The Reality of Brasilia -- a failure
丘延亮
The Reality of Brasília -- a failure
Brasília was a failure in many ways. The city did not turn out the way the planners intended and is not thought of very highly by either its own inhabitants or other Brazilians. The construction of the city produced a debt of over 2 billion dollars. Massive inflation in the 1960's, fueled by the proliferation of paper money, gave the military a good reason to take over the government and ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985.
Many of Costa's ideas for the Pilot Plan were failures from the beginning. They may have been good ideas in theory, but in reality they could never work. There has been a recent gentrification in much of the Pilot Plan, putting the housing there even further out of reach of the common worker than before. The superblocks, intended to be small communities in themselves, foster almost none of the community Costa and Niemeyer intended. The complaints against the buildings themselves is that there is no individuality to them, and that the apartments themselves are unchangeable.
There is very little casual social interaction in the Pilot Plan. There are no convenient meeting places, therefore people must arrange for meetings in their own homes, a very undesirable location for both parties involved. The Pilot Plan was built for the unrestricted movement of the automobile, therefore it is without street corners. The traditional street corner society is dead and there are no urban crowds in Brasília. New residents in the city are easily disoriented because of the lack of visual cues with which to navigate about the city with. Trying to find a particular address can be difficult because so much of the city looks the same.
Costa had intended the intersection of the two axis to have an area which would be much like the streets of Venice, with pedestrians strolling about and vendors hawking their goods. Kubitschek was in such a hurry to build Brasilia that this intimate part of the Plan was ommitted in the construction of the city, taking away any hopes of a truly pedestrian area in Brasília.
Brasília was a city built for the car, not the pedestrian. Accident rate in the Pilot Plan are five times higher than rates in North America. There are few opportunities for people to walk anywhere because the city has only superhighways. Crossing these highways is especially dangerous for the pedestrian. Although there are some underground crosswalks, they are poorly lit and a haven for muggers. It is estimated that at least one person a week is struck and killed attempting to cross a highway(Wright and Turkienicz, 1988).
A major complaint among residents of the Pilot Plan is that they have only home and work. There are no centralized meeting places for leisure time. The city is very divided into sectors, and there are almost no multi-use areas. There are sectors for everything, like embassies, police departments, fire departments, government car repair shops, private car repair shops, sports facilities, warehouses, military activities, clubs, schools and churches. Travel between these sectors can be very difficult, especially for a pedestrian. Most government buildings have their own shops and restaurants, but, because of the nature of the city, if a service is not available in the building, it could be several miles away. This strict division of the city discourages the casual errand, making the city a difficult place to live in.
There have been some attempts to make Brasília a more congenial city. Vendors often travel around with carts or bikes, selling their goods in superblocks and other areas, but this helps only a small bit in the attempt to make Brasília a nicer place to live.
Brasília is widely known as the "three day city" (Brunn and Williams, 1993), as many of its wealthier workers spend only Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday working in Brasília, and then jet to the more social cities like Rio and Sao Paulo for extended weekends. This only furthers the view of Brasília as an unpopular city. For one Brazilian's critique of Brasília, click here.
Brasília was a success on two fronts. Firstly, the construction of the city unified Brazil and provided Brazilians with a source of pride and a symbol of hope. The speed necessary to construct the city in the short amount of time allowed focused the countrys energy and showed Brazilians what they were capable of. There now seems to be a shift from Brasília being the core of the Federal District to it becoming more of the symbolic capital city it was intended to be as the satellite towns grow more and more self-sufficient of the Pilot Plan(Wright and Turkienicz, 1988). Soon, Brasília might become a suburb of the satellite towns it spawned. Secondly, Brasília's location was an even greater success. The city not only connected the rest of the country together with it's central location and superb highwy network, but it provided a growth center for Brazil to expand westward and to tap it's vast interior resources.
Overall, Brasília was a failure. Perhaps the greatest criticism of Brasília is that it is a culturally inappropriate city. Brasília is based upon European ideas, not Brazilian ones. Brasília was built for the automobile in a society where the automobile is still a status symbol. The social disparities clearly evident in Brazilian society are much to great for any idealistic city to overcome. The modernist view that an ideal city would produce an ideal society is clearly objectional, the modernist view did not take into account the human aspect a city, and therefore failed. To quote Paul Forster in "Capital of Dreams", "Perhaps if they had taken note of Frank Lloyd Wright, who wrote in 1932 that 'Architectural values are human values or they are not valuable', the city would be more suitable for pleasant living rather than efficient working."(Forster, 1986).