Brasília – Buliding a City from Scratch | Hacker News Reader

Brasília – Buliding a City from Scratch

vimota.me

48 pointsvimota34 comments

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!

What parts of the United States remind you the most, and the least, of Brasilia?

I haven't traveled enough around the US to be able to give you an appropriate answer. I'd say Washington DC share some characteristics (federal capital, planned city etc) but it's still a "normal" city in my opinion: you can walk through it, buildings are in old-style architecture, there are people on the streets...

Probably, the older cities, such as Boston and even downtown NYC are quite different from what I was used to in Brasília. There is less urban planning and more organic growth.

People often compare Brasilia to an airplane, this is common even among locals. But Lúcio Costa — the mastermind behind Brasília's urban project — used to compare Brasilia to a butterfly, not an airplane.

This is one of the most debated things in Brasília. The current understanding is that the design is neither an airplane nor a butterfly, but simply a cross adapted to the topography of the region [1]. The confusion comes from the words "Plano Piloto" (literally, "pilot plan" or "pilot design"). The butterfly metaphor, apparently, was a lyrical comment by Lúcio Costa, not a literal source of inspiration. Anyway, the intersections do resemble butterfly wings [2].

[1] https://g1.globo.com/df/distrito-federal/noticia/2019/06/04/... (Portuguese only)

[2] https://www.dronebrasilia.com/assets/img/portfolio/agosto201...

Sure, it wasn't a formal inspiration, they're all valid. Each generation seems to choose symbols and images that resonate more with them.

Agreed

This is the case for most US cities. It sucks.

> one of the fastest growing metro areas in Brazil.

So it's succeeding in spite of its faults? Or would it be growing even faster if it were set up better?

It's growth is mainly driven by migration from other states by people attracted by the high quality of life (highest in the country) and high-paying government jobs.

However, the designed neighborhoods are currently noble areas where only rich people can afford renting/buying apartments. Poor families are forced to live far from the city center (think 2-3 hours by bus) in dangerous places controlled by organized crime. For instance, Sol Nascente will most likely become the largest favela in Brazil (even larger than the ones in Rio since it can grow without being limited by surrounding mountains).

[1] https://epoca.globo.com/sol-nascente-favela-de-brasilia-que-... (Portuguese only)

That's correct, the city was designed to house high paying government workers and politicians, still like this since the growth is controlled by the government so house development does not meet the demand. People that can't afford living there go to more dangerous and poor cities around Brasília. The city is also not designed for pedestrians and does not have a good metro system. Brasilia is unique but it also shows the worst from Brasil.

Brazil is a big country with a big and centralizing government. The national capital gets a lot of well-paid federal jobs - politicians, their staff, a huge chunk of the government bureaucracy.

With that sort of boost, any city would trive.

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.

True. Rio used to be the capital, and the many revolts were one if the reasons. The middle of the country was also very unpopulated, so the location was chosen more or less as a “middle of the road” to incentivize development

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...

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

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

North-south painful? Haven't you swapped the axes? North-south is the axis which the the Eixão lies on, which is a three lane express way. Meanwhile, every day around both noon and evening all the streets and roads on the east-west axis will be crammed with cars, to the point of blocking the roundabouts, because most of them are single lane roads chockful with roundabouts and pedestrian crossing.

Edit: changed, from "pedestrian way" to "pedestrian crossing."

Oops, my bad. North-south is the good flow, east-west is the shitty one indeed!

PS: Swap east-west and north-south. North-south is the good flow, east-west is the shitty one.

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.

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.

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?

Zoning can also be a good thing, e.g. for keeping loud factories away from residential areas. The problem is more if your zoning regulations don’t allow for mixed use development.

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

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

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.

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!

Egypt is doing the same: https://theconversation.com/egypt-is-building-a-new-capital-...

Indonesia as well:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/26/indonesia-new-...

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

Canberra is also a created capitol.

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

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

Also, on the intellectual history behind the architects who designed Brasilia: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-lik...

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.

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.

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.

San Francisco east of golden gate park is pretty pedestrian friendly ?

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