Benjamin Moser: evaluation

Transcript context

…Does Brasilia actually work as a city? If you want to keep the great unwashed at a sanitary distance and live in a little colonial island where you don’t ever have to interact with the actual country, yes. People like living there. It’s a little diplomatic island. It’s surrounded by this “green belt” which is just a bunch of scrub. It’s not like a beautiful park or anything. Then at a very, very, very great distance, you have all the poor people, millions of them. It’s quite disconcerting if you know Brazil because one of the things about Brazil that makes it both scary in certain moments, but also really dynamic in other moments, is that despite the massive class differences — which are humongous, of course, and that has a racial component as well — you’re always quite . . . If you’ve ever been to Rio, you know that right behind the fancy apartment buildings, you have the slums just right there. It’s segregated in a certain way, but it’s not really geographically segregated. So, when you go to Brasilia, and it looks like some kind of architectural drawing but nobody’s on the streets, it’s very weird. I think it’s even weirder that people like it, but, apparently, people who grow up there — I like it. I’ve been twice. [laughs]…

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