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Brasilia was an attempt to advance a nation by rejecting history and embracing new ideas and technologies based on ideologies of a utopian future: making the planned city a useful context through which to analyse modernism and its inherent failures. It is evident that the philosophies of Brasilia’s designers, Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, have led to a breakdown in autonomy between perceived ideas of utopia and the desires of its inhabitants.
The strict ordering and bureaucratic regulations that control life within the planned city have led to social segregation, where people are denied the freedom that modernism promised. The city has been meticulously structured, rooted in the principles of modernism that control any spontaneous event.
The concepts of functionality and rationalism that are fixed in modernism can be useful in planning civic spaces. However, rejection of historical context and denial of freedom of thought of its occupants has led to a refusal to accept these theories as a way of living.