Brasília, Brazil (1960)
Brazil inaugurated Brasília as a brand-new capital on the empty central plateau, designed by Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer. The move shifted the federal government from coastal Rio de Janeiro to a planned modernist city built in under four years.
The federal government and diplomatic corps relocated, but officials continued to commute to Rio for years and the construction left Brazil with significant debt.
Brasília succeeded as a political capital and now has more than 3 million residents, though it never absorbed Rio's economic role and developed sharp inequality between the planned core and informal satellite towns.
Brasília shows the most ambitious version of the Nusantara playbook can endure — but also that a new capital tends to leave the old city's economic dominance intact for generations and produce its own unequal geography.