The new urban form and the model city: town planning in the Brazilian hinterland

The diffusion of planning ideas incorporates both objective learning and more imaginative processes. This paper explores the interconnection of these two factors in Sinop, a new town in Brazil's Mato Grosso state, planned by private developers in 1972. Sinop's layout was commonly believed to reflect features of Maringa, a new town founded in 1945 in southern Brazil, whose highly rated design was planned according to formal garden-city principles. Like Sinop, Maringa was developed by private investors as part of a systematic colonization and deliberate urbanization process. Although Maringa was taken as a model for Sinop's design, the two urban forms appear fairly distinct.