Brasília

city · earth

Brazil's capital, inaugurated on 21 April 1960, laid out by Lúcio Costa with buildings by Oscar Niemeyer, and the twentieth century's most complete test of designing a city whole. The Plano Piloto was dimensioned for a population in the hundreds of thousands; the Federal District now holds several million, and the great majority of them live outside the plan in satellite towns — several of which, including Ceilândia, began as relocations of the construction workers and squatter settlements the plan had no place for. The result is a planned core with high incomes and a serviced environment, ringed by unplanned or belatedly planned periphery, with commuting burdens falling on the outer population: retrieved analyses report the poorest decile commuting substantially longer than the richest, and household incomes in the Plano Piloto many times those in Ceilândia. Brasília did not fail to become a city. It failed to be the city that was drawn, and the difference went to the periphery.