LAUSR

Abstract City planning is a complex challenge that asks for problem-solving expertise to address stakeholders’ diverging interests, while its multidisciplinary essence imposes communication difficulties among specialists from different disciplines. After decades developing planning theories and practical solutions in isolation, transportation planners acknowledged the importance of mutual influences between composing urban subsystems and proposed the concept of Land Use and Transport Interaction (LUTI) planning, where both urban-space and transportation planning efforts should converge to admit common problems and goals. Contemporary literature confirms that this convergence prospered in developed countries, but not so much in developing countries, due to political and economic issues. This paper aims to verify if urban-space planning concepts converge to the paradigm advocated by LUTI planners in the context of a developing country. To do so, a series of urban master plans developed in the past 50 years for Fortaleza, the 5th most populated city in Brazil, were assessed using an ALUTI (Activity, Land-Use, and Transport Interactions) conceptual framework as the analytical tool. Every intra and interrelations among the three urban subsystems were systematically checked. Evidences indicate that, considering Fortaleza a representative case of large cities in Brazil, urban-space planning in a developing country already share similarities with LUTI planning concepts that drive the latest evolutionary stage of transportation planning. The reviewed plans seem to have reached an evolutionary stage with evidences of more integrated practices, as it recognizes all ALUTI subsystems and its mutual relations. This indicates that the proposed conceptual structure is a tool capable of helping to assess whether the products and concepts of urban-space planning are aligned with the LUTI concepts or not, within some limitations.