Campo Grande suffers the side effects of having grown beyond what is necessary to house its 916,000 inhabitants. “The city is absurdly large, there are 4,300 kilometers of streets. It’s absurd, bigger than the urban area of Porto Alegre. More construction, drainage, water supply needs to be done,” says architect and urban planner Fayez José Rizk.
Another comparison is that Campo Grande has the urban area of Fortaleza, but the capital of Ceará has three times the population: 2,703,391 people.
“You live on a plot of land measuring 12 by 30. They arrive and tell you that now the land for your house is going to be the entire block. But will you have the money to take care of this whole court? It grows too much and who finances it?”, asks the expert.
The real city, which grew without control, is very different from Campo Grande, which was planned at the beginning of 1914, a master plan and in the 70s it came to the mind of Jaime Lerner, the architect who created Taveirópolis and the Barão do Rio Branco footbridge. Lerner was also governor of Paraná and mayor of Curitiba.
According to Fayez, the urban restructuring planned by Lerner, in 1977, was based on the environment and urban mobility, such as bus terminals and bicycle lanes on the outskirts.
In the case of the main streams – Prosa and Segredo –, the recommendation was to preserve the valley bottoms, with large urban parks. “But it never got off the ground and the city grew towards the valley”.
The Córrego Prosa rises in the state park of the same name, with access from Avenida Mato Grosso, next to the Parque dos Poderes. Resulting from the meeting of Joaquim Português and Desbarrancado, Prosa passes by the lake of Parque das Nações, continues through Praça das Águas, in front of Shopping Campo Grande, spreads through the cachoeirinha near Ceará and continues surrounded by urbanization until it finds Segredo in the intersection of Fernando Corrêa da Costa and Ernesto Geisel.
Without the big parks, Lerner was also clear about the future of the city. “All of this reminds me of a sentence by Jaime Lerner in a meeting I attended in 1978, still as an Architecture and Urbanism student: if you don’t take care of the bottom of the valley, you’ll end up building tunnels to conduct rainwater. Prophetic and accurate”, says Fayez José Rizk, in an article published after the torrential rain of January 4th. The original publication dates from 2010, showing the little evolution of the city in terms of combating floods.
Incidentally, the situation is not just a matter of works, but involves conduct. How not to cut down a large tree simply because it soils the shop front.
Over the decades, the city has exchanged the leafy mango trees for smaller trees. Afforestation also “holds” rainwater. So much so that, hours after the rainy weather, the leaves are still dripping, reducing the volume of water dumped on the soil.
Another villain is the garbage thrown in the streets, which clogs the sewers. The risk of flooding is aggravated by climate change. Increasingly, the city records large volumes of rain in a short period of time.
“The climate is changing, it’s obvious. Anyone notices. I remember April 1, 1964, I was 10 years old, and it was 5ºC, with ice on the bank of the stream. Soldiers on the 14th of July wore overcoats because of the cold. It scarred my memory.”
In the early hours of March 31 to April 1, 1964, President João Goulart was overthrown. Last year, on the same date of April 1st, the minimum temperature in Campo Grande was 17.5ºC. From 2018 to 2021, the minimum temperature every April 1st ranged from 19.7°C to 22.4°C.
Last Wednesday, the city hall of Campo Grande announced different measures to contain the impacts of the rains, which in recent days have caused numerous inconveniences to residents. Among them, there is an agreement with UFMS (Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul) so that flooding points are identified and mapped.