Brasilia’s bow and arrow shape seen from above

Seen from the air, Brasilia appears variously as an aircraft, a cross or – more poetically – a bow firing an arrow into the mainly featureless and empty savannah that surrounds the city.

The construction of Brazil’s capital – 720 miles from Rio de Janeiro, the previous seat of government – was ordered in 1956 by Juscelino Kubitschek, then president. The city was inaugurated on April 21 1960 after less than four years of feverish work. Always controversial, it was designed by urban planner Lucio Costa and architect-in-chief Oscar Niemeyer to make a clean break with the chaos characteristic of the country’s cities and the class divisions that underpinned them.

This month Brasilia began celebrating next year’s 50th anniversary. Today’s unprecedented national prosperity will ensure that the 2010 party will be the most extravagant in the city’s short history. The 2.5m residents of the federal district that contains Brasilia now enjoy the country’s highest literacy rates, best roads and highest average incomes, despite the inevitable growth of a ring of shanty towns, or favelas, away from its prosperous core of retro-futuristic modern architecture.

Brasilia was not the first capital to be designed from scratch. Planned at the end of the 18th century, Washington, DC, was the fulfilment of article one of the US constitution and provided for a national capital distinct from the states, as well as a location that was considered more secure than Philadelphia. The site of Canberra was selected in 1908 as a compromise between the great Australian rivals Sydney and Melbourne.

And today a slew of new cities is being raised in locations such as China and the Middle East. Astana – a work in progress that is the new capital of Kazakhstan – has a population of 700,000 and has provided a blank canvas for architects such as Norman Foster. But Brasilia can surely lay claim to being the most ambitious urban creation. The US capital was sited next to an existing settlement (Georgetown) and Canberra – although it is now Australia’s biggest inland city – is an easy morning’s drive from Sydney. Set against this, Brasilia was both the engine that opened up a vast, virtually empty, tract of central Brazil and – at its inception, at least – a piece of particularly Brazilian social engineering.

“Brasilia was thought out so that the standard elements of a traditional city would disappear,” says Nicola Goretti, 47, an Italian architect who has lived in Brasilia for the past nine years. “The centre has no corners or crossroads. Streets are numbered, not named. While traditional cities contain open spaces hemmed in by continuous construction, Brasilia is the reverse: there is a sense of limitless space punctuated by buildings. This idea is reinforced by the large number of apartment buildings built on stilts, with no ground floor, which often gives you surprising, unobstructed views.”

Costa said he wanted the new capital to be “full of dignity and noble intentions at once lyrical and functional”. Goretti takes the view that it could not have existed without the example of Washington, DC: “Costa was familiar with the National Mall and you can see how it found a Brazilian echo in his Eixo Monumental. He was intrigued by the layout of American downtowns in general and their relationship with suburbia.”

The construction that was unveiled to the world in 1960 was the beginning of the aircraft shape, termed the Plano Piloto. In time it grew to feature identikit ministries and shopping centres, plus the office of Brazil’s president, fronting a broad esplanade – the Eixo Monumental – in what approximates to the fuselage. The National Congress, looking more than anything like a landing pad for two giant UFOs, and the pretty Itamaraty Palace, home to the foreign ministry with a façade mirrored in an ornamental pool, draw the eye. There is also Niemeyer’s landmark cathedral, the source of much pride among residents.

Meanwhile the city’s “wings” contain blocks of flats grouped around indistinguishable blocos comerciais – mini-malls containing shops and local services – which provide an early example of how the city’s residents found a way of adapting their new and unusual home to their own needs. Originally, the malls were intended to function as delivery areas, with shopfronts facing on to the green spaces that divided one from another. But the plan was inverted so car drivers could take advantage of parking in the loading areas, which in turn made it convenient for store owners to position their shopfronts towards the passing motorists. “That was inevitable,” says Goretti. “The step from lofty idea to practical reality was always going to be tricky.”

Newer residential areas such as the Lago Sul and Lago Norte neighbourhoods, across the artificial Lake Paranoá from the downtown (the “fake lake” of John Updike’s novel Brazil, an attempt by planners to make the climate less dry), fell outside the original plan. Prospective homeowners bought building plots, from 1,000 sq metres to 4,000 sq metres, and were free to let their imaginations run wild. As a result, these districts feature ersatz French châteaux, New England-inspired clapboard residences and the occasional vaguely cubist family home. The dominant style, however, is luxury hacienda, which gives the best addresses in suburban Brasilia the look of southern California. The British embassy is one of several to maintain large homes for its diplomatic staff in Lago Norte.

Although Brasilia’s population growth has now tailed off, the projected demand for single-family houses is such that a new district to the north-east of the city, containing 20 residential blocks, is due to be created. When complete, it will house 40,000 residents.

And, perhaps inevitably, Brasilia is experiencing some of the chaos that its designers tried to stave off. Costa could hardly have imagined that, almost 50 years after its creation, his capital would be home to more than 1m cars – up from 500,000 just eight years ago. Meanwhile the city’s social divisions do not only mirror those of Brazil nationally, in some ways they exceed them. According to a study commissioned by the local Correio Brasiliense newspaper, the capital now has one of the country’s biggest gaps between rich and poor; Brasilia’s poorest 10 per cent earn just 8.9 per cent of the incomes of the wealthiest 10 per cent. This year has also seen a spate of “express” kidnappings – where a relatively small ransom that a family can afford to pay is demanded – and in Lago Sul and Lago Norte burglaries are a common occurrence.

Looming on the near horizon is the biggest conundrum of all: Brasilia will soon have to decide what will become of its central district. As the country grows and prospers, the ministries that line the Eixo Monumental will become too small to house an expanding population of civil servants and federal agents. The generous spaces between buildings, so crucial to the original plan, might need to be put to use. Or Brasilia’s showpiece core could become a museum piece, the youngest preserved historical district on earth.

A source of embarrassment for the Brazilian authorities is the fact that the capital has not managed to eradicate yellow fever in its hinterland: in early 2008 a man died of the disease in a Brasilia hospital. Despite, or perhaps because of this external threat, no other city in Brazil imposes such discipline on its residents. It was designed with, and for the most part retains, a strict division into sectors: one for hotels, another for hospitals, others still for embassies, printers, dog kennels and so on. Most city arteries feature regular speed traps.

Tim Millikan, 39, a diplomat from Canberra, has had the chance to compare the Brazilian capital with his home city. “Canberra is so close to Sydney that it just didn’t need to develop and expand in the same way,” Millikan says. “It was designed to be congenial in a quite continental European fashion, with plazas where people could meet and relax, for instance.”

It might be that Brasilia’s strongest echo will be found in the grand Kazakh project of Astana, with its landmark public buildings and open vistas. Meanwhile, architectural fashion in the UK has pulled new towns in another direction altogether: “Although the English garden cities movement influenced Brasilia, the city’s monumental civic spaces are a million miles away from contemporary planned communities such as Poundbury in Dorset, south-west England, with their picturesque, townscape approach to urban design,” says Geraint Franklin, an architectural historian at English Heritage. And ultimately, no matter how revolutionary the plans, the biggest influence on a city’s evolution will be the people who live there.

Elinor Watson Rosen, originally from New York, moved to Brasilia in 1961 as a 25-year old nurse, having met a Brazilian doctor in the US. “It was tough at the beginning, rather like a Brazilian version of the Wild West,” she says. “It was the very start of Brasilia as a functioning city and the streets were full of red dust in the dry season and red mud in the rainy season.

“The city grew in piecemeal fashion, little by little, according to the master plan. It’s true that the authorities had to be flexible when they saw that the design had to be adapted. For instance, traffic lights had to be added for safety reasons, even though none were foreseen. There was no doubt that the plan was fascinating; it just wasn’t entirely functional.”

“We were pioneers,” Rosen says, referring to the generation of Brazilians – and a trickle of foreigners – who arrived in the very first years of the new capital. “It really felt that we were helping to build something positive, even utopian. Looking back, we helped to bring something important to life. I’ll always be proud of that.”