Postwar & Welfare-Modernist (1945–1975)

Lima Plan Piloto

1949 · Peru · Latin America · Functionalist modernism · Planned by Sert & Wiener
Plan of the historic centre of Lima, the gridded core that the 1949 Plan Piloto sought to modernise.
Plan of the historic centre of Lima, the gridded core that the 1949 Plan Piloto sought to modernise. · CC BY-SA 3.0

Core idea

Regional framework and civic axes

Why it matters

Modernist Latin American urbanism

Description

A pilot plan for Lima prepared in 1949 by Town Planning Associates, the partnership of Josep Lluís Sert and Paul Lester Wiener, working with Peru's national planning office under the reformist climate that followed the 1946 planning law. Applying CIAM doctrine, it proposed a regional framework for the Lima–Callao area, decongestion of the colonial centre, civic axes and a new civic core, and neighbourhood units based on the neighbourhood-unit and functional-city principles. Only fragments were realised, but it anchored the institutionalisation of planning in Peru.

Significance

The plan belongs to the influential series of Latin American schemes by Sert and Wiener that translated CIAM functionalism into national planning programmes, and it fed directly into debates on the civic core that preoccupied postwar CIAM congresses. In Peru it shaped the planning apparatus and professional culture that later confronted Lima's explosive informal growth.

What shaped it

Plans it influenced

Sources

Open it on the interactive timeline →
hub.toekom.st — History of Urbanism · an interactive timeline of 850 planned cities across 6,000 years.