Building a new capital city is a unique opportunity for a planning team, a people, and a nation. Being able to start with a clean slate provides, in theory, the most suitable conditions to reach “perfection.” Yet the new capitals created since the turn of the 20th century have been, for the most part, great planning disasters. They are dreary, overpowering, underserviced, wasteful, and unaffordable. They encompass large monumental squares and malls rather than friendly, usable streets. Public transportation and neighborhood services are seriously lacking. In other words, new capitals are dystopian. What is the common thread that connects these megaprojects in their shortcomings? My argument is that new capital cities are failures largely because they embody the patriarchal relations that govern the respective polities. They emerge out of political power rather than developing over time, guided by the needs and wants of the residents. Therefore, they magnify problems in an unfavorable manner in efforts to wield new power and majesty. As a result, new capitals are as, or even more, unfavorable to women and other disadvantaged groups than ordinary cities. Typically, the urban design of new capitals has blended (a) ‘grand manner’ style in the capitol and central areas, and (b) modernism combined with and ‘garden city’ principles in the surrounding residential areas. A focus on symbolism, grandeur, and order, has led the planners of new capital cities to give short shrift to issues of livability, lifestyle, and walkability, which have become central to contemporary planning. Master-planned capital cities have been accused before of being sterile and artificial places, estranged from presumably authentic urban environments elsewhere in the respective countries. To this, a feminist critique must be added: master-planned capitals, as a progeny of the patriarchy and the modernist city, have been designed to primarily meet the practical, physiological, and psychological needs of men. As everyday cities, they have, for the most part, failed women.