Early 20th Century & the Modern Movement (1900–1945)

Recife Agache Plan

1943 · Brazil · Latin America · Hygienist and infrastructural reform urbanism · Planned by Alfred Agache
Aerial view of Recife, the city restructured by Alfred Agache's 1943 plan of avenues and zoning.
Aerial view of Recife, the city restructured by Alfred Agache's 1943 plan of avenues and zoning. · CC BY-SA 3.0

Core idea

Boulevards & zoning

Why it matters

French planning influence in Brazil

Description

A remodelling plan for Recife associated with the French urbanist Alfred Agache, who worked in Brazil from the late 1920s and whose office and doctrines guided studies for the city culminating in proposals of the early 1940s. In the manner of his celebrated Rio de Janeiro plan, it applied Beaux-Arts civic art to a tropical port city, proposing widened boulevards, functional zoning, sanitation works and monumental civic spaces adapted to Recife's estuarine site. Implementation was partial, filtered through local administrations and later plans.

Significance

The plan illustrates the deep influence of French urbanisme, and of Agache's Société Française des Urbanistes circle, on Brazilian planning between the wars, transmitting zoning and civic-design methods to local professionals. It forms part of the lineage that carried hygienist boulevard planning into mid-century Brazilian practice and is studied as a case of the international circulation of planning expertise.

What shaped it

Sources

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