Brazil’s bold experiment in creating a new capital city from scratch in five years, Brasília, won much praise as a modern architectural marvel upon its inauguration in 1960. With project town planner Lúcio Costa’s radical, artistic urban plan (the Plano Piloto) for the central city in the shape of a bird in flight⦑a⦒, and the symmetry and spacing of architect Oscar Niemeyer’s stark white, curvilinear, futuristic structures with sculptural silhouettes⦑b⦒, Brasília was heralded as “a modern utopia (expressing) optimism and trust in the future” and a demonstration of Brazil’s capacity for modernising progress (Dr Steffen Lehmann, cited in ‘60 Years Ago, The Modernist City of Brasília Was Built From Scratch’, Stefanie Waldek, AD, 21-Aug-2020, www.architecturaldigest.com).
Bland homogeneity?
Detractors of the futuristic urban ‘miracle’ in Brazil’s central west however have been many and varied. Brasília’s inner city residential zones comprising superquadras (“superblocks”) were characterised by French writer Simone de Beauvoir as all exuding “the same air of elegant monotony”. The city’s large open lawns, plazas, and fields have been likened to wastelands. Structures intended 65 years ago to represent the future, now crumbling, accentuate this sense of decay and obsolescence (‘Brasília, national capital, Brazil’, Britannica, www.britannica.com)
↟ Highway hell? (Photo: BBC)The car is king!
In a city built for the automobile, Brasília is uber-pedestrian-unfriendly. “With long distances and harrowing six-lane highways connected by spaghetti junctions, Brasília presents challenges for walkers” (Lonely Planet) – which is good news at least for the city’s car hire firms! Transport options for the non-driver in Brasília have been meagre…the subway was basically an afterthought; footpaths are confined to a scanty few, where they exist they are dwarfed by the criss-crossing gargantuan highways; the first set of traffic lights in Brasília didn’t get installed until the 1970s (‘Lost and Found – Brasília’, Blueprint, ABC Radio (broadcast 21-Jan-2022).
Source: airshipdaily.comA lack of a pulse?
Some critics point to the Brasília lifestyle’s deficit in “humanness”. The city centre is bereft of “the typical street life of other traditional Brazilian cities”. It is merely a place to work…night life is unstimulating, city workers tend not to hang around after hours, few stay to “live and play in the Pilot Plan” centre (Kobi Karp in Waldek). According to Prof. Ricky Burdett (LSE), Brasília flounders on the basics of what constitutes a city…no messy streets, no people living above shops, no mixed use neighbourhoods – rather it’s “a sort of office campus for a government” (‘Niemeyer’s Brasilia: Does it work as a city?”, Robin Banerji, BBC News, 06-Dec-2012, www.bbc.com). The scope for improvement is hamstrung as a result of restrictions on development and expansion in accordance with the city’s world heritage covenants.
↟ Taguatinga, one of Brasilia’s irregular satellites (Photo: Frederico Holanda/ Researchgate)The creation of two segregated communities
Overpopulation is part of the Brasília problem…designed as a city for 500,000 people, it has five times that many residents today, hence the growth of satellite towns which the poorer residents of Brasília have been shunted into⦑c⦒. Allocation of resources is another…whereas in the centre everything was zoned, over-organised city blocks to the point of impracticality, the satellite towns have been neglected and left in a disorganised state without adequate infrastructure, services and civic spaces (Britannica; ‘Lost and Found – Brasília’). Accentuating the imbalance between the centre and the outliers, only 300,000 of the 2.5 million Brasiliense live in the Pilot Plan area where the jobs are!
Source: modern diplomacy.eu ”A monument to technocratic rationalism”
One of the biggest savagings of Brasília’s architectural merit came from trenchant art critic Robert Hughes who brutally summed up the capital city’s shortcomings: “a ceremonial slum…this is what you get when you think in terms of space rather than place and about single rather than multiple meanings, when you design for political aspirations and not real human needs. Miles of jerry-built, platonic nowhere infested with Volkswagens” (The Shock of the New, Ep. 4 (BBC documentary, 1980). The “utopian” city of Niemeyer and Costa, lauded at its onset as ilha da fantasia has acquired other, less glowing epithets such as “concrete carbuncle” (‘fast:track’, BBC News). For Jane Jacobs (Death and Life of American Cities, the failure of Brasília and other such utopian dreamscapes was in making the mistake of trying to substitute art for life – with unworkable consequences for the inhabitants. Brasília has also come under fire on environmental grounds, the impact of its footprint has contributed to the deforestation of the Amazon region.
↟ Niemeyer’s Alvorada (Presidential) Palace, Brasília (Photo: wikimapia.org) Postscript: the whole purpose of Brazil’s new capital in the interior for President Kubitschek⦑d⦒ and the urban planners was to create a modern city that avoided the excesses of Río and São Paulo (overcrowded slums, the preponderance of favelas). Costa’s “grand vision” envisaged a new urban centre that was deliberate, orderly, rational, dignified and systematic. In practice, the endgame to the myopic focus on the Plano Piloto was a city of inequality (with a good quality of life only for a minority of the inhabitants), congestion and urban sprawl (‘Inside Brazil’s ‘cautionary tale’ for utopian urbanises’, Diana Budds, Curbed, 07-Jun-2019, www.archive.curbed.com). Rather than being transformed into the shining exception, Brasília is “a mirror of Brazilian society…those with power live in a little island or cocoon. Those who don’t—which is the majority—live on the outside” (Prof. Vincente Del Rio).
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⦑a⦒ alternately it has been likened to the Crucifix, to an airplane or even to a bow and arrow
⦑b⦒ and avant-garde landscape design by Roberto B Marx
⦑c⦒ 90% of the Brasiliense, in the lower or lowest income brackets, live outside the centre in satellite towns
⦑d⦒ the politician in power who initiated the Brasília project in the mid-1950s