International workshop Venice - March 11-12 1999 Concepts and Paradigms of Urban Management in the Context of Developing Countries
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Alberto Cordiviola e Carla Zollinger (Fac. de Arquitectura da Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brasil)

"Politics, Space And Transportation: History of Space Structure Logic in a Dependent City - Interurban and Intraurban Nets in Salvador.*"

INTRODUCTION

The Brazilian city is still a confusing and disperse field of study. While social sciences developed, in the seventies, a comprehensive study of the Brazilian urbanization and the characteristics that are a result of the situation of dependence of the continent, the analysis of the urban structure as an outcome of this dependence remained as a reference to the classical studies of "central" origin: either European or American. Only recently, on account of the studies that were developed to the peak of the city history and of urbanism as a subject with academic prestige, the specific studies of cities and its relations with the continental dependence started to arouse interest. Even so, the way of seeing these studies is based on the influence of the central theories in urban actions, by means of the influences that come from studies and biographies of the authors of these authors. Despite the great influence that American and European models had on the formation of a local urbanism culture, the relationship that our plans had with the concrete Brazilian city is still very weak (with the obvious exception of Brasília). We can’t leave aside the importance of this influence in the real city, but it is much more in the formation of an "idea" of city, as the operator of a culture , rather than in the concrete action on the city. We suppose that the action of this cultural "dependence" is much more observed at the conceptual level, extremely used in political and real state ads, than properly in the carrying out of plans and consequent concrete actions on the city.

Thus, our proposal is to study the inter and intraurban structure transformations in Brazil, and especially in Salvador, and its relations with the urbanistic discourses; with the urban ideas reflected in city’s plans and visions. The choice of the transportation systems is due to the strong structuring character of the territorial and urban spaces, which also reflect the different kinds of internal and external dependence.

On the other hand, the study is centered on the transformation that took place in this century, especially in its second half, during which Brazil went from an eminently rural country to a country that is predominantly urban, inserting itself definitely in the transnational industrialization process that took place after the war.

THE LATIN AMERICAN CITY

The Latin American city is formed before the territory, that is, to the European territory in the continent. It is an instrument for conquest: point of origin of what will be in the future a field. It is born as a fort for refuge and support to ships.

It is, nevertheless, an idea; the imposition of an order:

"Since the remodeling of Tenochtitlan, right after its destruction by Hernán Cortés in 1521, until the opening, in 1960, of the most fabulous urban dream of which the Americans were capable, Brasília, by Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, the Latin American city is being basically a sort of birth of intelligence, since its inscription in a cycle of universal cultural in which the city started to be a dream of an order and found, in the lands of the New Continent, the only propitious place to incarnate".

...

As they crossed the Atlantic (the conquerors), had not only gone from a continent that was old to a supposedly new one, but had also surpassed the wall of time and had entered the expanding and ecumenical capitalism, which still carried the medieval spirit of missions. Although prepared by the renascent spirit that designs it, the mould of the universal culture that is developed in the XVI century only reaches a more perfect stage in the absolute monarchies of the European national States, which had militant service to which the Churches joined, rigidly concentrating the totality of power in a court, from which society was disciplined in a hierarchic way. The city was the most precious point of insertion in reality of this cultural configuration and put us in front a urban model that lasted for centuries: the baroque city."

City that prevails and organizes the territory and its systems due to the metropolitan needs.

Latin America derives from an order, from a word that gives order to what is before anything the written word. But it is order also in the sense of organization of the universe, of a cosmology. Thus the written word prevails when related to the spoken word, coming from something written by a superior knowledge: "This written word would live in Latin America as the only valid one, opposed to the spoken word which belonged to the reign of the insecure and precarious". But if this discourse of the order of the written word is omnipresent in the foundation and management of the Latin American city, there was a second discourse superimposed: the graphic drawing one.

"The plan was always the best example of the operative cultural model. Behind its apparent neutral register of reality, it inserts the ideological milestone that gives value to and organizes this reality, authorizing all kinds of intellectual operations based on its own proportions, proper of a reduced model.

..................................

<<One can conclude that, since the nature of the sign consists in exciting the senses through the idea of the figuring thing or of the figured thing, as long as that effect subsists, that is, as long as that double ides remains excited, the sign subsists, even if that thing is destroyed in its own nature.>> Base don these conditions, it is possible to invert the process: instead of representing what already exists by means of signs, they are in charge of representing the dream of the thing, so strongly desired in this time of utopias, opening way to this future that would rule the modern times and would reach a nearly delirious apotheosis in the contemporaneous times. The dream of an order would serve to make power perpetual and to preserve the socioeconomic and cultural structure guaranteed by this power. Besides, it imposed itself to any discourse that opposed this power, forcing it to previously pass by the dream of another order.

The city starts to have a life which depends on the idea of city, and urbanism is consubstancial and previous to the real city:

"According to these procedures, the American cities were always sent, since its origins, to a double life. The correspondent to the physical order that, being so sensitive, material, is submitted to the coming and going of construction and destruction, installation and renovation, and, especially, to the impulses of the circumstantial invention of individuals and groups, according to their moment and situation. Above that, the correspondent to the order of signs that work at a symbolic level, since they can remain unaltered, which is of no concern for material avatars. Before being a reality of streets, houses and squares, which can only exist and even so gradually, in historical time, cities emerged already complete due to an intelligence birth in the rules that theorized them, in the foundation acts which brought them to life; in the plans that made their ideal design, with this fatal regularity that watches the reason dreams and that would come to a principle that for Thomas Moore was a reason for glorification, when he said in his Utopia (1516): "The one that knows one city knows them all, since they are all the same, except in which the nature of the terrain is an obstacle".

The quotation of the brilliant critic from Uruguay describes in a reasonable way the situation in which it is founded and that extends with no definition, the cultural domination by means of the letter, the urbanism and the city in Latin America.

THE FORMATION OF THE URBAN NET IN BRAZIL

At a first moment in Brazil, the urbanization politics had a clear defensive character; it aimed territorial control over the colony. Defense viewed the European attacks, initially from the French, later from Dutch, more than the autochthonous

Despite that, the first urbanizing wave left a urban structure that also developed a character of support to the economic cycles through which the colony went. Thus, Brazil formed a urban net, similar to the Spanish America urban net, although maintaining territorial unit, which the other one did not have.

Since the beginning, the Brazilian urban net was formed in a disperse way. Even though only on the Atlantic coast, in the first centuries the need to defend an extended coast of the attacks of other countries that were competing demanded from Portugal the implementation of a system of cities along the coast. This characteristic influenced the urban structure along its whole history as the several economic cycles found a city propitious to its development. This way, during all of the long pre-industrial period, the primary exporting economy did not establish in only city all its relations with the centers that dominated exportation. Unlike the macrocephalic structure that was relatively frequent in the primary exporting economies, Brazil developed a urban net that is equivalent, in number and size of the cities, to all of the Hispanic American urban net

Booming and crisis of an export product was always succeeded by another product that replaced it, geographically changing the dynamic axis of the exporting economy and causing migration of the population in its direction.

Therefore, the study of the Brazilian urban system demands the comprehension of some characteristics of the exportation cycles.

The exportation economic activities adopted productive processes that were highly intensive in labor. As a consequence, the expansion of the exporting activities brought the recruitment of great masses of labor, thus enhancing population, that had its highest numbers at boom moments. On the other hand, that kind of economic activity (...) demanded new urban centers to where production went and from where the product was exported.

.................

After the boom of this exporting cycle there was fall or stagnation. In both cases the result always was the fall in labor needs. This labor that one activity let go (...) seems to have dedicated to subsistence agriculture and cattle growing, spreading throughout the territory.

Thus, the colony’s initial cycle, based on the tropical agriculture slaver economy, in the XVI and XVII centuries, formed the Northeast net with the hegemony of Salvador, capital of the colony from 1549 to 1763, that was further transferred to Rio de Janeiro due to the Minas Gerais slave economy cycle in the eighteenth century, which besides creating a new center in Vila Rica (nowadays Ouro Preto), brought advantages of exporting through Rio de Janeiro, as well as gave new potential to all of the net in the South of the country that lived on subsistence basis. Once again, the regression of the economy from Minas Gerais was followed by the expansion of the subsistence area, leaving a labor surplus near to the capital, which favored the growth of the coffee economy, that in the end of the eighteenth century and during all of the nineteenth century would take over the command of the economy, developing the urban centers in the South. The feasibility of the European labor in large scale at the turn of the century allowed the expansion of the coffee economy in São Paulo ad the consequent growth in strength of its urban net. Other less important cycles, such as rubber in the Amazon, would develop cores such as Manaus and Belém, and the development of nets subsidiary t the main cycles

The Brazilian urban net was kept this way during the colony time with a series of centers tat attracted the economic cycles linked to exportation, resembling European economy. The relations among these center, which weren’t very strong, were accomplished by the exportation ways themselves. Besides this, a slight flow of cattle growing in the interior brought together the subsistence zones in the Northeast and the ones in Minas Gerais and in the South, through the São Francisco River.

In the end of the nineteenth century, the Brazilian urban net was already long and complex enough to bring incentive to the integration of the economic space, such as the development of local industries (mainly iron and steel, textile and food), which contributed to the creation of a significant number of intermediate cities. At the turn of the century, although the urban population was still small when compared to rural population (16% in 1920) Brazil had a urban net that was a considerable urban structure

This system can be compared, in size and importance, to the urban system in the Spanish America, although being one national territory.

THE TRANSFORMATIONS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

The urban system gets to the twentieth century with a characteristic that makes it different from countries with the so called "developing" economies. While these tend to have its capitals more important, Brazil presents a urban net of the "log-normal" kind, understood by the cycles of migration, the inertia of the centers and the subsequent economic transformations.

From 1920 to 1970, the Brazilian urbanization undergoes intense dynamics, transforming the rural country of the centuries before in the essentially urban country of our days. FARIA (1976) points out, among others, industrialization for this fast urbanization:

"2. The expansion of the industrial system, directly creating new possibilities of employment and indirectly demanding the expansion of the urban system through the territory in order to provide economy with new distribution centers, able to take industrial production to the population disperse throughout the territory."

In fact, the industrialization process starts in the end of the nineteenth century, but the industry will only take command of Brazil’s economy after the end of Second World War. The hegemony of the mercantile system remains until 1930, when the international crisis and the oligopoly bring the coffee economy down. These two periods must be understood as the beginning and the end of two phases in the transformation of the hegemonic Brazilian economic system.

Up to the thirties, industrialization is subordinated to the mercantile economy that dominates the capitalist reproduction process in Brazil. From the fifties on, this reproduction will gradually lead to the industrial sector. This change of command in the Brazilian economic hegemony will have deep reflexes in the configuration of the urban net national structure and in the correspondent intraurban structure of the main urban cores.

The formation process of an industrial economy of foreign companies "branches", following the capitalist industrial international tendency in Europe after the war, design in Brazil, as in some other Latin American countries, a special kind of capitalist development, the "Associate Capitalism" . This structure, which can’t be described in detail here, establishes an agreement between the capital of the international companies’ branches and the local capitals, ruled by the State.

As LESSA (1983) describes it, this industrialization system, given to the foreign companies’ branches, should preserve "..full participation of the national capital in the horizontal sharing of profits" that is, according to his opinion, "related to the confirmation of the ‘pervert’ valuation standards."

As a matter of fact, since the national capital was not able to take part in the main industrialization sectors, which belonged to the foreign companies, it is guaranteed to it valuation areas that may allow profits at least equivalent to the ones made in the industrial sector. This limitation guarantees to the national capital important sectors such as the bank system at the time all kind of valuation is favored in the territory, urban or rural.

Under this point of view, starting from the industrialization process, understood as the main way of capital reproduction, the territorial structure starts having a new content of valuation of capital in the hands of the national sector. This comprehension would explain, on one hand, the success of the road implementation process in that period and, on the other hand, it would give new meaning to the implementation of a new capital in Brasília; but it mainly explains the success of the urban real estate circuit during thirty years, and its influence in the structuring process of the Brazilian cities .

In fact, the objectives and results of the Objectives Plan (started in the end of 1956), which meant "the most solid conscious decision in favor of industrialization in the economic history of the country" , the road objectives are accomplished and successfully enhanced. Besides, the construction of the new capital, Brasília, was one of the most important aspects of the Objectives Plan, both by the great amount of resources compromised and the aspects of political promotion, as well as by the enhancement of the system’s economic space, due to the mounting of the road linking system, that "came to open great extensions of the national territory (idem, p.53).

The fact of "making fluid" the national space through the road system and the implementation of the new capital corresponds to a new structure of the urban net that already existed. Needed for the distribution of a growing variety and amount of industrial products, the cities are also a privileged place for the formation of "monopoly incomes" . It thus favored the capitalist reproduction of both sectors, industrial branches and national capital, and it’s not surprising that the urban growth in the old and new cores had an unprecedented boom in that period (1950-80).

The urban system, that was once formed by several centers extending their tentacles on influence territories, larger or smaller, but almost always relatively isolated from other centers, is gradually transformed in one net structure that has in an almost center form, a significant concentration in the Center-South of the country.

The net rank-size structure, as it starts to present symptoms of domination at national level, presents a false log-normality in the states that were dominated before by a main center. Once the isolation that was a result of the several historical cycles is broken through road integration, a series of medium cities start to acquire distributive importance relates to the new national center structure.

THE SALVADOR OF BAHIA CASE

It’s therefore natural that intermediate cities that depended on the radio-concentric system of the territory polarized by old capitals had their importance decreased when the ones that are highlights in the space organization of the industrial phase take over this highlight in the same speed. This is the case of all cities in the Recôncavo Baiano, as well as the growth of cities related to national distribution axes, such as Feira de Santana, Vitória da Conquista, Itabuna, etc.

Formation of the historical city

Due to the defense demand from external and autochthonous attacks, the city searched in the Sé hill, in the promontory of the fault ridge in Salvador, the adequate place for this defense situation, but also to view the ways that led to the European origin or to Africa where abduction took place and to its hinterland with all its wealth: the sugar in the Recôncavo.

In the last century, Salvador’s population was enhanced in mote than tem times, as part of the great urbanization movement that Brazil and all of Latin America went through during that period. Its loss of relative position doesn’t indicate a slight populational dynamics, but the relative reduction of its economic dynamics in the national context. Salvador, as Milton Santos observed in 1958, grows due to the lack of dynamism in its territory and not due to the opposite. Still according to Milton, it was a case of pure speculative economy

The city and its difficulties

Salvador’s geographical and topographical situation is a permanent restriction to its development. A city with two floors: the upper city and the lower city, its development was always jeopardized by a territory that is difficult to be used. Since the beginning, the ridge of the Salvador fault imposed the need to go over the difference of heights between the port, in the beach district, and the upper part of the city where the administrative activities were maintained. What was good for defense was not always good for its development

In the upper city, the deep valleys that give form to the city’s territory configured along Salvador’s development a typology of occupation that can be called adding, since it grows due to the enhancement of an infrastructure that develops along the tops, leaving the valleys empty and immediately after occupied by the poor.

This segregation "in height", that is the rich on the top and the poor in the valleys is also a result of a lack in economic activities and labor demand. The poor populations are frequently related to the richer ones through domestic services. It is what Milton Santos calls, in the fifties, segregation immature structure . Obviously the form of richer districts and poorer ones, that is, the formation of a urban soil, or location, segmented market is already defined from the second half of the century on, but the presence of a segregation "by heights" is still almost omnipresent in the beginning of the sixties.

EPUCS

In order to overcome these anomalies related to the classical city, as of 1942 a urbanistic Plan is developed in Salvador by the Escritório do Plano Urbanístico da Cidade do Salvador (EPUCS) (City of Salvador Urbanistic Plan Office) under Mário Leal Ferreira. These works were interrupted in 1948 but they gave subsidies to a legislation and later on to infrastructure works that would make the territory feasible, overcoming the "lack of maturity" of the city, pointed out by Santos tem years later.

Adapting the ideal city models of the beginning of the century, the radio-concentric city to Salvador’s difficult location, is a task that demands comprehension of its topography in detail, besides establishing an intelligent connection between the model and reality neither loosing the advantages of the model nor neglecting the particularities of reality. It is also necessary to invent, in each case, a three dimension structure, taking advantage of the topography’s difficulties.

EPUCS’ city image maintains its center in the harbor function, and consequently in the traditional center, which had the port enhanced by land moving, giving origin to the district of Comércio, which during a long time was the financial center of the city. Thus its territorial image is still the enlargement of a city with a mercantile economic model that at the time was already decaying, although the State of Bahia, with the flourishing cocoa economy had a significant exporting prospective. The road plan elaborated by DERBA a decade later still maintained this vision as a spider web with its center in Salvador, almost as a mirror of what was done by EPUCS. The semicircle centered in the port, which constituted the city structured by EPUCS had a radius that varied between 4 and 5 km.

EPUCS then created the bases for a territorial occupation that would be independent of the tops that made possible a second type of occupation which is the creation of lots. In contrast with the previous occupation, the occupation through addition which is done in narrow and deep parts for better use of the infrastructure, this new occupation, through lots, is characterized by the use of a terrain through the design of ways that complies with the best use of the land. In the first kind of occupation the infrastructure establishes the lot, and in this one the lot establishes the ways.

More, EPUCS crested the "big city", "modern city" psychological conditions, with park-ways and the spirit of "garden City" needed for the mobilization of the real estate business in terms of long term future.

The period between the practice of EPUCS and the second great intervention in the city which was represented by BNH building cities in Brazil was characterized by a great enhancement in the approval of lots by the City hall . The "soil" merchandise had been set free through urban structure that although in paper in its majority, would house it in the future.

In this sense, EPUCS repeats the idea of the Plan of which Rama speaks, the creation of the image of a "future" city, by which present life should abide.

The "coup" and BNH

1964 finds urban speculation in all directions. A great amount of resources for urban construction through the creation of BNH (Banco Nacional de Habitação) as well as the interruption of jurisprudence in the protection of tenants that would free the construction market for rent, increasing the potential of all urban growth vectors.

In Salvador BNH’s politics brought many resources that the City Hall invested in a significant way in the streets infrastructure that EPUCS had designed for the "modern city" of Salvador, but what had been planned for the structure in two levels was carried out through the valleys with the objective of on one side making feasible the distant territory with rapid access ways, and on the other hand, remove populations that were still in areas of high value close to the valleys. What Mário Leal Ferreira had thought as the articulation of the city was implemented as road expansion lines towards the suburbs, that started to multiply.

Although the EPUCS plan was kept from the population in general it was part of the "New Bahia" discourse.

The politics of cheap pieces of land for cheap housing created successive waves of rapid leaving of the central core, leaving empty spaces along the expansion axes.

The territory in Salvador was then fluid for speculation. The growth process would happen in successive and permanent movements that led to the suburbs and occupation of empty spaces, now valued, with the resources of BNH.

THE NEW PHASE OF THE CITY: ESQUIZOPOLIS

The city is then broken: at metropolitan level the municipality is broken to house speculation brought by the incentives to industrial locations, product of SUDENE BNB system. In 1967 the Aratu Industrial Center is started and in 1973, only six years after a great new industrial center, COPEC, Camaçari Petrochemical Complex is also started, with a great metropolitan way infrastructure that gives more spaces expectations of valuation, besides the structure for intake and water supply needed by industrialization and urban growth; at intraurban level a procedure for quick peripherization is established, as a consequence of a process of self-valuation of lots of land. There is here articulation among the governmental action with the COHAB system, the private activity and the clandestine activity of various kinds. The populations that remained in the valleys near the noble areas are expelled, with few exceptions.

Spacial segregation is now "mature" with a greater number of people aside of all possibilities of urban fruition.

The CIA plan

In the beginning of the government resulting of the military coup in 1964, the politics of fiscal incentives for industrialization in the Northeast is still in practice. Trying to attract the program’s investments, the States compete with industrial districts that might bring incentives such as no local taxes, and mainly soil and quality infrastructure. With this goal, in 1967 a significant effort is made in local planning for the elaboration of the Directing Plan for Aratu Industrial Center, north of the city of ].

The goal of the plan is to divide and give infrastructure to an immense area to be offered to the capitals in the south of the country along with the federal incentives, urbanized land, railway and port. The Directing Plan nevertheless brings "enclosures" with a long utopia about the new city of Salvador and its metropolitan region that incorporates the old hinterland in Recôncavo. The great infrastructure investment in CIA and its great promotional and political campaign significantly influenced the expansion of a series of activities north of the city and along BR 324, road that turned to be an almost exclusive access to the city.

On the other hand, a direct access way from the airport to CIA that had remote feasibility opens a large area that was not inhabited and values the far northeast of the peninsula, when arriving to the airport.

No doubt it is in the apparently naive the proposal of transferring the Administrative Center of the city to a new interior epicenter in the crossing of BR 324 with valley avenues system that the CIA plan has its clearest intraurban importance.

Paralela Avenue

The growth in the direction of a high and medium high class suburb along the coast line brought up in the technical part of City Hall the need to create a way parallel to Otávio Mangabeira Ave, the only urban link with the airport, by the sea. Although there still was the idea that the city was ruled by the EPUCS Plan, the city tried to join the new reality of peripheral growth and verticalized denseness, with projects done by its planning sectors. This parallel avenue was one of these studies.

The accomplishment of this way never happened; but the idea of a Parallel Way was immediately accepted, with a new design. This new Paralela has a design that is effectively parallel to Otávio Mangabeira Avenue at a distance of approximately 3 Km inside, in an area that remained untouched and extends to the airport. Starting from the city limits, Paralela Avenue goes through a sequence of hills and valleys cutting in perpendicular the virgin area reached only by small farms and orchards, with an extension of 13 Km.

This way structure, mainly composed by the principal road access, BR 324, coming from the north to the limits of the urban, articulating as the valley ways inherited from EPUCS, plus the penetration in the territory that had no population in Paralela Avenue, makes feasible a territory with an area five times superior to the city, that could not fill its empty spaces since it had filled the great empty spaces of the valleys that had been recently open.

Paralela Avenue is immediately used by the Government of the State for what will be, during the period started with this urban territorial expansion, the masterpiece of governmental publicity and the myth of a "NEW BAHIA".

The Administrative Center of Bahia - CAB

In this process a significant territorial jump happens through the creation, as of 1971, of a new symbolic center of the city: the Administrative Center of Bahia, in a distant and vacant place where the State Government intends to put all of its administrative sectors that so far were in the center of the city.

The idea in form of utopia in the directing plan of CIA turned into a strange accomplishment four years later. Only this time 10 Km from the traditional center.

There was no plan or study, at least known, for this location, but the logic is evident: conditions are created for a double center; the first shopping center, Iguatemi, starts, made feasible by the enhanced infrastructure of the Administrative Center, as a center of class, and the conventional center gradually as the poor center.

The Historical Center, that started to be slowly degraded and abandoned since the beginning of the century, migrating along Chile Street and then Seventh Avenue, goes into an accelerated process of physical and social deterioration, although in CAB’s opening plaque it is written "Here Bahia builds its future without destroying its past".

URBAN PLANNING’S DISCONTINUATION AND RESUMPTION

EPUCS plan was the only plan for the city during almost thirty years. But the city to which it referred was definitely different in the beginning of the seventies. Only in 74 the integral study is resumed in a systematic way, with the Study of the Use of Soil and Transportation (EUST) hired by CONDER (Companhia de Desenvolvimento da Região Metropolitana de Salvador) (Salvador’s Metropolitan Region Development Company).

Al the measures for the structure of the city’s space have already been taken in this gap: Industrial Complex 15 Km north, emphasizing the growth through BR 324 (as of 1967); Paralela Avenue opening a new way in the woods; implementation of the Administrative Center (1971); new industrial complex in Camaçari, 40 Km north, housing the Petrochemical Complex (plan 1973 – implementation 1975) ²; Shopping Center Iguatemi (1975), beginning of the Paralela Avenue and in the crossing with valley avenues system and the BR’s road system, and the transfer of the Bus Station next to Shopping Center Iguatemi.

This study of the use of the soil and transportation starts at the same time (and in a way as a competition) to the Metropolitan Railway Ring project. The effects of this railway Ring were only indirect. Little or nothing did the idea advance. Nevertheless, in EUST, study that was fundamental (?) for the immediate urbanistic actions, the hypothesis of the railway Ring was taken into consideration. Both projects, the Ring one and the EUST, are developed by organisms of the State Government (CONDER, Planning Secretariat and Transportation Secretariat) while the Municipal City Hall in Salvador started to prepare for the elaboration of an integral urbanistic plan for the city: the PLANDURB.

EUST and PLANDURB

The hiring of EUST was done by a consortium between PLANAVE, company from Rio de Janeiro, and the English COLIN BUCHANAN. The studies in terms of transportation were the application of the Lowry model. The basic date for the study was the year of 1975, with projections for the year 2000.

In an essentially descriptive analysis (Lowry would talk about an "instantaneous metropolis"), the structural elements inherited from the immediately previous phase with objectives that dissociated of a general view of urban development, start to fit as determining data of "simulations" "either in present terms or in future terms". On the other hand, "a preliminary analysis of the RMS’s growth dynamics", which is not part of the plan, "dictated the adoption of a methodology oriented in the sense of elaborating a strategy of development which has as its first goal a long term view".

EUST accomplishes with the help of the computer language that was then hermetic, the transforming of a series of actions connected to the valuation and speculation of the urban territory into a "scientific" photo of the present situation of a long term development strategy.

In fact, EUST projects for the year 2000 a number of jobs in these areas that the traditional center could not handle. From this point on, it starts to choose the location for the most adequate sub-center to house this kind of activities.

"...zone 11 (Iguatemi) was considered the most promising, due to its excellent communications, including the bus station, its vicinity to CAB, and the present existence of a dynamic commercial complex, also having adequate and available soil for this kind of development."

PLANDURB is the plan that the Municipal City Hall in Salvador starts to elaborate right after EUST, which is part of a set of main information for the elaboration of alternatives for the "physical-territorial model".

Once again Colin Buchanan and Partners, hired by PLANDURB, represents the technical and scientific quality of the plan.

Aside some criteria for the allocation of densities and building typology, especially by the ocean, where PLANDURN intends to incorporate non-systemic concepts, but "urban morphology" ones, the definition system of territorial occupation forms is similar to those in EUST.

PLANDURB takes as "planning data" all of the actions "out of planning" that are incentives for urban expansion and valuation of urban soil, here mentioned before. It thus leaves aside any correction and transforms the plan in something to justify "a posteriori" the referred actions.

..."...the location of Camurujibe Sub-Center (it’s the name given in PLANDURB to the Iguatemi Shopping Center area) is identified as favorable not only to absorb activities that are typical of a sub-center, as an option to improve the access conditions to the traditional center, not only freeing it of too many future activities, but also bringing up solutions in terms of transportation, parking and stations. One can’t thus admit the extreme situations of the Condensed Growth and Longitudinal Corridors situations.

The PLANBURB conclusions are more alike the slogan "Bahia builds its future..." The idea could be similar to the logic of the Centri Direzionali in Italy, but noticing that the distance between the Traditional Center and the Camurujibe Sub-Center (Iguatemi) is 6 Km in a straight line, and other km to CAB, it’s easy to understand how difficult it is to articulate them. The traditional center will keep the hierarchical position, but with controlled and shall:

"...adequate its size to the future possibilities of satisfactory access, linking it to the Camurujibe Center, so to create a "communicating vessels" type of system, made possible by integrated transportation solutions, peripheral parking lots and a corridor of activities along the axis Barroquinha, Sete Portas, Barros Reis until Camurujibe (Iguatemi).

The "communicating vessels" character between the Centers can only be thought of if there’s an efficient mass transportation system that might allow covering the long distance between them.

The political slogan at the launching of CAB: "Here Bahia builds its future without destroying its past", has in EUST and PLANDURB its pseudo technical and scientific version, milestone and projects of the greatest enterprise of real estate valuation since BNH’s decline.

Mass Transportation

As of 1980, the transportation planning in Salvador starts to demand a Mass Transportation system. Left aside the idea of a Metropolitan Railway Ring, but with the city spreading to the limits of the municipality and entering the closest neighboring municipalities, such as Lauro de Freitas, which had in the 70-80 period the greatest percent growth of the RMS due to this invasion, the transportation issue can no longer escape the evidence of a more efficient system than the bus. Besides, the desired integration of the traditional and Iguatemi centers can only be accomplished by means of a high capacity system.

The concentrations north of the city, promoted in an initial phase by the official housing financial system and its politics of cheap lots, led to an occupation known as "spontaneous" of great intensity, overcoming the BR’s possibilities to hold the passengers flow.

As a matter of fact, in 1980 the city has only four ways of expansion: Suburbana Ave., in the Railway Suburbs, BR 324, north; Paralela Ave., northwest, and Otávio Mangabeira Ave, by the coast. This situation is maintained up till now. The linear concentration of this system, together with the lack alternative and/or complementary way infrastructure, makes the ways very long and makes more expensive, social and economically, public transportation. The peninsular configuration of the city’s territory contributes to this situation; but it is the lack of way infrastructure the major problem for the occupation of the interstices and the greater fluidity of the transports in the system.

EUST’s proposals for the transportation and ways system for the year 2000 can nowadays be seen as utopias, since nothing that was proposed was accomplished.

On the other hand, in the beginning of the 80’s, all big cities in Brazil already had or were starting a great capacity system for its transportation problems, thus creating a culture of mass transportation that oriented technocracy in Brasília and reached locals.

In the years 1979/80 the CONDER association GT Report (State Government), GEIPOT (Federal Government) and PMS (Prefeitura Municipal de Salvador) (Salvador City Hall) presents the "Analysis if Alternatives for High capacity Transportation in Salvador". Its horizons are 1985 and 2000; the analysis studies the corridors Brasilgás-Retiro, Retiro-França, CAB-Retiro, Rótula do Abacaxi-Aquidabã and North Access-Lapa. Retiro, Rótula do Abacaxi and North Access, areas that are near the crossing with BR 324, Paralela Avenue and the system of Valley Avenues of continuous urbanization, are parts that correspond to the connection with the north urbanization by BR 324 to the traditional center, represented by the França, Aquidabã and Lapa terminals, and the Paralela Avenue complex represented by CAB. The Brasilgás-Retiro-França corridor, that is, area north of BR324-Center, had greater economic feasibility, but was suggested as greater priority the CAB-Retiro-França line. This evidently meets the PLANDURB expectations and its "communicating vessels" theory. The technologies suggested go from conventional and articulated buses and trolleybuses to VLT.

In 1983, CONDER publishes the Salvador’s Mass Transportation Basic Study in which there are no significant modifications neither in the designs nor in the technological alternatives. Only the names are changed and the arrival at CAB is taken out, this part thus ending at the Bus Station (which means Iguatemi). This study refers to the orientations in EUST, PLANDURB and PMD (Development Metropolitan Plan).

In 1985, the same CONDER evolves to the Salvador Mass Transportation , with significant changes. In first place the parts in which two lines cross at Retiro are simplified. Although there’s no great difference as to the previous lines, this design surpasses the arrival at the Traditional Center and gets to Campo Grande, also serving as transport to the south zone of the traditional city. The parts are Cajazeiras (little beyond Brasilgás-Retiro) and Campo Grande-Rodoviária (passing by the Traditional Center). But what changes the most in this significant part as a tunnel under the city (4.15 Km). The Cajazeiras-Retiro part is a segregated duct system compatible with the surface Subway, and this transformation leads to many questions. CONDER elaborated an executive project for this last corridor. The plan itself admits a variable or Alternative Proposal with light car system.

In 1987, CONDER presents the Salvador Metropolitan region Transportation Plan, that intends to be the "final consolidation of all Studies and Projects developed in the last years, by CONDER and other federal, state and municipal organisms that work in this area". This plan neither consolidates the previous proposals nor brings anything new. It doesn’t enlighten the effective transportation politics for the Region or for Salvador.

In 1990, the Salvador City Hall launches a project that is apart of the systems elaborated by CONDER, characterized by a VLT system in ways segregated by the valley avenues that articulates with a specific transport system for the central area. The system clearly comes to the traditional Center, although it extends by "ways oriented by axes of the city’s occupational expansion, representing the lines desired for trips with origin/destination in the historical and commercial center of Salvador". Some works related to the traffic of private vehicles needed for the segregation of ducts, as well as some of the ducts, were accomplished. The system, however, nowadays works partially with conventional buses.

Salvador City Hall and CONDER finally elaborated in 1988 a basic project for a subway system, and the project is being developed. This project comprises a line Pirajá-Lapa, that is, from the concentration north of Br 324 until the center by Lapa terminal. In this sense it is an association between CONDER’s primitive studies and the City Hall’s last project. In terms of technology its proposal is a surface Subway with a Rail Light Transport system: electric vehicles that go through segregated ways. Similar to the 1990 City Hall study, this project admits the central position of the traditional Center: "the Salvador Central Area is the place to where the greatest number of trips come at peak hours. Approximately 27% of the trips go there, reflecting the concentration in that place of the job offers in Salvador".

Salvador Mass Transportation planning is already twenty years old. Differences in project, design and technology can’t hide the growing evidence of the demands in public transportation to the Central area, which as we saw before, are there concentrated since 85, whereas the Iguatemi area concentrates the lines of desire of trips in individual transport. The theory of the "communicating vessels" seems to have lost strength, or the migration of central position has used up the valuation capacity of the area.

In fact, the location advantages of the abundant ways system and sufficient parking lot, have disappeared in this "New Bahia". The growth of the Paralela vector and of the Iguatemi center itself come to the same articulation, thus obstructing it. Besides, the real estate valuation capacity of this area seems to have come to an end, or is near it.

In parallel to this revaluation of the Traditional Center in the discourse of the Mass Transport, the City Hall starts to think about the parking issue in the central areas under a new point of view:; privileges for the construction of garage buildings and studies for underground parking start to acquire importance. It is not by chance that the new municipal administration took back some areas in the traditional center from street vendors and started a series of projects for the qualification of the urban space in central areas.

CONCLUDING

"Publicity is, in essence, nostalgic. It has to sell the past to the future. It can’t by itself reach the level of its own demands. Thus all of its references are retrospective and traditional. It wouldn’t inspire confidence if it used strictly contemporaneous language.

...........................

Publicity, in a future always postponed, excludes the present and therefore eliminates all development, making experience impossible. All that happens, happens outside it."

Berger’s words explain the role of the political slogan and urbanism as publicity of the city-merchandise. "here Bahia builds its future without destroying its past"... excluding here and there any possibility of making the city (citizenship) in the present, to what is being experienced.

The initial quotations from Rama are far from serving only for the colonizing urbanism of the foundational cities. The company changes, the owner changes, but urbanism remains as the operator of the dominating culture. "Well, those that at a certain moment dominate are the heirs of all who won before"

EPUCS transformed the city that spread according to its needs, in an abstract structure that allowed selling a dream: the lot, even though distant and lonely, could be reached by a urban structure in the future. It thus made strong the bases for the transformation of the city in financial and speculative capital [LESSA, 1980 (?) #376]

There is no compromise with this dream coming true since having reached the limit of its accomplishment another dream, more distant, will have occupied the future.

The structuring actions (CIA, Paralela Ave., Cab, COPEC, Iguatemi, etc...) disobey or ignore, or despise any previous urbanistic support. They are born and they live from the political slogan and publicity in the media. Urbanism will then ‘scientifically" structure and turn into law this power birth, more than a "birth of intelligence". EUST and PLANDURB have here their main function.

The migration from the central location feeds real estate business at a greater speed than the urban and building obsolescence would allow, but the demand of this migration is to maintain enough plastic access to "degrade" old locations and create "new bahias" rapidly.

Therefore, the Mass Transport is a recurrent dream that passes by: necessary to the affirmation of the "future" of new and old fronts of valuation, but not feasible since it hardens, with its heavy structures, the advantages of access to the centers it supports.

The return to Salvador’s Traditional Center is followed by a new front of valuation. The Port of Salvador, with the growing transfer of cargos to the Aratu Port and the relative reduction of the maritime transports, as well as the disarticulation of the hinterland at Todos os Santos Bay, starts to be wanted as a new front for real estate business.

The water portion in Salvador, historically part of the city and nowadays almost with no function, suffers the invasion of high classes’ water sports with the proliferation of marinas.

There is still a great part of the bay to be divided in lots... The examples of London or Barcelona will help insert this new valuation front in a "urbanistic logic".

TO BE CONTINUED...

BIBLIOGRAFIA

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BAHIA, Governo do Estado / CONDER - Companhia de desenvolvimento da Região Metropolitana de Salvador. EUST-Estudo de Uso do Solo e Transportes . Salvador, CONDER, 1971.

BAHIA, Governo do Estado. Secretaria da Industria e do Comercio. CIA- Centro Industrial de Aratú. Plano Diretor do Centro Industrial de Aratu . Salvador, 1967.

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* This work was carried out during ongoing research in the Architecture and Urbanism MD of the Architecture and Urbanism School of the Universidade Federal da Bahia.

** Alberto Cordiviola is architect and professor of the Architecture School of the Universidade Federal da Bahia, Carla Zollinger is architect and invited researcher.

1. see the introduction to the book Memórias da Sé (Sé Memories), by Chico Bahia.

2. We don not refer specifically to the Camaçari Petrochemical Complex – COPEC plan, since its influence on the city doesn’t add much more than CIA. Nevertheless, the Parafuso road, connecting this industrial center to the CIA – Airport road brought a considerable flow of well-paid jobs choosing to live by the ocean border. Fifty percent of the bus trips with its origin in the Complex came to Salvador through this way, that is, by the airport.