Eugenics in the garden: architecture, medicine, and landscape from France to Latin America in the early twentieth century

Abstract

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--decades that saw the radical transformation of Latin American cities into metropolises-race and environment became social determinants of the modem utopian project of eugenics, the biological and social movement that claimed nothing less than the "improvement" of the human race. My study reveals how eugenics, fueled by an elite's fear of social degeneration in France during the Third Republic (1870-1940), moved from the realms of medicine and law to architecture and urban planning, becoming a political subtext in the building of modem Latin American nations that viewed France as a primary cultural and scientific paradigm. By bringing together science and aesthetics, this work offers an interdisciplinary study of a movement that, in its striving to create a new human ideal, found a moral guidepost in medical science, and a critical technology in architecture, urbanism, and landscape design. Analyzing eugenics as a set of practices characterized by motifs of generation/degeneration, species' survival and productivity, this dissertation is the first in-depth exploration of eugenics' influence on the construction of the built environment and its crafting of modernity.