
Brasília – Buliding a City from Scratch - vimota
https://vimota.me/writing/brasilia
======
mportela
I was born and raised in Brasília, currently living in New York. The city is
indeed unique and beautiful and building it in about 4 years is an incredible
feat, but the airplane-shaped urban design is _terrible_.

It is easy to cross the city from east-west but quite painful to do so north-
south. Things are quite far from each other, so it isn't common to simply
walk: you either drive or take a bus (and the public transportation system is
awful) even for the most mundane things. Retail suffers a lot because there is
simply not enough people walking close to stores. No day-to-day coffee shop
survives because people don't take their cars for a regular coffee (only
gourmet ones thrive). Even worse, the city is more or less sectorized
(hospitals, government buildings, hotels, industry etc are clustered in
specific zones), which drives up the number of cars in these areas.

Also, the city was planned for ~500k people, up to 1M. The metro area
currently has 3.5M inhabitants and is one of the fastest growing metro areas
in Brazil. Since the airplane sector cannot be modified, most people end up
living in dorm-cities around Brasília even though 95% of them work in the
airplane. A commute of 20-50km is pretty standard, so the traffic during rush
hours is horrific.

At the end of the day, in my opinion, the design really influences how people
behave in the city for the worse. Since I left Brasília to live in "normal"
cities, both in Brazil and abroad, I came to the conclusion that Brasília
became a failed experiment of the Brazilian modern architecture and urbanism.

Feel free to ask me anything about my hometown or even disagree with me if you
also lived in Brasília!

~~~
scurvy
My Brazilian in-laws maintain that the site of Brasilia was chosen because
it's exactly in the middle of the country and not close to the established
power cities of Rio and Sao Paulo. True?

They don't have many nice things to say about it.

~~~
mportela
I wouldn't say it was the _only_ reason but probably _one_ of them. I've also
heard that the federal government buildings were placed in a super wide avenue
[1] because even huge crowds of millions wouldn't be able to pack the street
(and, then, it would feel emptier than it really was).

Also, the very first Brazilian constitution had an article about moving the
capital to a more geographically centered place, a plan that was developed
while Brazil was an empire [2]. One could argue that the move was simply a
matter of fulfilling this constitution article.

Another reason could be that the Rio and São Paulo areas are full of mountain
chains and make the task of building a new city quite difficult.

Yet another reason is that building the capital in the São Paulo state or
Minas Gerais state would bring back old political rivalries (Brazil was
controlled by politicians by these states for decades [3]). Same for the
surrounding states. Hence, moving it to a more neutral area.

Anyway, hard to pinpoint one specific reason. The city is interesting, though,
with nice people trying to define their own cultural aspects. Unfortunately,
most Brazilians have never visited it.

[1]
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Esplanad...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Esplanada_dos_Minist%C3%A9rios%2C_Bras%C3%ADlia_DF_04_2006.jpg)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bras%C3%ADlia#Background](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bras%C3%ADlia#Background)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caf%C3%A9_com_leite_politics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caf%C3%A9_com_leite_politics)

------
qwerty456127
I've also taken a look into Wikipedia and it says

> The city's design divides it into numbered blocks as well as sectors for
> specified activities, such as the Hotel Sector, the Banking Sector, and the
> Embassy Sector.

LOL. Perhaps they should also have a groceries sector and a parks sector (as
far from the living sector as possible preferably). IMHO zoning is bullshit. I
still believe in intelligent design for cities but only as long as it actually
is intelligent, not just pretty-looking. Perhaps we could even use algorithms
to optimize the layout.

~~~
devtul
Why not prepare a petri dish with the topography of the region and let some
fungus populate it, copy the pattern as roads and mass transportation and
populate the surrounding areas.

~~~
qwerty456127
What about redundancy? Every road can be closed for construction (or by an
accident) and the city should keep functional with all the places still
accessible and without other roads overwhelmed. Can a fungus take care about
that?

------
init
The quoted article[1] mentions Berlin's Tegel airport being built in just 3 or
4 months. This is an amazing feat! Contrast that with Berlin Brandenburg
Airport that started being built in 2006 to replace Tegel and is still under
construction and massively behind schedule.

[1] [https://patrickcollison.com/fast](https://patrickcollison.com/fast)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Brandenburg_Airport](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Brandenburg_Airport)

~~~
mzehrer
To be fair it should be mentioned that only a first runway and a few
improvised buildings were created in this time frame. The Tegel Airport of
1948 ist in no way comparable to a modern airport.

~~~
jen20
The runway at Tegel was built on military orders in 90 days in order to serve
the Berlin Airlift - more of a life and death situation for the city than
opening Brandenburg!

------
Sami_Lehtinen
Egypt is doing the same: [https://theconversation.com/egypt-is-building-a-new-
capital-...](https://theconversation.com/egypt-is-building-a-new-capital-city-
from-scratch-heres-how-to-avoid-inequality-and-segregation-103402)

~~~
adventured
Indonesia as well:

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/26/indonesia-
new-...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/26/indonesia-new-capital-
city-borneo-forests-jakarta)

~~~
bane
South Korea is also attempting it, but the Constitutional Court has blocked a
complete transfer from
Seoul.[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sejong_City](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sejong_City)

Canberra is also a created capitol.

------
einpoklum
There are numerous examples over the course of history of new cities being
built from scratch by government decree. I guess some worked out better than
others.

One prominent example is Heian-Kyo, today's Kyoto:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heian-
ky%C5%8D](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heian-ky%C5%8D)

which served as the imperial capital for about 1,000 years.

------
mushufasa
Also, on the intellectual history behind the architects who designed Brasilia:
[https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-
lik...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-
state/)

~~~
vimota
Thanks for sharing that, first time I see it!

These passages and the localism movement (ie. Wrath of Gnon twitter) make me
think that maybe there are things that society should explicitly avoid
applying any lessons we learn from "Fast" projects, because they necessarily
require time to develop properly:

> “Brasilite,” as a term, also underscores how the built environment affects
> those who dwell in it. Compared to life in Rio and Sao Paulo, with their
> color and variety, the daily round in bland, repetitive, austere Brasilia
> must have resembled life in a sensory deprivation tank. The recipe for high-
> modernist urban planning, while it may have created formal order and
> functional segregation, did so at the cost of a sensorily impoverished and
> monotonous environment-an environment that inevitably took its toll on the
> spirits of its residents.

and

> First, existing structures are evolved organisms built by people trying to
> satisfy their social goals. They contain far more wisdom about people’s
> needs and desires than anybody could formally enumerate.

~~~
dasil003
I would make the same critique about all American cities with their grids and
wide roads compared to the character of old European cities. Having spent
years living in London, San Francisco, and Brasília, I definitely consider
London the superior city. But between San Francisco and Brasilia it’s not so
clear. Brasilia for all its flaws is much greener and pedestrian friendly.

~~~
mportela
Certainly Brasília is a lot greener, but I wouldn't say it's pedestrian
friendly: crosswalks requires one to deviate from the shortest route by a lot
and walking in the north-south direction is always a terrible experience. What
ameliorates this felling is when you are only walking inside of a block, but
that's a tiny part of the Brasília's usual commute.

