Modernist Civic Space and the Case of Brasília

Is architectural modernism necessarily hostile to civic life? Or can it be said to produce civic life in new terms? This article explores the experience of the civic realm of the modernist city with regard to Brasilia, the new capital of Brazil and by far the largest city built on modernist lines. Designed by Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer in the 1950s, and inaugurated to international acclaim in 1960, it subsequently came to represent an authoritarian and inflexible urbanism that for residents was profoundly alienating or worse. Yet for all the city’s evident problems, it is productive of complex spatial experiences that are qualitatively different from those of older cities. Civic space here is by no means absent, it is argued: it merely takes different forms.