1993 / 2158
1993
Not a surprise, Brasilia, the first big city totally funded on modernist principles, was, according to the
acclaimed Danish architect Jan Gehl, made with great artistic skill, “but not thinking about the people
who had to move around. The blocks are absolutely impossible for people, all the structure is not
made for locomotion, but to be appreciated from a helicopter. (…) These architects and engineers
didn’t know what was good for people because the tradition of how was done in the old cities wasn’t
taken into account in that time.” (MARTINI, 2016) He continues on how many architecture students
even today never had contact with the works of Jane Jacobs, but know Le Corbusier. “The education
I had in the 50’s was how Brasília is the best thing mankind has ever done. It took me years to
understand what was wrong and how to do better. I believe that many Architecture and Urban
Planning schools continue dedicated to an Architecture designed for the own architects, and not to
an Architecture as a way to make people happy and with a richer and more qualified life.” (MARTINI,
2016).
Jacobs, on the other hand, started to revert this trend in the 60’s and defended the principle that
cities need a more complex and dense diversity of uses, one that allows a mutual and constant
support, as economic as social. For her, unsuccessful urban areas are exactly the ones that lack
this kind of mutual complex support, so that the science of urban planning and the art of urban
design, in real life and real cities, should be the science and art of catalyzing and nurturing these
relationships. She also condemned the idea that a good planning is the one where every detail was
previously decided, where a community should have every meaningful activity controlled by the
planners since the beginning and kept that way, resisting to future changes (JACOBS, 1961). Even
before sustainability became a trend, her vision of an ideal big city shared values with the notion of
a “city as a living being”: it should be able to adapt and constantly evolve from its own experiences
and changes that inevitably happen with time.
Nowadays, inspired by these ideas, the self-called “new urbanism” is arising, which aims to design
new cities and retrofit the existent ones in order that in their spaces, socialization is not only easy
but also inevitable. This movement defends walkable spaces, where the use of individual motorized
transports be reduced to a minimum and there is a dense integration among all urban activities.
Furthermore, this movement seeks to favor small local business before multinational corporations
and, above all, to strengthen civic values and citizenship through a wide participation in public issues
(RICHARDS, 2007).
6. ENVIRONMENTAL ASPECTS
Urban areas create a series of environmental challenges, from the consumption of natural resources
to the subsequent generation of residues and pollution, which also contribute to social and economic
unbalances. As cities around the world grow, these problems become bigger and demand new
solutions. The challenge of planning sustainable cities is considering the dynamics of urban cities,
the fluxes of matter and energy and the role and maintenance of structures direct or indirectly
supplied by natural systems. However, the researchers’ task is not only in the use of technologies
and in a good technical plan; it is also in managing human activities and our search for prosperity
and well-being in an urban environment. It is not only in considering the relations between man and
nature but among ourselves (WESSEX, 2015).
The degraded city deprives us of the access to more natural life conditions, as much physically as
by our way of life. However, many times the claim for our “right to nature” is answered in a twisted
way. The same systems that denied us that right, also offer us it back as an exchange value (as
Léfèbvre would say), through artificial recreations in private parks, ecological condominiums or