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You can have bad urbanism with good architecture, and good urbanism with bad architecture

Alan Deschamps

@DechampsAlan

I kind of like the first one, ngl

23

4:42 PM • Jun 13, 2025

I like and agree with this tweet: "You can have bad urbanism with good architecture, and good urbanism with bad architecture." The two provided examples of this are (1) Brasilia and (2) what appears to be some random little street in Japan.

Brasilia is the capital of Brazil. It's a masterplanned city designed by Lúcio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer and Joaquim Cardozo in the 1950s. And it was all part of a plan to move the capital from Rio de Janeiro to a more central location in the middle of the country.

The result is some incredible architecture by Oscar Niemeyer that, for me, is emblematic of the country. Brazil was one of the first countries outside of Europe to adopt modern architecture and it's precisely for this reason that Brasilia is high on my list of places to visit. (Rio is also one of my favorite cities.)

But whenever I tell a Brazilian that I want to visit the city, the usual response is, “Why?” I then have to explain that it’s because of Niemeyer and the architecture, and then they say, “Oh, okay, that makes sense. But besides the architecture, there isn’t much else to see or do there.”

Part of the reason for this could be because the city has objectively bad urbanism. When you look at it in plan view, the layout of the city resembles a plane or bird in flight, and that is, I guess, symbolically cool when you view it on Google Maps. But on the ground, cities are not at their best when they're designed around abstract symbols.

They're at their best when they're designed around people. And this is what example number two does well. The architecture is ugly and nondescript, but the street is narrow, the road is shared, and the buildings contain a mix of fine-grained uses.

It's a dead simple approach, but it works — really well. It's good urbanism.

Cover photo by Thandy Yung on Unsplash