Brasilia at last

I know a few people have been waiting for my comments on street life and neighbourhoods in Brasilia but my relentless schedule left no room for blogging.

I was in the city for three days, talked to a lot of people, got driven around by an unofficial guide, visited two community projects, and despite suffering a wretched cold I enjoyed myself enormously, with two memorable restaurant meals. One of the local projects left me in awe and since it seems to have transformed a neighbourhood I’ll post about it shortly.
For now though, some quick thoughts about the capital city. There seem to be a couple of myths – (i) it’s car-city (true) so nobody walks (not true); (ii) neighbourhood life was designed-out by the planners (true) and there’s no street life (not true). It’s just that Brasilia is quite unlike other cities in this country and I picked up elsewhere some strong antipathy towards it as being somehow inauthentic.

What characterises Brasilia is the demographics and the space. It’s self-evidently not organic – designed from scratch and built in the late 1950s – so you wouldn’t expect it to offer authentic Brazilian street life. But there’s not a lot wrong with what it does offer.

The city was designed as car city and it’s well spread-out. A very few of the poor have shacked-up in some of the uncertain spaces in the central district, the rest of the working people commute in on buses, sometimes travelling three hours a day or more. Accommodation costs within the central district keep these people out and this is why some people feel the centre is a kind of ghost town. I was told that indeed in the past it felt very much like that at weekends, because many of the professionals would commute by plane from other cities just for the working week. But things have changed.

Brasilia can be very hot and very dry, and it’s punishing to walk for long in these conditions (I wasn’t well enough to get out for a run, it would have finished me off). Most places you want to get to aren’t quite close enough. And yet people are out there, walking about at all times and in all parts of the central district, scurrying across the multi-lane roads through the furious traffic. I think the point is not so much that many people are walking, but how they are doing so. Most are walking very purposefully, people with intention and schedules. These are not people who are open to serendipitous encounters – this is a centre of political power and influence, and professional classes are totally dominant. The extent to which they are serviced depends on the buses.

A new metro rail service is being built, mostly but not entirely underground, and one person I spoke to was confident that this should promote social mix. I visited a couple of the ‘satellite cities’ – one was a good 70km out, which shows the remarkable gravitational pull of the centre. I was told that in these cities, most of those who work, do so in the central district, but this is changing because the satellites are growing fast and seem to be developing semi-autonomous economies. Some of them have populations of 600,000. On one trip, as we pulled away from the city centre, the urban sprawl was quite disturbing to see.

I also visited one settlement which was altogether closer – about 4 or 5km from the centre, called (I believe) Villa Planalto. This was clearly a low-income neighbourhood but apparently wealthy people are buying the residents out in a gradual process of gentrification, because of the place’s convenience for centre and airport.

It seems that work drives Brasilia. Geographic mobility is very high, I gather, as is the comparative cost of living there. On the whole, people tend not to choose Brasilia as a place they want to move to, their careers dictate their presence here, but that too is changing – apparently people are tending to stay longer now and there is less churn in the population.

My interest in the nature of the streets was sparked some time ago by James Holston’s absorbing study, The modernist city: an anthropological critique of Brasilia, published in 1989. Holston offers a devastating critique of the plano piloto, the master-plan, which I would love to quote more fully than I have time for. Essentially in the plan, he claimed, ‘the street itself had been architecturally denied and remains legally proscribed.’ Nowhere, he says, did the word ‘street’ appear in the plan. Each of the commercial sectors that alternate with the large residential blocks had a ‘via de acesso motorizado,’ a motorised service way. These ‘antistreets’ served to dismantle the traditional urban market ‘by reordering relations of commerce and residence, pedestrians and transport.’ The theory is a clear example of modernism promoting space without sociability.

Holston argues that the design of Brasilia ‘accomplishes a radical functional differentiation of commercial space and thereby of exchange: streets have become entirely identified with the functions of transport and supply.’ Then he goes on to document how ‘the first inhabitants of Brasilia’s superquadras simply rejected the antistreet because it contradicted social practice.’ The early settlers came mostly from urban Brazil and started to convert the service backs into store fronts, thus reversing the design. ‘As a result, habit reproduced the street in practice where it had been architecturally denied.’

‘The signs of the popular street reappeared: mixed up functions (cars and people), uncoordinated signs, colors, and displays, window-shopping, sidewalk socializing, loitering, and even littering. The riot of urban codes’ Holston writes triumphantly, ‘reasserted itself in spite of the best attempts yet devised to prevent it.’

I have no doubt from what I saw, that the process identified by Holston in the 1980s has simply gathered pace. I stopped to chat to three young ladies who run a hair salon in back of one of the service blocks. People were powering around this apparently ‘hidden’ part of the neighbourhood from all sides. They told me that they have clients who come from fifteen minutes drive away, a lot from the commercial sector round the corner and many of course from the neighbourhood which their property is facing. I turned to look at it, and subsequently saw several like it. People have high quality apartments, green space, trees, shade, places to stop and chat. In several places they look like the campus of a new university. The blocks are on stilts so folk pass through readily. The geometries of movement are hardly constrained.

Besides all this though, I struggled to understand how space works in Brasilia. Partly it’s because I come from England and I like a country I can feel round me. Knowing myself to be more or less in the centre of a country the size of Brazil is a strange feeling – not necessarily unpleasant, but very odd. Then when I looked out from my hotel room window I would see numerous huge buildings but well spaced out. I would have expected this anti-density aspect of Brasilia to bother me visually, but for some reason it didn’t. From street level however, views are seldom well-framed, you don’t get enticed by what you glimpse. And I have trouble with the design of many of the buildings, because I distrust profoundly the way sheen and glass display anonymous power, but it wasn’t that. Well of course, although people were gathering here and there, they were gathering in the smallest numbers. Bustle is subdued and widely distributed, to say the least. William Whyte wrote, “The highest incidence of encounters is in the most crowded locations.” (City: rediscovering the center, 1988).

In the end, I got the feeling that more than any other city I have visited, Brasilia has to be learned. People who come here to live have to learn a way of doing so. You don’t just slot in.

Huge thanks to Tim Ireland, Spiros Scliros, and Andrea Drapier. And apologies for any errors or misinterpretations.

Comments

[Tim Ireland]

After such a brief visit to Brasília I found your analysis and observations extremely pertinent. As a new comer to Brasília, I am sure you are right about having to learn the city. But it appears eminently worthwhile. What is interesting to me is the melting pot nature of Brasília. The turn-over is much less than it used to be but that also depends on the function which the person occupies. You must come back for a longer visit and the opportunity to confirm or revise your original analysis.

[Madson Schmitz]

As a "Brasiliense" (person born in Brasilia) I was glad to see your post on the city. I have to agree with Tim Ireland that your comments on the city are really pertinent. Many times misinterpreted and disliked, this beautiful city is unlike any other place I've been. Brasilia, due to its singularity, has to be learned. But once we do so, we realize the beauty of its conception. The mix of its people, the shock between nature/trees/grass and concret/glass, the open and free space, the 'anti-street' plot designed to make traffic flow easily.... There are many aspects in the urbanistic plan that go beyond what we think one could think of when planning a city.
I believe people who live in Brasilia for a long time become different from the rest... We all observe and appreciate when something is designed for the human being. We all like when people care about us, about the 'individual'... Well, try to live in a whole city designed for you, designed for the well being, for the quality living... for the visual amusement...

[Amy Erica Smith]

Having just spent about 5 weeks in Brasília studying community organizations, I also appreciate Kevin's comments. Brasilia is certainly neither the most beautiful nor the most dynamic city in Brazil, but it has a stark, quiet prettiness and a--for me at least--surprisingly high quality of life. In part because of my exposure to the received wisdom among urban planning types, and perhaps in part because of my experience growing up with *really* pedestrian-unfriendly cities in the US, I was consistently pleasantly suprised by the people-friendliness of the city. It's absolutely built for cars, but a great deal of walking nonetheless occurs in the city. Though distances are long, some combination of planners and ordinary people seem to have done a good job of adapting the space to make it very walkable. There are plenty of wide and well-maintained sidewalks and lots of paths cutting through the very plentiful green spaces. In fact, because of the strange driving patterns (there are almost no left turns in the city, and lots and lots of u-turns) in many places you can get to the nearest supermarket faster on foot than by car.

One interesting pedestrian-oriented development is that on Sundays the largest freeway running through the center of town, the Eixo Rodoviario, is closed to vehicles and becomes a huge walk/jog/bike trail.

This isn't to say that there aren't problems. Public transit is lacking, though the new Governor Arruda has been investing in revitalizing the system. The substantial deficiencies in public transit are most hurtful for low-income residents of satellite cities who commute to work in Brasilia each day.

Also, on a purely aesthetic note, apart from some really impressive mondernist architecture among key buildings and monuments, I find the architecture in most of the city absolutely boring. The apartment blocks and neighborhood stores that make up the great majority of the city are unrelieved 1950s-70s concrete slabs, with some equally boring steel-and-glass high rises in the central business district. Ironically, much of this unrelieved concrete is under historic preservation ordinances, making it difficult for building owners to adapt the built environment to make it more what we today might call people-friendly.

[Amy Erica Smith]

PS I also intended to post a link to a photo set on flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/amyerica/sets/72157600857074545/