“Brasília – the Brazilian capital carved from the savannah 50 years ago – is a hard city to love. I hate to say this while its architect, 104-year-old Oscar Niemeyer, lies ill in a Rio hospital, but Brasília was built for cars and architecture critics, not for people. It’s a place for bureaucrats to have a quiet life, a Bonn in the tropics. Traffic jams are rare, even at 5pm when the ministries empty and everyone sails home along the huge central axis. This is a middle-class town.” FT – Simon Kuper