Planning for isolation? The role of urban form and function in shaping mobility in Brasília
This addresses urban planning challenges for policymakers and researchers by analyzing segregation in a planned city, though it is incremental in applying existing methods to a specific case.
The study tackled how urban form in Brasília shapes mobility and segregation, finding that segregation intensifies at finer scales (from 0.282 at district to 0.545 at block scale), with mobility softening segregation for most but asymmetrically, and built form explaining more than visit volume.
Brasília offers a rare test of how urban form shapes experienced segregation. Built almost at once around modernist neighbourhood units, then expanded through planned satellites and informal peripheries, it lets us ask whether urban form turns mobility into mixing or into a more efficient engine of separation. We combine data on human mobility with urban morphometrics, amenities, road networks, along with enclosures and tessellations that capture segregation at the scales where access is structured: districts, neighbourhoods, blocks, and street-and-building cells. We find that segregation intensifies as resolution sharpens, from 0.282 at the district scale to 0.545 at the block scale, indicating that Brasília looks most integrated at coarse units and most segregated where everyday encounters are actually organised. Mobility softens home segregation for most users, but not symmetrically: poorer groups travel farther, while affluent groups remain the most selectively exposed. civic cores and mid-rise, mixed-use areas are the least segregated morphotypes, yet they occupy only a sliver of the metropolis. Elsewhere, rich lakefront suburbs and dense poor settlements reach similarly high segregation through opposite spatial logics. Amenities predict lower segregation, while barriers and enclosed residential interiors predict higher segregation. Built form explains more of this pattern than visit volume alone in the segregation models: integration is less a property of residential design than of shared destinations and porous connections. Planned capitals can build order without building isolation if they distribute mixing space rather than sequestering it.