University Campuses: Experimentations on the Relations Between City and Nature in Brazil

Abstract

In Brazil, the university campuses built over the twentieth century are an important chapter of planning history, favoring a closer relationship between the city and the natural environment. The aim of this chapter is to analyze the spatial strategies applied in the planning of federal university campuses in Brazil by emphasizing their relationship with nature. The temporal cut comes from the origin of the implantation of university cities in the country from the 1930s up to the recent expansion occurred in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Two important moments in the trajectory of the federal university campuses in Brazil, the origin in the 1930s and the first expansion in the 1960s, are considered to be periods of creation and consolidation of a spatial model of university campus based on North American experiences. From the third moment of the expansion on, which was after the year 2000, this model was revised as new smaller campuses were created, less committed to the academic community’s integration with nature. In this new moment, it is noticeable that a good share of the new campuses stopped being ideal small towns and has taken on the virtues and the vices of the already consolidated cities.