mandag 14. februar 2011

One mans dream...



Henry Ford, one of the richest men in the world, didn't just want to be a maker of cars — he wanted to be a maker of men. He thought he could perfect society by building model factories and pristine villages to go with them. And he was pretty successful at it in Michigan. But in the jungles of Brazil, he would ultimately be defeated. In 1928, he established a prefabricated industrial town in the Amazon rainforest.
It was called "Fordlandia”.
Ford wanted his own supply of rubber for The Ford Motor Company in the US and thats the reason why he built this. Fordlandia isn't just the story of a plantation; it's a story about Ford's ego. Not one drop of latex from Fordlandia ever made it into a Ford car.
Ford basically tried to impose mass industrial production on the diversity of the jungle, but it seemed to be an impossible task, as the Amazon is one of the most complex ecological systems in the world and Ford relied mainly on indegenious workers on the plantations who had none botanical education. Ford’s vision was a replica Midwestern town, with modern plumbing, hospitals, schools, sidewalks, tennis courts and even a golf course. There would be no drink or other forms of immorality, but gardening for all and chaste dances every week. The workers where given something which for them where unfamiliar food such as hamburgers and sloppy joes, they were forced to live in American-style housing and they truly disliked the way they were treated — they had to wear ID badges at all times and work midday hours under the tropical sun and as a result; they would often refuse to work and revolt. Instead of the picket-fenced utopia in the Amazon that Mr.Ford dreamed about it turned into something complete different; Ford forbade alcohol and tobacco within the town, including inside the workers' own homes. The inhabitants circumvented this prohibition by paddling out to merchant riverboats moored beyond town jurisdiction and a settlement was established five miles upstream on the "Island of Innocence" with bars, nightclubs and brothels.
No matter how much you try to enclose people the parias in a society will allways seek out to establish theiere own reality.
Looked upon as a complete failure, Fordlandia was abandonded in 1945, due to the development of synthetic rubber.
So, conclusion; one mans utopia aint necessary the next mans…

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