The wagon beside the airplane: the right to the metropolitan city in Brasília

Abstract

The theory of combined and uneven development helps to understand the metropolization process of Brasília. This nexus, in addition to the socioeconomic dimensions that are part of that theory, has an urban dimension: an urban design guided by the ideas of the modern movement was inscribed, in the form of an airplane, as the originating matrix of the territory that became a metropolis. Derivations of the peripheral metropolization have not accompanied it and have made a paradoxical counterpoint: they emerge much later and, the more recent they are, the more old-fashioned and archaic they are configured, seeming to belong to periods before the modern urbanism of the 20th century, coexisting in a functional manner in the metropolitan territory. In the article, we use the binomial Wagon & Airplane to reflect on policies that reproduce urban precariousness patterns, expressed in the first term; they are part of the same process that ensures privileges to well-equipped areas of the metropolis, which are expressed in the second term.