For More Sponge Cities

Abstract

There are signs of the influence of rivers since ancient times on urban morphology. Still present, though, these rivers often have been subsumed under the concrete and arid city landscape, and their significance is hidden in pipes and pushed into canals. To reconsider rationalist urbanism and reintroduce an environmental perspective to urban territories is now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, more important than ever. Drainage-based proposals that are associated with the urban design are presented as innovative solutions to contemporary urban and environmental issues. Similar examples are seen in recent Chinese urban policy: Sponge Cities and in Unesco’s (Soluciones basadas en la naturaleza para la gestión del agua. Unesco: Programa Mundial de las Naciones Unidas de Evaluación de los Recursos Hídricos, Relatório Completo, Paris, 2018a) concept of Nature-Based Solutions (NbS). To reflect on this issue and relating it to Goiânia, Brazil is the goal of this study. Goiânia is a planned city, founded in the 1930s as the new capital city of the state of Goiás in Brazil’s Center-West region. Although it is a planned city, urban growth dissociated to proper urban policies led to the identification of urban and environmental issues since its early decades. The analysis went from normative changes intended to regulate land use and occupancy, expressed in its land-use plans, to the basic premises orienting the elaboration of 2017 Metropolitan Planning, in which water management is reclaimed as a prime condition for regional development. The results point to a metropolis that is organized by the logics of the real estate market, which has resulted in, among other problems, the compromising of its water resources by urban expansion and the lack of efficiency of urban policies intending to benefit urban rivers.