Mobility on Modern Urbanism: A Study of Brasilia's Plano Piloto

Abstract

This article addresses the city form as way to ease urban mobility, with a case study in the city of Brasilia, symbol of modern urbanism. Identifies the characteristics of the area that attributes mobility to the urban space and how these elements are shown in Brasilia, while exploring the possibilities in intervening the heritage city as a way to enhance mobility to pedestrian. As conceptual bases the characteristics of compact and dispersed cities and their influences over the levels of mobility blend in to four aspects: high density, usage of mixed soil, continuity of the urban mesh and continuity of elements of composition of public spaces are utilized as reference. The fundamentals of modern urbanism and how their characteristics, shown in Brasilia, are analyzed to verify the possibilities of intervention. The empirical study falls upon the connection between public spaces and the “superquadras”, residential areas that utilized spatial analysis, by a composition of elements that structures public spaces, to analyze their presence in the studied area. Found that the city space was treated continually where: access, tours, meeting points, barriers and urban furniture does not have attributes such as safety, comfort and amenity. The results points to connectivity as a characteristic of urban form with the biggest viability to suffer interventions in consonance with the heritage, for not to talk about, necessarily, the characteristics of modern urbanism were recommended interventions to improve low connectivity between buildings, bus stop points, car parks with rides and interconnection access, removing barriers, creating meeting places and street furniture to facilitate the mobility of pedestrians.