Planned and built from scratch in a span of just five years, Brasília is a truly unique city. Its plane-shaped planned city center is filled with millions of trees and hundreds of landmark buildings that provide a snapshot of mid-20th century modernism — making it a world heritage site and the largest area of listed buildings in the world.
The new federal capital was conceived as a modern, innovative urban utopia that would reflect the image of a booming country.
However, something the history books have missed is that the original plan for Brasília was to also make the city completely self-sufficient in terms of food supplies. Maria Fernanda Derntl, a professor at the University of Brasília’s Architecture and Urbanism School, uncovered new documents from the national archives that show how the ‘founding fathers’ of Brasília did not stop at the city center, and had actually planned the city to be surrounded by a massive green belt.
That area would be occupied by small rural producers, united through agricultural cooperatives that would supply food distribution centers within Brasília itself.
Although lacking in detail, the project included multiple drafts and a consolidated soil occupation plan. Its main goal was to find a sustainable way to absorb the sheer number of construction workers brought in from poor areas of the country to build the new city — most of whom would be left unemployed once the city was finished.
Ideally, one-third of the so-called candangos — as these migrant...
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