Die größte Stadt, die vor 100 Jahren noch nicht existierte. Brasília, die Hauptstadt Brasiliens, mit 3 Millionen Einwohnern.

Shenzhen (18 million) is by far the biggest city that didn’t exist 100 years ago.

I guess we’re not counting it because there was a small fishing village, but it certainly wasn’t a city.

Under 5000 people lived in Shenzhen in 1950. Only around 50k in 1979.

Honestly would have thought that it would be some new city in China

There are plenty of bigger cities that didn’t exist 100 years ago (in China and the Gulf States alone)

>I experienced the dash of modernisms very dramatically and indeed participated in it, when I visited Brazil in August 1987 to discuss this book. My first stop was Brasilia, the capital city that was created ex nihilo by fiat of President Kubitschek, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in the exact geographical center of the country. It was planned and designed by Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, left-wing disciples of[ Le Corbusier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier).

>From the air, Brasi!Ia looked dynamic and exciting: in fact, it was built to resemble the jet plane from which I (and virtually all other visitors) first observed It. From the ground level, however, where people actually live and work, it is one of the most dismal cities in the world.

>This is not the place for a detailed account of Brasilia’s design, but one’s overall feeling-confirmed by every Brazilian I met-is of immense empty spaces in which the individual feels lost, as alone as a man on the moon. There is a deliberate absence of public space in which people can meet and talk, or simply look at each other and hang around. The great tradition of Latin urbanism, in which city life is organized around a *plaza mayor*, is explicitly rejected.

>Brasilia’s design might have made perfect sense for the capital of a military dictatorship, ruled by generals who wanted the people kept at a distance, kept apart and kept down. As the capital of a democracy, however, it is a scandal. If Brazil is going to stay democratic, I argued in public discussions and the mass media, it needs democratic public space where people can come and assemble freely from all over the country, to talk to each other and address their government-because, in a democracy, it is after all their government-and debate their needs and desires, and communicate their will.

Marshall Berman, in the preface to [All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_That_Is_Solid_Melts_into_Air)