Fordlandia – The failure of Henry Ford's utopian city in the Amazon
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Re: Fordlandia – The failure of Henry Ford's utopian city in the Amazon
#2There's a good overview--albeit a much more pessimistic one--of Fordlandia in Bill Bryson's book _1927_.
Re: Fordlandia – The failure of Henry Ford's utopian city in the Amazon
#3Great soundtrack, too, by Jóhann Jóhannson: https://open.spotify.com/album/2I4uGgkMgN3UGE8ZQjCMjB
Re: Fordlandia – The failure of Henry Ford's utopian city in the Amazon
#4Not to latch on a minor turn of phrase, but it is a shame we've replaced the "employee relations office" with "human resources".
Re: Fordlandia – The failure of Henry Ford's utopian city in the Amazon
#5I recently read Grandin's book after learning about this from a Priceonomics article. It's fascinating not just for the way that it ultimately failed, but also the level of power and influence that Henry Ford had at the time to be able to do it at all...
The Ford Company was privately held, and what Henry Ford said, went. Enormous amounts of time, money, and manpower went into developing this colony, on the back of ideology as much as the promise of economic return.
The closest examples I can think of in modern times for this kind of project are in folks like Musk and Allen (and his Vulcan real estate development group), but they are much more capitalistic in motivation.
Re: Fordlandia – The failure of Henry Ford's utopian city in the Amazon
#6Great soundtrack, too, by Jóhann Jóhannson: https://open.spotify.com/album/2I4uGgkMgN3UGE8ZQjCMjB
I came here to suggest the same album. Here's the artist's page for it: http://www.johannjohannsson.com/discography/fordlandia/
And this is nitpicking, but you did include the accents ;-) — it's Jóhannsson, with two Ses. (It's basically "Jóhann's son".)
Re: Fordlandia – The failure of Henry Ford's utopian city in the Amazon
#7I recently read Grandin's book after learning about this from a Priceonomics article. It's fascinating not just for the way that it ultimately failed, but also the level of power and influence that Henry Ford had at the time to be able to do it at all... The Ford Company was privately held, and what Henry Ford said, went. Enormous amounts of time, money, and manpower went into developing this colony, on the back of i…
I remember reading in an old issue of National Geographic magazine, about a similar project, also in the Amazon region, IIRC, by the American billionaire Daniel Ludwig.
Googled and found it:
Re: Fordlandia – The failure of Henry Ford's utopian city in the Amazon
#8Another example of how culture eats strategy for breakfast
Ford wanted to make Fordlandia a model american city, forgetting about the culture of those brazilians he was employing
It also seems he never asked the locals how to plant rubber trees. And even though it was "in the Amazon" it might have been a bad place for the rubber trees
Re: Fordlandia – The failure of Henry Ford's utopian city in the Amazon
#9He planned a eutopia, and ended up with a utopia instead.
Re: Fordlandia – The failure of Henry Ford's utopian city in the Amazon
#10I recently read Grandin's book after learning about this from a Priceonomics article. It's fascinating not just for the way that it ultimately failed, but also the level of power and influence that Henry Ford had at the time to be able to do it at all... The Ford Company was privately held, and what Henry Ford said, went. Enormous amounts of time, money, and manpower went into developing this colony, on the back of i…
I have heard that pre-WW1, pre-WW2, and pre-atom bomb, there was a culture of hopefulness and idealism that we could soon cure all humanity's ills with technology and progress.
Unfortunately, those events served to at least partially extinguish that dream.