Brasília’s urban design limitations offer a crucial lesson for many other places in the world. By resisting the temptation to fill every square inch of space on their paper, architects and urban planners can open up possibilities for people, changing times, and spontaneous chance to co-create the living city.
The most obvious problem is a series of design choices that privilege motorists. The power of the automobile is cemented into Brasília’s principal axis, the 15-kilometer (9.3 miles) Eixo Monumental. Driving it – through green fields and past mighty monuments – is thrilling, but walking it is stymied by stretches of missing sidewalk. The urban landscape is seemingly tailored for spectacular selfies, rather than for moving one’s legs.1
In Brasília, that vision is of a life that can run only through the city’s automotive arteries. Buildings are located large distances apart, scattered along wide esplanades. Niemeyer’s masterpieces console us with their curving shapes. These are the curves, he wrote, that “we find in mountains, in the waves of the sea, in the body of the woman we love.”
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Another of Brasília’s drawbacks is its rigid functional division. This affects the city’s planning even more. During one of my first visits, I was admiring Niemeyer’s cathedral, which blossoms with its concrete pistils on the Esplanada dos Ministérios, when a young local engineer in our delegation made a telling quip: “Do you know what really doesn’t work in this city? The espresso coffee district is far from the sugar district.”
His joke revealed one of the fundamental limitations of both Costa’s Plano Piloto design and modernist urban-planning principles in general: a dogmatic zoning strategy that stifles possibilities for organic urban growth. In Brasília, you might well find yourself in a mono-functional neighborhood, perhaps consisting almost entirely of dull, tiresome hotels.2
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Fortunately, Brasília is not a lost city. The more one gets to know its inhabitants, the more one understands how, over time, life always manages to take over. For example, pousadas – small, family-run hotels – have popped up everywhere to take tourists out of the city’s traditional hotel zones.3
- 1. While municipalities across the world are today competing to make their streets safer for pedestrians and bicyclists, Brasília’s rumbling engines and screeching tires are a stark reminder of how many twentieth-century urban designers imagined a future inextricably linked to the car. Now we must struggle to overcome the visions they paved.
- 2. In other words, far from embracing complexity, Brazil’s capital rejects it, as if the city could be reduced to a formula. The mathematician and architect Christopher Alexander famously diagnosed this mistake a half-century ago in A City is Not a Tree. A metropolis cannot obey predefined hierarchies and orders, like those of a tree diagram, but should instead resemble a network of interconnected elements. By attempting to reduce urban complexity, Brasília’s designers stunted the spontaneity that is one of the most stimulating features of urban experience.
- 3. Such “urban acupuncture” initiatives bring a pinprick of pleasant chaos to Brasília’s rigid modernist design. This pattern of life prevailing – or at least surviving – in the face of top-down impositions is a central theme of Latin American history, especially among the indigenous people who have resisted social and cultural oblivion since European conquerors arrived five centuries ago.