February 11, 2025 - 12:30 p.m. - 1:30 p.m.

The WSU Humanities Center invites faculty, students, staff, and the community to a Brown Bag presentation given by Andrew Guinn (Assistant Professor, Urban Studies and Planning) on the topic of, "Revisiting the Modernitst City: Brasilia Beyong the Pilot Plan"

Abstract: For decades, conversations among urbanists about Brasília, the capital city of Brazil that was constructed in the late 1950s, have been mostly negative. The city is held up to epitomize the hubris and failure of modernist planning and design: it is auto-oriented, exemplifies top-down governance, lacks flexibility, produces inequalities, and obliterates the conviviality of street life. For some authors, the example of Brasília is indicative of the failure of city planning in general. These critiques crystalized among US scholars in the 1980s, but they have not been seriously updated or reality-checked in subsequent decades. In this talk, I argue that Brasília deserves reconsideration by humanists and social scientists through an examination of the city’s evolution since the 1990s. I explain how and why the city became a site of equitable and inclusive innovations in city planning and urban governance, with lessons to offer to other cities.

Please RSVP for the zoom link.