5 ms·

Brasília – Buliding a City from Scratch

48 points by vimota 7y ago

init 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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!
mushufasa 7y ago
Also, on the intellectual history behind the architects who designed Brasilia: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-lik...
- vimota 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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.
    - thatfrenchguy 7y ago
      San Francisco east of golden gate park is pretty pedestrian friendly ?
Sami_Lehtinen 7y ago
Egypt is doing the same: https://theconversation.com/egypt-is-building-a-new-capital-city-from-scratch-heres-how-to-avoid-inequality-and-segregation-103402 https://theconversation.com/egypt-is-building-a-new-capital-...
- adventured 7y ago
  Indonesia as well: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/26/indonesia-new-capital-city-borneo-forests-jakarta https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/26/indonesia-new-...
  - bane 7y ago
    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.
qwerty456127 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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?
- legulere 7y ago
  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.
mportela 7y ago
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!
- danans 7y ago
  What parts of the United States remind you the most, and the least, of Brasilia?
  - mportela 7y ago
    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.
einpoklum 7y ago
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.

48 points by vimota 7y ago

init 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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!

mushufasa 7y ago

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

vimota 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
  - thatfrenchguy 7y ago
    San Francisco east of golden gate park is pretty pedestrian friendly ?

Sami_Lehtinen 7y ago

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

adventured 7y ago
Indonesia as well: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/26/indonesia-new-capital-city-borneo-forests-jakarta https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/26/indonesia-new-...
- bane 7y ago
  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.

qwerty456127 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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?
legulere 7y ago
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.

mportela 7y ago

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!

danans 7y ago
What parts of the United States remind you the most, and the least, of Brasilia?
- mportela 7y ago
  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.

einpoklum 7y ago

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.