Moving capital cities

Press, 15 August 1988, Page 20

Moving capital cities

CHILE’S General Augusto Pinochet thinks his country needs a new capital to go with the new democracy he has sort-of-promised for 1990. He has just chosen the plans for a SUS4OM congressional building in Valparaiso, a down-at-heel port 128 km from the present capital, Santiago. With SUSIB.S billion of foreign debt on its hands, Chile might have better uses for its money; but Valparaiso is both the general’s birthplace and a spot where he could use a boost in the polls. Leaders have been moving this capitals for much the same reasons since history’s champion uprooter, Peter the Great, shifted from Moscow to St Petersburg. They want to escape the evils of the old city (which in Peter’s case included uncomfortably powerful religious leaders), and to build their own memorials.

General Pinochet’s neighbour, Argentina’s President Raul Alfonsin, harbours an eccentric whim to move the capital from Buenos Aires, where one in four Argentines live, to wind-swept Patagonia, where just 2 per cent of them do. The sophisticated residents of Buenos Aires are appalled, which is part of Mr Alfosin’s plan: he hopes many bureaucrats will not follow the government 960 km south to a

new $4.5 billion capital at Viedma.

Mr Alfonsin says the move will help to develop a desolate region of sheep, sea-lions, penguins and Welsh immigrants. Bankers are less than keen.

The populist Peronists, strong in Buenos Aires, for once resist more public spending, saying the world’s third-biggest debtor cannot afford a new capital. For the time being their opposition has put the plan on ice.

The Government that founded Brasilia did not have it much easier, nearly 30 years ago. The new Brazilian capital’s remoteness, lack of culture and Stalinist layout were almost universally abhorred. These days, residents rave about it.

Brasilia is a great place to raise children, they say, free of crime, crowding and smog of Rio or Sao Paulo. To be sure, neither the city nor the economic boost for Brazil’s interior have lived up to expectations. Shantytowns fester on its fringes. But terrific weather and swimming pools — some with artificial waves — provide the imaginative with an inland Copacabana. Nobody claims Brasilia is interesting. Boredom is the plague of new capitals: half the size of Arlington cemetery and twice as dead, goes the old joke. Even

Australians in their bureaucrats’ heaven admit that Canberra feels a mite provincial. Legislators are accused of being cut off from the problems of the country’s sheep. Yet rulers go on trying. Pakistan’s soldiers wanted to reclaim their Government from Karachi’s businessmen, so they built the yawner of Islamabad next to the cantonment at Rawalpindi. The Nigerians cannot afford to quit the sweaty unpleasantness of Lagos by actually making the long-planned move 480 km northeast to waterless Abuja. For 20 years Tanzania has struggled to shift away from Arabised Dar es Salaam to the authentically African, and bone-dry, hills of Dodoma.

In Malawi, President-for-Life Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda has pulled off black Africa’s one successful capital movement, away from Blantyre. In the early 1970 s the South Africans rewarded him for diplomatic support by plonking a gleaming new capital at Lilongwe in the desolation of the bush.

White-gloved policemen direct traffic; banners urging long life to Kamuzu drape its buildings; the curfew is at 9 p.m. But then even Washington, D.C., was mocked by Dickens as “the city of magnificent intentions.” Copyright — "The Economist”