October 6, 1998

Brasilia: A Dusty Symbol

Eric Ellis, Brasilia

A cheeky Gough Whitlam once mused that Canberra had "a whiff of Brasilia" about it. Gough may have been right about many things but that wasn't one of them.

True, Brasilia and Canberra are planned, 20th-century capitals and, true again, both have lots of politicians and officials with their noses in the public trough.

But although non-Canberrans might disagree, Australia's capital has one great advantage over its once-modern Brazilian counterpart: it at least feels and functions a bit like a city.

Despite its 2 million population, Brasilia is a sprawling, faded architectural theme park, a vision more of what has been wrong with Brazil, not right. Its flaws also add up to a neat symbol of the real Brazil, a nation that's promised much but always has trouble delivering.

Australian art critic Robert Hughes described Brasilia as "a utopian horror, when it should be a symbol of power", while Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was more polite, and appropriately cosmic, when he said "the impression I get is that I'm arriving on a different planet".

With massive but empty car parks alongside massive and near-empty (for most Brazilian cities) freeways and flyovers, Brasilia was a city designed for the car at a time when most people could not afford one.

If ever a city was designed to clash with a nation's soul, Brasilia is it. Brazilians are a warm, vibrant, volatile people, who rejoice in a culture of jeito, a liberal interpretation of the law that overcomes often pointless bureaucracy.

About the only thing warm about Brasilia and its scores of stark Soviet-esque rectangular office blocks is the LA-style weather.

And among the few vibrant things that catch the eye are the occasional sunburnt park or median strip, garish night-time neons, the massive Bandeira Nacional - the huge Brazilian flag that dominates the late Brazilian architect and national hero Oscar Niemeyer's Three Powers Square - and the many drive-in McDonald's that sprinkle Brasilia. (Even the Golden Arches are housed in buildings that wouldn't be embarrassed by Brezhnev's Moscow.)

"You've got to know where to go," says Spiros Scliros, a native of Mildura, who has just opened a bar, El Greco, on the banks of Lake Paranoa, and has invested in a big tourist development nearby.

"This place has great potential," Spiros says, unwittingly mimicking Brazil's great modern refrain.

It all probably looked good in the 1950s when many of the world's intellectuals were flirting with international socialism's New Society. But even then, it probably looked better on paper, and obvious did to UNESCO when it made it a World Heritage Site in 1987.

Take the Catedral, representing Christ's Crown of Thorns in a confection of massive curved concrete columns punctuated by long rectangular windows designed to let in natural light.

But inside the stunning interior, it's dark because the windows don't seem to have been cleaned since Niemeyer stopped work in the 1960s - a curious omission in this markedly Catholic country.

Canberra has suburbs, often named after former Prime Ministers like Chifley and Curtin. Given Brazil's turbulent political history of corruption and generals who can't stay in their barracks, is it any wonder Brasilia's barrios, or suburbs, have code-names?

Try getting around Brasilia when someone tells you their address is CLN 110 BLA s203.

That means Commercial Local Norte, Quadra 110, Bloco A, Sala 203, which happens to be the address of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso's Social Democratic Party.

Still confused?

Not Vanessa Santos, 24-year-old receptionist at Brasilia's flagship Hotel Nacional.

"We don't have barrios. I like that, it's much better organised this way.`

But many other Brazilians have been confused for 38 years, when then President Juscelino Kubitschek, or JK as he was known (his tomb is one of Brasilia's more interesting features) moved the capital here from Rio.

Thousands of Brazilian civil servants fell into a funk, not immediately sharing JK's vision that Brasilia, stuck out on the hot savannah Shaped like an aeroplane, Brasilia became a symbol but not quite the one JK had in mind. half-way to the Amazon jungle, would symbolise Brazil as a Country of the Future, a new superpower.

Indeed, so disenchanted have Brazilian funcionarios been with Brasilia that it became probably Brazil's most expensive city, because officials are paid double their salaries to live here.

Shaped like an aeroplane - its two sides are called asas, or wings - Brasilia became a symbol but not quite the one JK had in mind.

The city cost so much to build that Brazil went in hock to international banks, precipitating the vicious hyper-inflation and debt default cycle that current President Cardoso has only recently pulled the country out of. Despite the cost the city is still dusty, although to be fair Brasilia is no dirtier than Rio or Sao Paulo or any other throbbing developing world metropolis.

But the incongruity of Brasilia's uneven freeways, potholes, fetid canals and litter is in sharper focus when the national psyche regards it as futuristic and immaculate. And it has speed humps, this in the nation that spawned Fittipaldi, Piquet and Senna.

But the years have dimmed Brazilian opposition to their capital and even non-Brasilians have developed a certain fondness for the place. The man I sat next to on the Varig flight from Sao Paulo gazed wistfully out the window as the plane approached the capital and sighed, "Ah, Brasilia, Brasilia".

In a characteristic they share with Canberrans, locals never tire of saying how good it is to live here, how it's quiet, there's plenty of space, no crime, that the infrastructure is the best in the country and it's a great place to raise a family.

Modern history is littered with the urban translation of runaway political egos that lose something in practical translation - India's New Delhi and Chandigar, Pakistan's Islamabad, North Korea's Pyongyang, Britain's Milton Keynes and any number of ex-Soviet cities. Even Canberra.

In that vein, one is immediately reminded of the recent projects of Malaysia's embattled Dr Mahathir - the Petronas Towers, the Multi-Media Super-Corridor, the new capital Putrajaya.

When he stops beating up on Anwar Ibrahim, Dr M. might wish to take a sobering visit to Brasilia. It, too, looked good on paper. In 1960.