I was born and raised in Brasília, currently living in New York. The city is indeed unique and beautiful and building it in about 4 years is an incredible feat, but the airplane-shaped urban design is <i>terrible</i>.<p>It is easy to cross the city from east-west but quite painful to do so north-south. Things are quite far from each other, so it isn't common to simply walk: you either drive or take a bus (and the public transportation system is awful) even for the most mundane things. Retail suffers a lot because there is simply not enough people walking close to stores. No day-to-day coffee shop survives because people don't take their cars for a regular coffee (only gourmet ones thrive). Even worse, the city is more or less sectorized (hospitals, government buildings, hotels, industry etc are clustered in specific zones), which drives up the number of cars in these areas.<p>Also, the city was planned for ~500k people, up to 1M. The metro area currently has 3.5M inhabitants and is one of the fastest growing metro areas in Brazil. Since the airplane sector cannot be modified, most people end up living in dorm-cities around Brasília even though 95% of them work in the airplane. A commute of 20-50km is pretty standard, so the traffic during rush hours is horrific.<p>At the end of the day, in my opinion, the design really influences how people behave in the city for the worse. Since I left Brasília to live in "normal" cities, both in Brazil and abroad, I came to the conclusion that Brasília became a failed experiment of the Brazilian modern architecture and urbanism.<p>Feel free to ask me anything about my hometown or even disagree with me if you also lived in Brasília!