A beautiful horizon for food planning. Lessons from Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Avenida Afonso Pena.
The main Avenue of Belo
Horizonte is a diagonal that cuts the city grid pattern, bordered by public buildings.
Credit: Cecilia Delgado, 2015

Author(s): Cecilia Delgado

Abstract / Introduction (download full article at the bottom)

Located in the highlands in Southern Brazil, Belo Horizonte [Beautiful Horizon] is a planned city designed, in 1897, to serve as the new Capital of Brazil’s Minas Gerais State. The city plan, by the Civil Engineer, Ararao Reis, called for a grid organisational pattern with the addition overlay of diagonals in the government and business-focused core.

The plan envisioned a capacity of between 200,000 and 300,000 residents and included differentiated urban and peri-urban zoning as well as the designation of a productive rural belt, referred to as ‘sitios’, or areas where food is produced and animal are raised. With economic success, the city swiftly expanded from 25,000 inhabitants in 1897 to population of close to 2.5 million today.

Today the vast majority of the original planned city is fully developed. In addition, the footprint of the original planned city today is referred to as the centre of today’s city and covers less than 1% of the modern city’s area of 331.4 square kilometres, composed by 282.3 km2 of urbanised areas and a reminiscent quota of 49.1 km2 of non-urbanised areas due to geomorphologic constrains.