PERSONAL BEST

摘要

Brazil is big and young. The state of Minas Gerais, for instance, has the surface of France with the population of Holland. Its capital, Belo Horizonte (BH), now has more than three and a half million inhabitants and is barely 100 years old, having replaced the old capital, Ouro Preto, in 1897. Its original plan devised a modern city for 200,000 people designed according to positivist principles with absolute confidence in the power of engineering, inspired by Washington DC and the Paris of Haussman. A rectangular grid of streets overlaid with another more open diagonal grid of avenues cutting across it at 450 configured a checkerboard pattern divided into 120 by 120m blocks, limited by a circulation ring that separated the urban and suburban zones. Neat, and ready to grow.