Walk Pituba today and you can read its plan in the pavement. The avenues run long and straight, crossing at right angles, almost defiantly orderly in a city whose historic center is built on a cliff above a horseshoe bay and follows the cliff's shape. The coastal road is Otávio Mangabeira Avenue, named for the governor under whose administration much of it took shape. Manoel Dias da Silva Avenue - formally named in 1964 for the planner's brother-in-law - runs parallel a few blocks inland and is Pituba's commercial spine. For decades the streets were unpaved; only in the 1960s, under Mayor Nelson Oliveira, did asphalt finally cover them, with the work finishing in the 1970s. That is when Pituba actually became the neighborhood it had been designed to be. The grid was waiting. The city had to grow into it.

In 1975 Shopping Iguatemi opened in Pituba. It was the first shopping mall built anywhere in northeastern Brazil, and in regional urban history it is a specific kind of turning point - the moment middle-class commerce began migrating from the old downtown into the new planned neighborhoods. Shopping Itaigara followed in 1977. Through the 1980s and 90s Avenida Tancredo Neves consolidated itself as the new economic center of the city, earning the nickname *Bahia's Paulista*, after São Paulo's financial spine. The verticalization of Pituba accelerated. Apartment towers rose on the parallel avenues, corporate buildings clustered at the intersections, banks and boutiques and restaurants multiplied. Avenida ACM was cut through, bringing more traffic and more development. By the time the sidewalks along Avenida Manoel Dias da Silva were reformed and relit in 1999, Pituba was already one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Salvador.

Pituba is where Salvador's upper and upper-middle classes send their children to school. The Colégio Militar de Salvador, Colégio Anchieta, Colégio Gregor Mendel, Colégio Versailles, and Colégio Módulo all operate within the district. Headquarters of the Brazilian postal service in the region is located here. Bars and banks line every major avenue. The beach - Praia da Pituba - runs along the neighborhood's eastern edge: not one of the best in Bahia by reputation but the closest to the business district, which is enough for it to stay busy most afternoons. After dark the area does not go quiet. Theaters, galleries, nightclubs, and bars pick up where the shopping malls leave off. A reasonable working definition of Pituba is: you can probably get there on one of at least five major avenues, you can eat in a different restaurant every week for a year, and someone is almost certainly throwing a party tonight within walking distance.

Administratively, Pituba is bigger than it feels on a walk. Salvador's Administrative Region VIII - called Pituba officially - includes a cluster of neighborhoods that share character and commerce with the core grid: Iguatemi, Itaigara, Caminho das Árvores, Jardim América, Parque Nossa Senhora da Luz, Parque Júlio César, Parque São Vicente, several *loteamentos* (planned subdivisions) such as Aquárius and Vela Branca, and the massive Salvador Shopping complex. Today's Pituba counts something like 25 boulevards and more than 150 streets. It is a different neighborhood from the Pituba of 1932, when the plan was approved but almost nobody lived here. What the planners drew on paper a century ago is now the spine along which much of middle-class Salvador measures out its week.