Artigo Completo:

Taking as a starting point the understanding of space as an overlap of relations, objects and signs, this paper aims to compare the changes in the way Brasília has been used and occupied through the years. During the realization of the project, the model-blocks (107/108 and 307/308 south and their symmetric counterparts in Asa Norte) were analyzed in order to identify the subtleties in identity of the superquadras, with notes being taken concerning their particularities and a parameterization of their differences and likenesses being established. The Neighborhood Units were designed in order to meet the dwellers’ needs nearby their residences. The spontaneity of urban relations is limited by this configuration. After 53 years, Brasília keeps its structure as a project, but the way its inhabitants interact with space has changed. The flows within the city are no longer restricted to the superquadras, since they are under the direct influence of the configuration of markets, services and occupancy in satellite cities. Plano Piloto has acquired a fluid character, more often seen in urban centers with spontaneous growth. We are living a freer appropriation of Brasília. The unexpected itinerant trade and the tables on the sidewalks show man’s need to get closer, to occupy Brasília and to live it beyond what has been set in its original project. Plano Piloto is patterned, enumerated, logical, but when we look closer, it is easy to notice the fact that each superquadra is not about some “standard unit”, but is itself a unity of the different, something unique. We can conclude that Brasília is always moving, changing, as a way to resemble the many passersby who occupy it and the flows which go through changes due to external influences. The city, once so strange to its first inhabitants, so far away from the urban configuration found in the countryside, rigid and monumental, keeps reformulating its dynamics with the uses worked out therein.