Tag: brasilia

• Building new cities

  On this blog, we often talk about city building in the context of doing things to help improve a city — whether that be a development project, a new public art mural, or an interesting local business. These interventions help to build a city. But even more specifically, the term has, for many, come to mean building up a city in a positive way.

  But there is another way to think about city building. You can think of it in terms of building actual new cities. We’ve spoken about some of these before, namely this one in California and this odd one in Saudi Arabia. But apparently it is becoming more common. According to The Economist, the world is now building more new cities than it has in the last 80 or so years:

  Egypt’s “New Administrative Capital” is part of a rush of city-building. Firms and governments are planning more settlements than at any time in the post-war period, with many already under construction. Ninety-one cities have been announced in the past decade, with 15 in the past year alone. In addition to its new capital in the north, Egypt is building five other cities, with plans for dozens more. India is considering eight urban hubs. Outside Baghdad, Iraq, workers have just broken ground on the first of five settlements.

  In some cases, it is being done as a solution to urban congestion. If this city is too expensive and unaffordable, just create a new one. This appears to be part of the idea with the above city outside of San Francisco. Of course, new cities can also be created for ideological reasons, or for political purposes, which was the case with Brazil’s capital city, Brasilia.

  Here, the idea was to move the federal capital away from the country’s populated southeast region to a more geographically neutral location in the middle of the country. It also turns out that seeding a new city with government institutions is a good way to get one of these started. Existing cities do, after all, benefit from network effects.

  History points to characteristics shared by successful projects. State institutions can help anchor cities, as Brasília (in Brazil) and Chandigarh (in India) showed in the 20th century. Although both have had problems, people in Brazil and India are voting with their feet. Brasília’s population is growing at 1.2% a year, more than double the national average. Chandigarh, a state capital, is now India’s fourth-richest region on a per-person basis.

  But putting money, ego, and ideology aside, when does it actually make sense to start a new city in lieu of just expanding (or addressing the problems in) the one(s) you’ve already got? Population size can’t be the only factor in determining whether a city is “full”, because Tokyo seems to do just fine as the largest metropolitan area in the world.

  If it hasn’t already been done, I think this would make for an interesting research project. Until then, there’s this (paywalled) Economist article.

  2024.05.30

• A line vs. a circle — which is the optimal urban form?

  So I guess I was wrong. I thought “The Line” in Saudia Arabia was never going to be built — at least not in its current incarnation. But apparently it is now under construction, and it is still planned to be 170 km long and house some 9 million people when it’s complete. I suppose something could happen between now and when all 170 km are complete, but I’m happy to accept that, for the time being, I was wrong.

  Now it’s time to ask ourselves what a 170 km long city would even be like. To answer that, here is a fascinating article from npc Urban Sustainability describing how mobility and urban interactions are likely to work in this kind of a linear city. And it turns out that a line is actually an optimal urban form if you’re trying to both maximize commute times and maximize the average distance between inhabitants:

  One of the most critical aspects related to The Line is distance. If its 9 million inhabitants are homogeneously distributed in the city, each km will have roughly 53,000 people. If we randomly pick two people from the city, they will be, on average, 57 km apart. Although The Line occupies only 2% of the surface of Johannesburg, if we pick two random people in Johannesburg, they are only 33 km apart. Keeping the surface fixed, a line is the contiguous urban form that maximises the distance between its inhabitants. In The Line, people are as far away from others as possible. Considering that a walkable distance is 1.0 km, in The Line, only 1.2% of the population is at walking distance from others. Active mobility is not viable in The Line since distances are too long. The plan for The Line has no cars but also gets rid of most active mobility. Although in The Line, basic needs could be satisfied within 5 min, most journeys to school, work, leisure or visiting other people will depend on public transport.

  So what would be better? Well if you’re trying to minimize the average distance between people and increase urban interactions, then the optimal form is generally the one that cities have been using ever since they were first created:

  We can think of a city called The Circle, where we take the same tall buildings as in The Line but put them next to each other, forming a circular shape. A circle that occupies the same surface as The Line (34 km²) has a radius of only 3.3 km. In The Circle, the expected distance between two random people is only 2.9 km. In The Circle, a person is at a walking distance of 24% of the population (and within 2 km, they could reach 66% of the destinations), so most of their mobility could be active. In The Circle, a high-speed rail system is unnecessary since people could walk or cycle to most places, and buses could supply the rest of the journeys. The Circle occupies roughly the same surface as Pisa, Italy, but has 50 times its population. A round urban form is the most desirable since it reduces commuting distances and the energy required for transport.

  This is one of the challenges with building large scale cities from scratch. It’s easy to become enamoured with a particular plan or symbol; whereas in reality, cities don’t care about these kinds of visual representations. They don’t care that, in plan, the city may look like an eagle (see “Helicopter Urbanism“, a term that was supposedly coined by Jan Gehl). What matters is how interactions between humans play out at street level.

  2023.06.25

• Sidewalk Labs, Uber, Lime, and the demise of urban density

  

  Today I am going to talk about 3 things that recently happened and/or that are on my mind.

  Sidewalk Labs pulled out of Toronto. I think this is sad. A lot of people have said that they’re surprised, but not surprised. The official reason is that this unprecedented environment has made it financially infeasible for them to develop the 12-acre site, while still adhering to their core principles. I don’t have any inside knowledge of the situation, but I can’t help but think that this is probably just an opportune excuse. They were getting beat up pretty badly by Toronto on all fronts, even though they had put forward an incredibly ambitious development proposal. As I said before, I can’t imagine many (or any) “conventional” developers coming forward with something like this. The last plan I saw was 1/3 non-residential, and 40% of the residential component was to be priced below market. And never mind all of the other innovations that were being contemplated.

  In other tech news, Uber just led a $170 million investment in Lime (the micromobility scooter company). I think this is smart — both from an overall mobility standpoint and, selfishly, as a shareowner of $UBER. It is being reported that this round of investment values Lime at about $510 million. This is a 79% decline from April 2019 when it raised its last round. So presumably, Uber is getting a pretty good deal here. The bet is that the urban landscape demands multi-modal transportation solutions, everything from bikes and scooters to cars and public transit. There is also an argument to be made that in the short-term, our post-pandemic world is going to gravitate toward individual mobility and away from things like public transit. I’ve heard a few people say that, as we re-open the global economy and try to maintain social distancing, we’re going to face two major mobility bottlenecks: transit and elevators. Sounds like more testing would be a prudent idea.

  Above, I was very careful to say “in the short-term” because I think the narrative that is emerging around the demise of urban density is entirely overblown. Few of us are clamoring to jump back into a mosh pit right now (perhaps a metaphorical mosh pit), but I also don’t believe that we will suddenly look to sprawling Brasilia as a source of urban inspiration. While it is true that “disease did shape architecture in the 20th century” (Alex Bozikovic wrote a good piece on this over the weekend) and that there have been oscillations in terms of how we view urbanity, I also know that this isn’t the first pandemic that our cities have lived through. The Hong Kong flu of 1968 is thought to have killed one million people around the world after, allegedly, emerging in one of the densest cities ever created. Hong Kong’s relationship with Beijing is a tenuous one right now, but it still remains one of the world’s most important global cities.

  Perhaps cities are more resilient than we give them credit for.

  Photo by Touann Gatouillat Vergos on Unsplash

  2020.05.07

• A video tour of the Niemeyer apartment building

  

  In the 1940’s, Juscelino Kubitschek invited Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer to design a new planned suburb north of Belo Horizonte called Pampulha. Kubitschek was mayor at the time and Niemeyer was a young modernist architect in his 30’s. This was the start of an important relationship.

  The “Pampulha architectural complex” was completed in 1943 and was widely praised by the international design community. It was included in a 1943 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York called “Brazil Builds.”

  This was an important exhibition for Brazilian architecture and for modernism in general because it demonstrated that the European principles of modernism were traveling (Brazil was one of the first to adopt), and they were evolving. Brazilian architects, such as Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa, had begun to regionalize it and make it their own.

  A Brazilian style of modernism was emerging.

  By 1956, Niemeyer had become a key figure in the world of modern architecture. At the same time, Juscelino Kubitschek had just become the 21st president of Brazil. Shortly after assuming the position, he would ask Niemeyer to help build a new capital city for the country. This was the birth of Brasilia. Niemeyer designed the buildings. And Costa planned its streets.

  A few years before this, Niemeyer would also return to Belo Horizonte to design the “Niemeyer apartment building” at the Praça da Liberdade in the center of the city (and pictured above). It is quintessentially Niemeyer: curved & feminine. Niemeyer despised right angles. He found them harsh and manmade. Everything that is beautiful in nature — from the mountains of Brazil to the curves of a woman — was, in his view, sinuous.

  But the other thing I really appreciate about it is how its “brise soleils” play with your perception of the building. The building is only 10 storeys. But the sun shades, which some of you may read as balconies, make it look much taller (albeit with some minuscule floor-to-floor heights). The reality is that each floor is made up of 3 breaks. And the overall effect is magical (again, see above photo).

  Here is a great video tour of the building by Maíra Lemos, which includes a walkthrough of two of the apartments (note the antechamber in the first). This entire post was to get you ready to watch it. Click here if you can’t see it below. (Also, if I made videos, I would want them to be like this one.)

  Image: Screen grab from the video

  2019.08.10

• Crypto networks and top-down urban planning

  

  Taylor Pearson recently compared crypto networks to cities and argued that the best crypto networks, much like the best cities, are formed from the bottom up. 

  The example he gives is that of Paris (bottom-up) vs. Brasilia (top-down). Paris is the hugely successful city and Brasilia is the failure of high-modernism.

  I appreciate the argument he’s making and I do agree with him on the potential of decentralization, but I couldn’t help but dig into his city example a bit further.

  The Paris we all know and love today is the result of an enormous centrally planned urban renewal exercise. Baron Haussmann carved, among many other things, long straight boulevards through Paris’ medieval fabric in order to modernize and rationalize the city.

  What makes this top-down exercise different from that of Brasilia’s? Is it simply that Haussmann was constrained by Paris’ existing and decidedly urban fabric?

  Because then we could turn our attention to New York City’s gridiron plan of 1811, which laid out – before the island of Manhattan had even fully developed – a relentless and orthogonal street network from Houston Street all the way up to 155th Street.

  Is the difference that Brasilia was planned with suburban sensibilities in mind and Manhattan was not? Or was it the restrictive Euclidean zoning that did it in for Brasilia? 

  Whatever the case may be, history suggests that some top-down planning exercises may have worked out just fine. Though to be fair, each of them was not without their share of critics.

  Photo by Rafael Leão on Unsplash

  2018.03.20

• How does your city address its streets — literally?

  

  Depending on where you live, street numbering may not be something you’ve given a lot of thought to. In Canada, and in many other places in the world, the convention is usually to start on one end of the street and count up – with even numbers on one side and odd numbers on the other.

  In many cities in the US, they’re even more rational. The streets themselves are numbered and the addresses indicate location. For example in Philadelphia, where I used to live, if you were going to let’s say 1750 Walnut Street, you would know that it’s between the cross streets of 17th Street and 18th Street. It’s a kind of hyper-rational approach, which lets you know precisely the number of blocks you need to go to get to your destination.

  But not all countries and cities are this rational.

  According to this Economist article – which a friend of mine forwarded me over the weekend – Costa Rica actually had no street numbering system until about 2012. Which means that directions were all based on landmarks: “100 metres south of the McDonald’s.” It seems almost hard to believe. But I guess that’s why ¼ of all mail was getting lost.

  Of course, there are also lots of variations in between these two extremes.

  Japan numbers its buildings, but they’re often clustered together in blocks and have no particular order or logic to them. Brasilia (Brazil) also assigns numbers based on sectors, quadrants, and blocks. And in Ireland, where I also used to live, they actually never adopted postal/zip codes. They’re one of the few developed countries in the world not to do that – though it’s coming next year.

  If your city or country has a unique numbering system or you’ve come across one in your travels, I would love to hear from you in the comment section below.

  There are obviously practical reasons to adopt an easy to understand numbering system. People need to be able to figure out where they’re going. But I would also imagine that there are spatial implications to the way you number and the way you organize your city.

  Image: Flickr

  2014.09.29