Notes on Brasilia (II)

As I’ve mentioned below, Brasília is a remarkably planned city – sort of. However, the Plano Pilot (Pilot Plan) is only one part of Brasília. The city itself has grown far more rapidly than planner Lúcio Costa, architect Oscar Niemeyer, Juscelino Kubitschek, or anybody else could have planned. When it was completed in 1960, they envisioned Brasília having 500,000 citizens by 2000. By the time 2000 rolled around, Brasília’s population was triple that, 1,500,000, and it has only and will only continue to grow. This is particularly evident in the other bairros of the city.

Firstly, the other bairros are a fair distance from the Plano Piloto proper. I stayed in a part of town called Aguas Claras, which was one of the “closest” parts outside of the Plano Piloto, and you still had to drive through 15 minutes of brush, with virtually no residents or buildings, to arrive to the Plano Piloto. This was a rather odd trip (never leaving the same incorporated city, yet driving through near-nothingness for 15-20 minutes). My guess is that, in order to keep the Plano Piloto strictly in tact, the other parts of the city have to remain a certain distance away, so that it doesn’t all blur together and lose some of its uniqueness (and make no mistake about it – Brasília is unlike any other place in the world).

However, the rapid growth has led to severe growing pains for Brasília, growing pains which have been remarkably unplanned for a city whose reputation is built around how “planned” it is. For example – there is a subway, but it is only 10 years old or so, and as you ride it from the other parts of the city towards the Plano Piloto, you go past numerous uncompleted subway stops. I’m not exactly sure for the reason for this. Again, just guessing, but I suspect that, in the need for a subway, the city decided to install the “essential” stops first (such as the stop at the beginning of the Plano Piloto, on the southern “wing” of the airplane, or the central area), while leaving the other stops in between unfinished and to be completed later. It’s not a major crisis, for the buses and taxis pick up the slack.

The planning of the newer parts of the city is much poorer, however. Buildings are popping up faster than the infrastructure can handle. My girlfriend’s godmother has lived in the Aguas Claras barrio for 10 years, and was one of the first residents in that part of the city. However, the barrio popped up so quickly that it doesn’t even have an underground sewage system. Every apartment building (all of at least 10 stories, making up for the 5-story-maximum imposed in the Plano Piloto) has no interconnected sewage system. Instead, each building has just a giant tank under it, which trucks then come by and empty. I don’t know where it goes, but in some ways, that’s not even that important. What is remarkable is that, in the most rapidly-growing part of Brasilia (buildings under construction litter the landscape – there were three separate buildings being constructed in front of my girlfriend’s godmother’s apartment alone), they lack any sewage system.

Likewise, the buses don’t go to many parts of the city outside of the main routes (unlike, say, Rio de Janeiro), making the dependency on cars even greater. Similarly, while the streets in the Plano Piloto are very clear-cut, following a quasi-grid system, outside of the Plano Piloto, they are thrown pell-mell, built wherever land is sold (thus resembling a sort of Baltimore-like system of roads).

Despite all this, Brasília isn’t some inefficient squalor. However, I quickly learned that the reputation for its strict planning really only applies to one part of the city, and the majority of the city is in reality as susceptible to the vagaries of rapid growth with undefined planning as any city in the world.