CH2M HILL, a global full-service consulting, design, construction, and operations firm, has been awarded a project to develop an Economic Master Plan for the Belo Horizonte Metropolitan Region (BHMR), a 463-square-mile area comprising the rapidly expanding capital city region of the State of Minas Gerais, Brazil. The project will be led by CH2M HILL’s architectural design group IDC Architects.
The project team will deliver a broad range of services that relate to the region’s social and economic development. Brazil is seeking recommendations for building modern infrastructure in the region, rooted in the concepts of sustainable occupation, innovation and economic development for the modern knowledge economy and mobility.
The state has received financing for the project from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The project is considered a critical step for this region’s long-term planning, as it will consolidate a decade of planning and create a framework for the region’s next 20 years of economic and social growth.
The project’s desired outcome is to secure global private long-term investment to grow the region as well as to improve quality of life for the 4 million people who live there today. The project is motivated by Brazil’s belief that an increasingly globalized economy requires countries to target specific types of economic development and support those strategies with the appropriate infrastructure and incentives needed to meet the demands of 21st Century investment.
A central objective of the project is to generate ideas guided by “smart growth” concepts, including business, high-value industries, a variety of transportation options and preservation of natural landscape features.
The planning process will focus on the concepts of “work-live-play” and “smart growth,” creating areas that support the needs of targeted industry clusters, while preserving critical environmental areas and promoting sustainable development.
CH2M HILL’s strength in international advanced technology development will support the BHMR objective to make the territory attractive to high technology and other knowledge economy target industry clusters and to added value investments, generating thousands of skilled jobs.
Considering this project’s need for a variety of specialized strategic planning skills, IDC Architects’ advanced technology strength was considered a key factor differentiating CH2M HILL from other firms competing for the project. CH2M HILL also offered an exceptionally broad range of other expertise necessary for planning such a large and diverse region, including master planning, sustainable building design, transportation, water, ports, airports, roads, environmental planning, strategic planning and logistics.
“It’s a great tribute to the talents of our team that we were selected for such a prestigious project in a competition with a number of top global firms,” said IDC Architects President Tim Meier. “We’re motivated by the fact that this project is about much more than planning physical elements such as sites, buildings and infrastructure – it’s about planning the future of a vibrant region that has a great deal to contribute to the world.”