The growth of the Brazilian cities - a never-ending process

Abstract

Great Brazilian cities are similar in terms of urban forms and development processes, in spite of the fact that some of them were implemented by different development plans and some have been founded to serve different purposes. Despite these differences they have been growing and be experimenting territorial expansion nowadays. Planning processes were implemented in certain areas but few of them proved effective in forming legal cities. The change occurs in the form of occupation of the unused rural land around these towns, which have been deforested and bulldozed to accommodate new forms of urban settlement. New settlements such as industrial, commercial areas and new residential suburbs as well as peripheral housing estates assumed different urban forms. To make all this possible, forests have had their planted area reduced, the landscape suffered change, the rivers have been channeled, and all such actions culminated in erosion, and soil drainage into the rivers. In the aftermath rivers have been made into polluted, shallow channels. This paper presents the main characteristics of Brazilian cities that are undergoing a similar process. It discusses the most recent of such processes, occurring in the outskirts of cities, and introduces a case study of Belo Horizonte, a city that was planned to be the state capital 108 years ago. One of the reasons is going to be discussed in this paper, which will analyse if the government policies really meant to be used as control development measures or only to mask the real intention of making profit from land expansion.