Fordlandia – the failure of Henry Ford's utopian city in the Amazon (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Fordlandia – the failure of Henry Ford's utopian city in the Amazon (2016)

theguardian.com

90 pointsdrcongo30 comments

I 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.

This 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.

> 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.

This honestly makes me think of Musk -- huge actions/claims/successes/failures. The parallels, while probably all imaginary, work out quite well in my head.

While 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.

I'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.

I'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.

99pi version: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/fordlandia/

The book about Fordlandia is great.

https://www.amazon.com/Fordlandia-Henry-Fords-Forgotten-Jung...

...and also in the Amazon, I see.

Just 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.

I highly recommend a listen of Jóhann Jóhannsson's album inspired by it, also named Fordlandia.

Thanks 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.

Unfortunately not available on Spotify yet.

Michigan Tech uses a former Ford town as a field research station:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberta,_Michigan

A much smaller scale than Fordlandia.

This 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)?

Bill Gates is pushing one

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belmont,_Arizona

There 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")

Here's one from England.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bournville

And from Victorian England.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltaire

EPCOT 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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ave_Maria,_Florida

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Monaghan#Ave_Maria_Unive...

There’s David Hall’s Mormon utopia in Vermont:

http://www.newvistasfoundation.org/

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.

Charter 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/

Also in the Amazon, but a few decades later, the Jari project had some aspects in common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jari_project

Henry 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/...) or this article (https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/religion/the-dark-le...) for a popular account.

Wow.

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.

I finally understand what has inspired The Mosquito Coast movie.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mosquito_Coast

The Mosquito Coast novel?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mosquito_Coast_(novel)

Important business lesson, make sure you include locals in your business because we can always learn something new.

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