Brasilia and the Limits of Planning

(by Peter Hartman)

Brasilia, Brasil's national capital, was planned and built on the tabula rasa of the empty landscape of the Planalta Central several hundred miles inland from the existing capital at Rio de Janiero. A bold experiment. A complete brand-new city, master-planned along rational, modernist principles that would preclude the problems of older, organic more chaotic cities with their problems of slums, congestion, unemployment. It is the largest city in the world that did not exist at the beginning of the 20^th century.

The city is eminently readable. Laid out along two intersecting major axis – the E-W monumental axis that contains all the major government ministeries, their administrative support buildings, culminating in the legislative chambers and presidential palace. The N-S road axis contains the residential superblocks of individual 3-to6 story housing buildings surrounded by open space. Corbusian towers in a park meet Ebenezer Howard's garden cities. Neighborhood commercial strips serve every four superblocks.

All of the buildings are widely spaced with the exception of the commercial strips. A rudimentary public bus systems assures almost exclusive use of private automobiles. This  gives an eerily empty feeling to the residential areas. The only pedestrians we saw were a few people going to their cars in the surface parking lots adjacent to the residential buildings. No one was walking along the streets, occupying the planted open spaces between  buildings, or even in the ground-floor residential lobbies. There was, however, what appeared to be a lively social life in the bars and restaurants on the commercial strip. We could imagine that this extended to the other retail establishments as well but which, being a Sunday, were closed.

Central Brasilia has not changed since its inception in the 1960s. Its original form and function is jealously guarded by several layers of bureaucratic oversite that must approve any change or addition to the built environment in the city's original “pilot plan” area. In additon, in 1987 Brasilia was designated as a UN World Heritage Site, adding aonther layer of preservationist protection.

But Brasilia has continued to grow as civil service positions expanded along with the government and migrants arrived to staff the tertiary service sector. The original pilot plan area has a population of 200,000 in a metroplotan region of now over 3 million. The consequences of this imbalance were immediately clear as we toured the periphery where entire satellite cities have popped up in the endless plain consisting of cheek-by-jowl 30-to-40-story residential buildings. No towers in a park here. Brasilia has spawned all the traditional organic, dense, messy urbanism seen the world over. And as the pilot plan area still contains the vast majority of jobs, the extensive roadways around the capital are as jammed and impassible at rush hour as any city in the world.

Finally, even the original pilot plan area of Brasilia has changed. But paradoxically it has changed by staying the same. I was struck by the fact that even our guide, Professor Frederico Holanda of the University of Brasilia, said he lived in a new gated community about 30 km from the capital because he could not afford a residence in the pilot plan area. The original concepton of the  self-contained community had given way to an exclusively upper-income community. Everyone else lives on the periphery and endures lengthy automobile commutes. As the physical form of Brasilia has remained the same, the socioeconomics have dramatically shifted towards upper-income households, not what was envisioned in the original plan at all. So Brasilia has changed as much as it has stayed the same, indeed precisely because it has stayed the same. Today's solutiions to yesterday's problems sow the seeds of tomorrow's challenges.