiling in the vast pots of its restaurants are oxtail with watercress, sarapatel (a spicey dish of pork and offal cooked in blood), and buchada (goat or sheep tripe and liver cooked inside a goat’s stomach). A comparison of the menus reveals cities that stand parallel to one another but rarely communicate with each other. How is it possible to build links that are capable of connecting these worlds?

This distance may also be perceived in the homes. If, in the Plano Piloto, the apartments or houses are generically home to one family, in the homes of Ceilândia this universe is shared between generations of the same family or even with strangers who rent some portion of these spaces. The construction of individual stories in the Plano Piloto comes up against the sharing of memories that have arisen from experiences rooted in places of affective density, such as shared homes. The difficulties of existence do not prevent identity ties from being woven and reflected in the homes and lives of the residents. The drawings and reports by adolescents have indicated a respect for a way of being, without dissatisfaction or submission. This material has registered the memory of young people, but who are building their history, linking their own trajectory to those of their parents and grandparents.

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• 1
  The authors would like to thank the Federal District Research Support Foundation (FAP-DF), for funding the research, and the Federal District Public Archives, for granting us permission to consult its collection, and the Center for Primary Education 19 in Ceilândia, the basis of our work field.
• 2
  While in the English language, “house” refers to a single building unit for habitation, generally of more than one floor, made of bricks, cement, and all the other raw materials, “home” is a direct reference to the place where people live with their families and/or loved ones and contains more emotional connotations. An apartment is never referred to as a “house” but may be called a “home”. In Portuguese however, the word “casa” is commonly used for all these situations.
• 3
  This and all non-English citations hereafter have been translated by the authors.
• 4
  This is the name given to Lucio Costa’s Pilot Plan for Brasilia, which was the winning entry in the design competition for the 1957 project of Brazil’s new capital.
• 5
  The interview was granted to the authors on May 21, 2018.
• 6
  Cerradão is a type of dry forest found in Brazil, associated with the cerrado savanna ecoregion.
• 7
  According to Oliveira (2007), the complex was made up of the IAPI Settlement, Morro do Urubu, Morro do Querosene, Vila Tenório, Vila Bernardo Sayão, Vila Esperança, Curral das Éguas, Placa das Mercedes and others.
• 8
  This fact was observed by Oliveira in his master’s dissertation in the Geography Department at the Universidade de Brasília in 2007.
• 9
  Of the 2,670 alleyways in Ceilândia, according to Codhab, 111 are unoccupied and are public areas, 259 are registered, and 436 were benefited on January 14, 2016. Available at: https://www.agenciabrasilia.df.gov.br/2016/01/14/436-lots-in-alleys-of-ceilandia-will-have-deed/. Viewed on: October 10, 2020.
• 10
  The research “School Life and the Metropolitan Dynamics of the Capital of Brazil”, funded by FAP-DF, brings together anthropologists and architects focused on studying the federal capital considered in its metropolitan dimension. This research was interested in understanding, from a spatial and experiential viewpoint, the daily displacements undertaken by the inhabitants of Brasilia, a fragmented and dispersed city, between Lucio Costa’s Pilot Plan and its Administrative Regions.
• 11
  The texts were maintained almost in full. Only punctuation and spelling corrections have been made. The bold type is ours.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  12 Apr 2021
• Date of issue
  2021

History

• Received
  03 Aug 2020
• Accepted
  16 Nov 2020