Where mobility meets the city: Field notes from the Advanced Cooperation Mission in Fortaleza  

Fortaleza, Brazil | 30 June – 2 July 2026 

The IURC programme held its Advanced Cooperation Mission in Fortaleza as part of the Community of Practice on sustainable mobility (CoP 4), bringing together representatives from Madrid (Spain) and Umeå (Sweden) to explore how Fortaleza is weaving mobility, public space, environmental protection and social inclusion into a coherent urban development strategy. 

Over three days, participants moved through the city on foot, by metro and by bike — experiencing first-hand the interventions, challenges and ambitions that make Fortaleza’s approach to mobility both distinctive and instructive. 

Day 1 | A city introduces itself  

The mission opened at the Paço Municipal, where a visit to the space dedicated to the city’s history and origins gave the delegation an immediate sense of Fortaleza’s trajectory — from its founding to its present-day urban identity. The institutional welcome continued with a working session in which the Fortaleza team presented the city’s mobility priorities, its transport context and the challenges it is currently navigating. 

A visit to the Integrated Video Monitoring Center followed, showing how real-time data and digital infrastructure can support safer, better-coordinated urban management — a perspective that resonated with the cities present, each grappling in different ways with the question of how technology can serve urban governance without displacing human decision-making.

The afternoon shifted to the street. A circuit through downtown Fortaleza gave the delegation a first ground-level reading of the city’s central area — its ongoing urban transformation, the evolving relationship between public space and mobility, and the energy of a historic core in motion. The day ended at the Ponte dos Ingleses at sunset — a moment that connected the mobility discussion with Fortaleza’s waterfront identity, and with the broader vision of a city that is actively reshaping how its residents experience the coast, public space and everyday movement. 

Day 2 | Mobility, nature and the city’s edges 

The second day took the delegation to Fortaleza’s green environment. 

A field visit to Cocó Park, one of the city’s main green corridors, opened a discussion on the challenge of integrating green and blue infrastructure into urban planning and mobility policy. The visit addressed the particular tensions that arise when mobility infrastructure meets environmentally sensitive territory: impacts on accessibility, transport patterns and local ecosystems. It also provided a close look at the park’s flora and fauna and the environmental education activities carried out there — a reminder that urban parks are not only green lungs, but also spaces of civic formation. 

The afternoon continued at the Sabiaguaba Environmental Protection Area, where the relationship between mobility, nature conservation and social inclusion became even more tangible. The visit traced the history of the area, the involvement of local communities in its economy, and the ways in which nearby transport infrastructure has shaped the territory. 

An Urban Mobility Interventions Circuit through Mucuripe, Pirambu, Rachel de Queiroz Park and Vila Pita rounded off the day, offering a range of neighbourhood-scale perspectives on what active mobility and public-space improvement look like in practice — and what transferable lessons they might hold for cities working on similar challenges in very different contexts. 

Day 3 | From motorway to park — and back again 

The final day brought together the two ends of Fortaleza’s mobility spectrum: metropolitan rail and active mobility. 

The morning was spent at Metrofor, the metropolitan rail operator of the State of Ceará, where the management team presented the different lines of the Fortaleza metro system, explained the planned network expansion and discussed the city’s approach to fare policy — with a particular focus on free and low-cost access as a tool for encouraging public transport use and ensuring equitable mobility.  

A working session at IPPLAN Fortaleza provided space to process the mission’s accumulated learning: exchanges between cities deepened, pilot action ideas were developed further, and the group began to map the most transferable lessons from Fortaleza’s experience for Madrid and Umeå. 

The mission closed as it had unfolded — on the move. A public bike ride on Fortaleza’s shared bicycle system, from IPPLAN to Avenida Beira-Mar, gave the delegation one final field reading of the city: before-and-after glimpses of street pacification and pedestrianisation processes, narrated by the Fortaleza team as the group pedalled through them. It was a fittingly embodied end to a mission that had always been as much about experiencing the city as analysing it.

Read about the Prefeitura de Fortaeza and the IPPLAN Fortaleza experiences on their websites.

About the IURC LAC Advanced Cooperation Missions

IURC Latin America and the Caribbean, part of the International Urban and Regional Cooperation (IURC) programme, connects cities and regions from Latin America, the Caribbean and Europe to co-create sustainable, inclusive, and innovation-driven solutions. Through peer-to-peer exchange and partnerships, the programme contributes to improving citizens’ quality of life while strengthening global cooperation.

Advanced Cooperation Missions are on-site technical visits that build on the IURC programme’s collaborative and knowledge-sharing approach. They provide cities and regions with the opportunity to further develop the themes explored during the online meetings of the Communities of Practice, refine their cooperation action plans and gain first-hand experience of best practices implemented by the hosting city or region.