Water management and urban planning in Belo Horizonte

Belo Horizonte was born as a city of the future; established in the 1890s as the first modern planned city in Brazil. Belo Horizonte was designed by chief engineer Aarão Reis as capital of Minas Gerais state, with a grid structure of broad streets, squares and parks. It grew rapidly and in the 1950s the great Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer won a competition to develop the area around Lake Pampulha. The city now has 2.2 million inhabitants, rising to 3.9 million across the 33 municipalities that make up Belo Horizonte Metropolitan Region (RMBH). Water management in Belo Horizonte has kept pace with population growth, connecting 99.7% of Belo Horizonte residents to a safe supply and operating to high reliability and quality standards. Coverage of sewerage systems is also high (92%), but a shortfall in the number of interceptors to transport wastewater to treatment stations and a number of illegal connections into stormwater drains, means that sewage still ends up in rivers and seeps into groundwater. From the 1970s to the mid-1990s, stormwater drainage investment was focused on lining rivers and the construction of closed drainage channels. Despite the high cost of this work, the number of floods did not reduce and there has since been a shift to reflect
the original greening principles of the city by fitting drainage works into their natural contexts and developing more parks and recreation areas. Investment has gone into wastewater interception and treatment, restoration of urban creeks and piloting technologies such as detention ponds and wetlands. [authors abstract]