Brasilia (slight return)

I'm going to try and describe to the best of my abilities what Brasilia is like. It is a 1950's vision of a modern city and was designed with the motorist in mind. The city is formed in the shape of a plane, hence the main town being called "Plano piloto". There is the fuselage, along which the huge "Eixo monumental" runs, surrounded by the ministeries and parliament buildings. On each wing there is an "Eixo Rodoviario" which is the main artery of traffic to and from the "centre". There is no real centre to speak of, just districts which serve some purpose or other. Nearer the meeting of the two main Eixo's where you might expect a centre to be, there is the main bus station, and around it the banking and hotel sectors. Along each wing the blocks are made up of numbers. The even hundreds are always on the east side of the Eixo Rodoviario on that wing, and the odd hundreds are on the west side. There is a south and north wing, and so if you know the address then you can find it without needing a map. For example 203S would be on the south wing, the first commercial district east of the Eixo Rodoviario about a kilometer along. What makes things harder though is that you can't turn left off any of the main roads - so you have to go past the exit, turn at a designated "Retorno" and then turn right. Taking this to its most absurd is the problem of going into town on the north wing along the Eixo Rodoviario from the East side of the wing. You have to go west underneath the Eixo, turn right onto the retorno so you are now going into town on the Eixinho West, turn off and go round both retornos until you are out of town on the Eixinho West, now do one more retorno onto the Eixo North going into town. This is probably better demonstrated by the following diagram, for which I needed all of my exemplory cartography skills to achieve the obvious clarity. Just follow the pink spots for the path of the vehicle.

There are of course cool bars and places to go in the commerical districts, but unfortunately nowhere to just walk around and peruse. I don't really want to make any subjective judgement about whether I think this is good or not, as I prefer a place with a town centre which you can walk around. People here love the way Brasilia is set up. Presumably once you know the place well you just know where you're going and you drive there and don't really feel the need to walk. The problem I have with this is twofold: Firstly, there is the obvious environmental issue of making it an absolute necessity for everyone to have a car by constructing the city like this (even if the buses were good it would be hell to get around as every shop you want to go to is miles apart from any other); secondly noone walks anywhere for fear of attack since there aren't that many people on the streets. If there were more pedestrians the whole place would be very safe to walk in, but the design of the city produces the vicious circle that noone wants to walk because noone else is.


The architecure on the Eixo Monumental is quite impressive - indeed the Cathedral is spectacular, but this is not continued in the residential or commercial districts where most of the buildings are quite delapidated, apart from in the posher areas. On the East side of the city, there is a huge lake, and you can see the truly enormous houses of the wealthy on the other side. This is another world, and demonstrates the vast difference here between rich and poor. It is one thing that makes me feel uneasy here - the tolerance of this divide by the rich. I have not had the feeling before of being in a society where I exist in a different class altogether from someone else, and that somehow there is a well defined divide between us. I don't really want to say too much on this before I am able to consider and experience it some more. You can see some pictures of Brasilia here