It's an interesting bit of curiosity how capital design kind of spread from France to the U.S. and then from the U.S. to Canberra. While other purpose built cities, like Brasilia had designs sourced locally.
Not to mention the government mandated cities and folks like Le Corbusier! I think the vast majority of current new city developments are government mandated (e.g. Neom, Egypts new administrative capital, many new projects going up in China, etc.)
Brasilia is a case study in the book Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott. It's a great book that digs into the whole thinking behind such grand plans and why they often fall apart.
EDIT: The quote at the start of chapter 4 (The High Modernist City) captures the Ideology of these blank-slate planners.
> Time is a fatal handicap to the baroque conception of the world: its mechanical order makes no allowances for growth, change, adaptation, and creative renewal. In short, a baroque plan was a block achievement. It must be laid out at a stroke, fixed and frozen forever, as if done overnight by Arabian nights genii. Such a plan demands an architectural despot, working for an absolute ruler, who will live long enough to complete their own conceptions. To alter this type of plan, to introduce fresh elements of another style, is to break its esthetic backbone.
Several countries in Asia are/were not only making new cities, but new Capital cities (Malaysia, Egypt, Indonesia, etc) and they have mixed results. Old city pull and inertia is so strong.
That building doesn't look appealing, I agree, but I was in Brasília a year ago, and it is a wonderfully designed city, far better than many.
You can walk to many places, apartment buildings don't block your path, there are plenty of parks, and you don't need cars for everything like in American cities.
If that's your criticism, then I wish more cities were designed, and as similar to Brasília as possible.
There are lots of planned cities that are natural experiments in this: Brasilia, Canberra, Ottawa, Abuja etc. They all show that yes, it is possible to "build it and they will come", but it's hugely expensive, takes a long, long time (decades) to get to critical mass, and produced mixed results at best, eg Brasilia's original strictly separated zoning has been widely panned as a disaster. And I'm pretty sure all of those would still suffer gravely if the capital was ever moved out.
That doesn't make the poor US city design the inevitable outcome, however. Not Just Bikes has some great videos outlining why US design is particularly shocking compared to other countries.
These turn of the century architects lived at the birth of the affordable motor vehicle. To them the motor car was no doubt a symbol of the future and of marvelous connection with the world around them not unlike how I feel about the way I have seen the internet grow in my lifetime.
Canberra today - whilst still a beautiful city is too big for itself even with only a 0.5mil populous. The city is now too large in area and choked with congestion relying on buses as the only form of public transport. There is no longer anyway the city could feasibly afford to install any supplementary public transport like light rail.
The idea of a a dispersed city is idealistic, but a dense city is functional.
In Brasilia's case the city was designed from a "bird's eye view" by an architect who didn't really understand the scale of that kind of liveable space. If you look at it out of the window of an aeroplane it looks well designed and pleasingly laid out. Walking through it at ground level, not so much.
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