They are one of the curios of urban planning, beloved by some but mocked by many others as dull and soulless: the planned capital city.

Whether created to solve overcrowding or simply indulge the hubris of a president, such metropolises are also the biggest canvas imaginable for any architect lucky enough to be handed the commission.

Although Washington DC is the original example, founded in 1790 as the center of US government, the more common image of a planned capital is Brasilia, the dramatic settlement erected on a plateau in central Brazil between 1956 and 1960.

Famously divided into zones according to a plan generally likened to an airplane (although officially a butterfly) Brasilia is littered with futuristic buildings such as chief architect Oscar Niemeyer's crown-like cathedral and the twin towers of the Brazilian National Congress, between which the sun rises on April 21, the date the city officially became Brazil's capital.

While in many ways a success - a planned population of 500,000 has swelled to more than two million - Brasilia, along with equivalents like Australia's Canberra, and even Washington DC, has a distinctly mixed reputation.

"I think cities which are totally planned, particularly cities which are totally planned to have one function, like a center of government, can often be boring," says Professor Ricky Burdett, head of the Cities Program at the London School of Economics.

"It's funny, people are craving to get the hell out of Brasilia on the Thursday and go back on the Tuesday, working a short week, because it doesn't provide that sort of intensity and mixture of life that you get in downtown New York or the back streets of Naples."

For all its high-tech air, Brasilia could easily have been even more exotic. The third-placed entry in the original design competition involved 18 enormous residential towers hundreds of meters high, housing 16,000 people each, meaning everyone would live within a kilometer of the city center.

Canberra, Australia's early 20th Century compromise over Sydney and Melbourne, is somewhat more established, having been begun in 1913, and has an even more staid reputation, if anything.

Created by US architect Walter Burley Griffin, Canberra is, however, renowned as a highly liveable oasis of gardens and vegetation, if not a nightlife hub.

Other fully-planned capitals include Islamabad, begun in the 1960s, although Pakistan's government did not fully move from Rawalpindi until the 1980s, and the even more modern Abuja, which took over from Lagos as Nigeria's capital city in 1991.

A semi-official member of the club is Astana, a city in the plains of central Kazakhstan chosen in 1998 by the Central Asian state's repressive President Nursultan Nazarbayev as the new capital, replacing the much bigger Almaty.

Although Astana was an existing city, Nazarbayev has used the country's oil riches to heavily rebuild it, littering the center with impressive-looking - if somewhat brutalist - tower blocks and boulevards.

Other authoritarian leaders choose not to change capitals but simply remake an existing one in their own image. A notable example is President Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkmenistan, which borders Kazakhstan.

Not content with naming a series of public buildings in Ashgabat in his honor or after his mother, Niyazov had a vast gold statue of himself placed on top of the city's tallest structure, which rotates so it always faces the sun.

What do you think about planned capitals? Do you live in one?

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I am living in the village of Kirchzarten in the Black Forest, Germany. As the people from neighboring university town Freiburg moved into the country site, our village planned a totally new part called Kirchzarten-Birkenhof. It has all the facilities you need including a train station for commuters.

Planned cities are systems that work, move (not clogged with traffic), scenic( beautiful) and attractive with open parks (lungs) to be or live in.

I live in a terrible one -- Nairobi.

I live in Brussels, which is not a 100% planned city, you miss the big avenues like in Berlin.

But the city is made up of ‘quartiers' (neighborhood zones) and each quartier has its own center. To take fresh air and to be in the forest it only takes 15 minutes by public transport.

I live in Abuja, a city built with a master plan for a beautiful city.

But the implementation (of the plans) was not followed properly, due partly to some administrative factors, and the master plan does not reflect our realities.

Perhaps with planners did not consider our socio-cultural, religious and demographic characteristics as a people, hence the implementation of the plan ran into some hitches.

I have been in many cities with more than 5 million people, and I think we should not plan capitals -- we should avoid them, avoid big cities and look instead to smaller, networked ones.

There is no way to know the needs of a city in the future. Maybe we can design a city good for the next 30 or 50 years, but as the economy and culture changes over time, what we think today about what should be the optimal city will become obsolete.

Smaller cities are more flexible, cleaner, safer and easier to refurbish as people require change. We have to make cities for the people, not crowded with people.

Planned cities, be they capitals or otherwise, are always going to be uninteresting or boring.

What makes people remember places are the factors that make them unique. What makes places interesting are their own individual 'quirkiness'. Planned cities by their very nature lack such qualities.

Bangalore is a city in south India where there has been a tremendous influx of people lured by jobs outsourced from western companies. It is not capable of handling even 20% of the existing population.

Planned capitals would help in any part of the world, but only if the economic forecasting (what jobs, how many jobs, how big the urban infrastructure should be, etc) by the government matches what happens actually.

Today most metropolises, principally in the countries of the third world, have problems.

Here in Brazil, for example, our capital (Brasi­lia) was planned. But the problem isn't the structure of the city, we are talking about of the structure of society, that's the problem.

What's more important: to build a monument or build the future of our children, making schools, hospitals, cultural spaces?

I think planned cities/capitals are great.

In India, on the one hand we have Bangalore, with around 7 million people and a transportation system which is virtually choked. There is no mass transportation system in place.

On the other hand, we have the planned (state) capital of Chandigarh, with a population just under one million but infrastructure absolutely robust, and plans in place to counter any increase in population.

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