O comportamento de viagens em bairros planejados de uso misto: evidências a partir de um estudo de caso em Uberlândia-MG

Abstract

The rapid growth of Brazilian cities, especially since the late twentieth century, has been accompanied by increased dependence on car use by its inhabitants, contributing significantly to the gradual worsening of urban mobility, especially by favoring travel patterns based on motor vehicles. On the other hand, several evidences reported in the literature show that one of the factors that delineate urban travel patterns is the relationship between land use, road system and urban form. Thus, in the 1960s began to put in check several precepts of modern urbanism, such as the massacre scale and monofunctional zoning, identified as one of the responsible for the decay of pedestrian spaces and urbanity. However, even in the 1950s, the Reconciliation between the various land uses had begun to be part of the planning of some US cities through so-called mixed-use ventures. It is noteworthy that the criticism of modern urbanism was actively answered in the 1990s by the group called New Urbanism, which proposed a more diversified and therefore more pedestrian friendly urban design. The group's theories, to a greater or lesser extent, became far-reaching and materialized in various parts of the world with the creation of planned mixed-use neighborhoods that supposedly left behind a more sustainable urban design, however, even rooted in more sustainable proposals, the ideas of New Urbanism were criticized for being overly commercialized and for hiding behind their apparent benefits, greater harm than presented in the traditional city. Among them would be the fact that most residents would not be able to live and work in the neighborhood, which would nullify the intended effect of reducing energy expenditure on commuting. Based on these assumptions, the present work aims to evaluate the travel behavior of residents in a project with specific planning for mixed use in order to draw a comparative scenario with their previous dwelling. To this end, the work will focus on the analysis of a pioneer case in Uberlândia-MG, and for this, questionnaires and focus groups will be applied, which will be processed by means of digital spatial analysis tools allowing to draw an analytical picture of the distances traveled by the residents in two scenarios, the old and the current. The objective is to understand if the planned mixed-use neighborhood can achieve its goals of reducing the use of motor vehicles, followed by the increase in non-motorized transport. The results show the distances currently traveled by neighborhood residents are greater than the distance traveled from their previous homes, contradicting the concept of “living, living and working” preached by the project. However, it is believed that in the long run there will be a small reduction in trade-related dislocations that will tend to coalesce in the region. Therefore, this work therefore launches subsidies that can contribute to urban planners in creating more sustainable projects.