Towards integrated urban water management in Belo Horizonte, Brazil: A review of the SWITCH project1 Sônia Knauer2, Nilo de Oliveira Nascimento3, John Butterworth Stef Smits4 and Emanuele Lobina5 I. INTRODUCTION Water management and urban planning in Belo Horizonte The city of Belo Horizonte was established in the 1890s as the capital of the State of Minas Gerais becoming the first modern “planned” city in Brazil. Streets were laid out on a broadly spaced grid to create a pleasant living environment and facilitate the construction of houses and laying of pipes, and space was dedicated to squares and parks. Chief engineer, Aarão Reis, foresaw a broad sub-urban fringe around the city, as a transition between the urban and the “natural” environment that would also contain unlimited urban growth. Figure 1 Location of Belo Horizonte Source: Nascimento et al. (2007) 1 Knauer, S. et al. 2010. Towards integrated urban water management in Belo Horizonte, Brazil: A review of the SWITCH project. [Online]. Available at: http://www.irc.nl/page/58311 [Accessed 9 December 2010]. 2 Belo Horizonte Municipality (PBH/SUDECAP), Brazil (
[email protected]) 3 School of Engineering, Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil (
[email protected]) 4 IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre, Delft, the Netherlands (
[email protected] and
[email protected]) 5 University of Greenwich, London, UK (
[email protected]) 1 However, the city grew rapidly and in the 1950s, a new area was developed designed by the architect Oscar Niemeyer who won a competition launched by the mayor, Juscelino Kubitchek. Niemeyer planned Lake Pampulha in the middle of the neighbourhood, partly to act as a flood controlling reservoir but also to improve the landscape.