elements of demographic, socio-cultural and historical evolution of human settlements
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of approximately 48 square kilometres. The dam also functions as a hydroelectric plant, and was designed to supply the Federal District, although it currently accounts for only 2.5% of the local energy consumption. A qualifying technological aspect of the project is that the roads of the city have no intersections, nor even traffic lights, but only access and exit ramps connecting large and comfortable roads, with subways and viaducts of extreme elegance and total safety. In the original plan there were no traffic lights, all cars travelled via overpasses or tunnels, in order to avoid the need for intersections. The solution adopted by the city today, in order to take into account the needs of pedestrians, little considered in the original plan, has been to design thousands of pedestrian crossings on all streets, together with a subway/surface light-rail system, still under construction. To Saint John Bosco, the Piedmontese saint who first had a vision of Brazil’s great future capital, the city has dedicated a splendid church, a dreamlike space surrounded of blue crystal windows. Understanding the city The progressive transformation of the modus vivendi of the human species, which has now definitively evolved from Homo sapiens to Homo urbanus110, as asserted by Johnny Grimond on 5th May 2007 issue of «The Economist» in an article entitled The world goes to town, states: “WHETHER you think the human story begins in a garden in Mesopotamia known as Eden, or more prosaically on the savannahs of present-day east Africa, it is clear that Homo sapiens did not start life as an urban creature. Man’s habitat at the outset was dominated by the need to food, and hunting and foraging were rural pursuits. Not until the end of the last ice age, around 11 000 years ago, did he start building anything that might be called a village, and by that time man had been around for about 120 000 years. It took another six
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