Curitiba, Brazil – the Eco-socio-nomical Capital of the World – a Blue Print to Create People-Planet Friendly Cities of Today and Tomorrow

“It has grown from 6,000 people to two and a half million people in the last 20 years. It has multiplied its green space by a factor of 50. It has found ways to provide all of its people, especially its poor, with safe, nutritious organic food from the city’s farms. It has built a public transportation system that is second to none in the world. In fact, they make their busses at their own factories.”

Curitiba – The Envy of Mayors and Citizens of Other Cities

Three-quarters of the 150 million inhabitants of Brazil live in towns, under notorious conditions. But one town, Curitiba, is an exception. Situated 700km south of Rio and 100km from the Atlantic coast, it is the capital of the State of Parana and contains 1 600 000 curitibanos, descendants of Polish, Italian, German and Ukrainian emigrants, and has an economy (services, trade and industry) at the normal level for Brazil.

Curitiba is Brazil’s showpiece of urban planning, known among city architects worldwide as a pioneering achievement in metropolitan renovation and innovation. All of this is because Curitiba has innovative answers to universal urban problems.

In the 1960s, a redesign effort was initiated by aspiring architects who planned to carry the small but growing capital of the state of Parana’ into a new era — and to do so without the excessive borrowing that Brazilian public works projects are known for. What’s more, the designers brought their own values into the planning process, finding cost-efficient and environmentally friendly solutions to the city’s urban problems. Some 40 years later, the Curitiba Master Plan has become an international blueprint for sustainable city design, and its authors have been elevated as city heroes.

It is hard not to be impressed by this city’s accomplishments. Exploring Curitiba by foot, bus and car, I discovered this is a city that created a truly interdependent system addressing environmental, social and economic concerns. Every day I saw yet more creative, cost-efficient ways of getting to the core of urban problems.

Curitiba is among the world’s greatest cities. Not for its physical location; there are no beaches, no broad bridge-spanned rivers. Not in terms of culture or glamour; it’s a fairly provincial place. But measured for “livability,” I have never been any place like it. In a recent survey, 60 percent of New Yorkers wanted to leave their rich and cosmopolitan city; 99 percent of Curitibans told pollsters that they were happy with their town; and 70 percent of the residents of Sao Paulo said they thought life would be better in Curitiba.

Some city leaders travel to Curitiba to see for themselves just how the city operates, and they return home inspired to start similar programs. During my travels, I met a delegation from Mexico studying the city’s success as Brazil’s leading recycler. I learned Curitiba’s rapid bus transit model has also been exported around the world, from Bogota’ to Seoul. Los Angeles adopted a similar system after former Mayor Richard Riordan traveled to Curitiba. Other U.S. cities, including Detroit, Seattle and San Diego, are also considering adopting Curitiba’s transportation solutions. In all, Curitiba officials told me, 41 cities are operating a transportation system based on the Curitiba system, with 46 more in development.

From “Design by Politics” to “Design by Architects”

Nothing would distinguish Curitiba from another town if it were not for the action of its mayor, Jaime Lerner, an architect. He has made all the difference. He quickly understood that a town is designed not by an architect but by politics. So he contrived to be elected mayor for three alternate terms in 20 years and is ceaselessly improving the urban ecology of Curitiba.

Jaime Lerner is a chubby man with a large, friendly, and open face. He looks like Norm, the guy at the end of the bar in Cheers. He also looks silly stuffed into a suit; so even though hefs been mayor of Curitiba on and off for the last two decades, he normally wears a polo shirt.

It was a good thing that Jaime Lerner had grown up loving the mix of people in Curitiba. Because through a chain of political flukes, Lerner found himself the mayor of Curitiba at the age of 33. All of a sudden, his friends and colleagues were pulling their plans out of the cupboards. All of a sudden, they were going to get their chance to remake Curitiba — not for cars, but for people.

In 1964, Mayor Ivo Arzua issued a call for proposals to prepare Curitiba for new growth. A team of young, idealistic architects and planners from the Federal University of Parana’, led by Jamie Lerner, answered. Their proposal laid out plans to minimize urban sprawl, reduce downtown traffic, preserve Curitiba’s historic district, and provide easily accessible and affordable public transit. Improving upon Agache’s plan, Lerner’s team also proposed adding main linear transit arteries to Curitiba to provide direct, high-speed routes in and out of the city. Their proposal was adopted and eventually came to be known as the Curitiba Master Plan.

The Moment of ChangeQuake – a Touch of Madness

And so the story of Curitiba begins with its central street, Rua Quinze — the one that the old plan wanted to obliterate with an overpass. Lerner insisted instead that it should become a pedestrian mall, an emblem of his drive for a human-scale city.

“I knew we’d have a big fight,” he says. “I had no way to convince the store-owners a pedestrian mall would be good for them, because there was no other pedestrian mall in Brazil. But I knew if they had a chance to actually see it, everyone would love it.”

Lerner believed in implementing plans swiftly. To prevent opposition, he planned carefully. “I told my staff, ‘This is like war.’ My secretary of public works said the job would take two months. I got him down to one month. Maybe one week, he said, but that’s final. I said, ‘Let’s start Friday night, and we have to finish by Monday morning.’ “And they did –jackhammering the pavement, putting down cobblestones, erecting streetlights and kiosks, and putting in tens of thousands of flowers.” So, in just 72 hours, he converted the city’s downtown into Brazil’s first pedestrian mall.

“It was a horrible risk — he could easily have been fired,” said Oswaldo Alves, who helped with the work. But by midday Monday, the same storeowners who had been threatening legal action were petitioning the mayor to extend the mall. The next weekend, when offended members of the local automobile club threatened to “reclaim” the street by driving their cars down it, Lerner didn’t call out the police. Instead, he had city workers lay down strips of paper the length of the mall. When the auto club arrived, its members found dozens of children sitting in the former street painting pictures.

The transformation of Curitiba had begun.

Transport, Zones, Density and Memory – The City’s Past, Present and Future

They had, among other things, carefully replotted the city’s traffic flow, not only to make the downtown function without cars on its main street, but also to direct growth throughout the city.

Curitiba’s planners designed its public transit system to be economical. Rather than building a new train or subway system and pay exorbitant construction costs (about a million dollars a kilometre for buses, 10 million dollars a kilometre for trams, and 100 million for an underground subway), Curitiba’s designers worked with existing roadways to create a convenient, comprehensive and affordable bus system. It’s been so successful in Curitiba that dozens of cities worldwide have adopted the model.

Instead of buying up buildings and tearing them down to widen streets, planners stared at the maps long enough to see that the existing streets would do just fine — as long as they were considered in groups of three parallel avenues. Traffic on the first avenue would flow one way, into town. The middle street would be devoted to buses, driving in dedicated lanes so they could move more quickly. On the third lane you’d find motorists heading out of town. No highways in the city — three streets still scaled to human beings. All this was co-ordinated with very little expropriation. The routes gave a structure to development without allowing it to occur anywhere at random and without impossible traffic conditions.

And more important, once the planners had designated five of these “structural axes” leading out from the center of town like spokes in a wheel, they could begin to tinker with zoning. As the amount of available space diminished, most architects designed the city to grow up, not out. Along these main routes, high-density buildings were permitted — the apartments that would hold the commuters, keeping traffic pressure off secondary streets and people within short walking distance of bus lines. Farther from the main roads, density decreases.

From the observation deck on the top of the city’s television tower, you can see the results spread out below you: not a ring of high-rises choking the downtown, but orderly lines of big buildings shading off into neighborhoods along each of the axes; a city growing in lines that removed congestion from the center and kept a mix of housing — and hence, of incomes — throughout the city.

“Every city has its hidden designs — old roads, old streetcar ways,” says Lerner. “You’re not going to invent a new city. Instead, you’re doing a strange archeology, trying to enhance the old, hidden design. You can’t go wrong if the city is growing along the trail of memory and of transport. Memory is the identity of the city, and transport is the future.”

The Epicentrums and Shockwaves of Curitiba’s Changequake: “Space Age Pods” and Speedy Buses

They decided that buses needn’t be stuck in traffic. They quickly designed a system of express lanes that sped travel to and from the downtown, and ridership began to take off. In 1974, the system carried 25,000 passengers a day; by 1993, the number was 1.5 million — or more than ride the buses in New York City each day. The route network looks like a model of the human brain. Orange feeder buses and green buses traveling in constant loops through the outer neighborhoods deliver passengers to terminals, where they catch red express buses heading downtown or out to the factories on the city’s edge.

Sitting at a bus stop one day, Lerner noticed that the biggest time drag on his fleet was how long it took passengers to climb the stairs and pay the fare. He sketched a plan for a glass “tube station,” a bus shelter raised off the ground and with an attendant to collect fares. This speeds up the process (30 seconds instead of a few minutes). When the bus pulls in, its doors open like a subway’s, and people walk right on. The widened bus doors are exactly adjusted to the doors of the stop. A year after the “speedybuses” went into service, the city did a survey: 28 percent of the passengers were new to the system, commuters who had parked their cars because of the new convenience. The integrated network measures 500km and Curitiba’s buses make more than 21,000 trips a day, traveling more than 275,000 miles.

Amazingly, the city doesn’t need to subsidize its bus service. The fleet is purchased and owned by private companies; the government assigns routes, sets fares, and pays each contractor by kilometer traveled. For about 60 USD cents (in December 2003), you can transfer as often as you want; and the whole network turns a profit.

In 1993, Curitiba added another Lerner innovation — extra-long buses, hinged in two spots to snake around corners and able to accommodate 370 passengers at once. Five doors open and close at each stop, and on busy routes at rush hour, one of these behemoths arrives every minute or so; 20,000 passengers an hour can move in one direction. There is a word for this kind of service: subway.

A few years ago, to help celebrate Earth Day, Curitiba lent New York several of its loading tubes and special buses. Brazilians installed the system in five days, and for a couple of months, the buses plied a loop from the Battery to South Street Seaport and back. The Daily News reported “looks of bewilderment” at the “space age pod” donated by the Third World to the absolute epicenter of world finance, but by all accounts, passengers loved the system.

Initially Curitiba had half a million private cars, but they are no longer to be seen. There are still as many private car owners, but the cars remain in the garage. Because of its fine transit system, and because its inhabitants are attracted toward the city center instead of repelled out to a sprawl of suburbs, Curitibans use 25 percent less fuel per capita than other Brazilians.

In the early days of the public transit system, to increase its funding and encourage ridership, Lerner made a special city lottery, valuing bus fare as lottery tickets. Now, more than 60 percent of overall travel in Curitiba is by bus — Curitibanos use the transit system for more than just commuting to and from work. Taxis were complaining of having no work (why spend so much if the bus is so efficient?). Over a 20-year period, ridership has increased 400 percent in Curitiba. Bicycles however remain very important for walkers and workers. There is a 150km network of bicycle paths.

“The trick in changeover is to integrate the various forms of transport, from buses to boats, to the underground and the bicycle” says Lerner.

Greens, Rivers, Lakes, Parks – An Eco-socio-nomical Win-Win Solution on Flood Problem

The first act of the local administration had been to look after the parks and to plant many trees. The inhabitants had to be persuaded by mobilizing them with a slogan: ‘We bring shade, you bring fresh water’ (an old Portuguese proverb). Previously the town had planted 5000 trees per year, and this was increased to 60 000 trees per year. In 20 years, Curitiba has increased the green space per inhabitant from 0.5 square meter to 52 square meter.

Curitiba had federal money to “channelize” the five rivers flowing through town, putting them in concrete viaducts so that they wouldn’t flood the city with every heavy summer rain and endanger the buildings starting to spring up in the floodplain.

The bankers wanted all the rivers enclosed,” says Alves; instead, city hall took the same loan and spent it — on land. They then set it up into easily-floodable reserve areas near the rivers (after some expropriations) and small barrages which slowed down and soaked up premature floods.

“Each of these became the center of a park; and if the rains were heavy, the lake might rise a foot or two — perhaps the jogging track would get a little soggy or the duck in the big new zoo would find itself swimming a few feet higher than usual. “Every river has a right to overflow,” insists parks chief Nicolau Klupel.

The rivers will gradually be freed from pollution (only 45 per cent of the inhabitants are connected to sewers at present). For the moment, filtering barrages stop solid waste, and upstream basins reduce sewage pollution by biological means, until the fish can return and carry out their scavenging work. In this way, all rivers are given a reserved area and natural protection. Relief from taxation has been promised for all areas which still contain portions of the primitive forest. Many such areas have been declared.

Mostly because of its flood-control scheme, in 20 years — even as it tripled in population — the city went from two square feet of green area per inhabitant to more than 150 square feet per inhabitant. The official literature always points out, with understandable pride, that this figure is four times the World Health Organization standard of 12 square meters. From every single window in Curitiba, I could see as much green as I could concrete. And green begets green; land values around the new parks have risen sharply, and with them tax revenues.

Its 28 parks and undeveloped land cover about 20 million square meters. Many of Curitiba’s parks were reclaimed and converted from industrial or commercial use. For instance, the Free University for the Environment, Curitiba’s environmental learning center, was once a quarry. After it was depleted of stone, the land was donated to the city. When I toured the center, remains of the old operation were nowhere in sight. Instead, the old quarry wall made a dramatic backdrop for a quiet duck pond secluded from the roadway. The center’s office is perched above the water on beams made from recycled lampposts.

Another of Curitiba’s parks, Sao Lourenco, lies in the middle of a river floodplain. Before it became a recreational area in 1972, the land was a favela, a tight collection of squatter’s homes. During yearly winter rains, the valley basin would flood, carrying the shantytown’s trash into the water supply. Curitiba’s city planners came up with a creative solution: build low-income housing for these people away from the floodplain and convert the land into a park. Squatters went willingly to the new housing, which was outfitted with plumbing and electricity and paid for in part with help from the state. The community today has a park with jogging trails and picnic areas, and a herd of sheep grazes the grass instead of noisy lawnmowers.

Curitiba’s approach toward environmental protection often incorporates solutions to human needs, the city’s environmental education director Samora El Ghoz Leme told me. “The environment is not just physical,” she said. “It’s an interactive relationship with people.”

The City of the People, by the People and of the People – Especially the Poor – More Especially the Little Poor Children

Lerner maintains that town spirit is immaterial but a great incitement to action. “We must escape the syndrome of tragedy” he says. The bomb promised by Malthus has not yet exploded. Poverty is widespread but does not overwhelm us. “A tendency is not a destiny” says Lerner, echoing the philosopher Rene Dubos. “The idea”, he says, “is that the citizens know that solutions exist”. The only way is to involve the citizens in improving their own environment. Recycling of rubbish and planting of trees are successes because they are organized in association between the official town and the private sphere.

“The dream of a better town lives firstly in the heads of people” is another of his sayings. All the mayor has to do is to draw strength from these dreams. What he can do is limited by his electors. Strangely, Lerner has invented nothing; no action of his is a critical discovery. His genius was to undertake everything at once and coordinate activity over a long, continuous period. It is a truly architectural work.

“What is a process of changing? After those 32 years, I (Lerner) can say to make change, a real change, in a city — or in a state, or anywhere — you have to have political will, solidaristic view and an equation of co-responsibility. And when you have an equation of co-responsibility, when people understand the ideas, everyone, they know how to share it.”

“What is the secret to Curitiba’s success? Simplicity. We never tried to have all the answers because if you try to have all the answers, it’s…not leaving for the next generations everyone to make their contributions, and synergy. In Curitiba, it showed that it is possible. Every time when I hear “Ah, that city is so big, it’s not possible” or “It’s too difficult,” that drives me crazy. You know, now, I can say every city in the world can make important changes in less than two years. And it’s not a question of money, it’s just a question of how to transform every problem [into] a solution. If you have a problem, you have to build an equation of co-responsibility.”

Cassio Taniguchi, the former mayor (up to 2005) said, “when you try to propose something that’s completely different, society, the people tend to be against these new things or new proposals. This is very natural. If you want to change something else, you must discuss with all the population. This is very important. Now I think that every place in the city that we have some problems with, we use the community to stimulate the collaboration of these communities to solve their own problems. To set up conditions for these people to participate in the process. For instance, in new axis of transportation [traffic corridor], we made at least, almost 20 meetings with the community to inform, to collect suggestions, to be criticized. It was very important to set up the conditions for them to participate in the process. They gave good suggestions, also. You must give a proposal, that’s very important. But it’s not a closed proposal, it’s an open proposal so they can make suggestions.”

Save the children

Children are the wretched victims of Brazilian town development. They are abandoned without protection and thrown into the street. When very young they form gangs, become dangerous and are massacred by the police. The object of the Pia (street-urchin) programme is to collect these children, who are in a critical situation. At Curitiba a count was made of 500 children who had lost every link with their family and slept in the streets or in the parks. They are admitted (voluntarily or otherwise) into children’s homes, and are given work, food, education (below age 14); 8000 children have been admitted. There will soon be 11 000 in 40 establishments.

Curitiba has also constructed creches (A hospital where foundlings–infant children of unknown parents–are taken in and cared for) which it ’sells’ to businesses. The children there are of pre-school age. Owing to lack of space, schools often operate in two four- or five-hour shifts, but are now being increased in order to provide a complete day. Before then, children were accommodated in disused buses.

Lerner is also trying to attack the problem by requiring businesses to adopt small groups of 10 to 15 children, feed them and give them work and teach them a simple trade or enable them to earn a little money in exchange for small, easy services such as errands, gardening, caretaking or minor office duties. Brazilian law forbids child labour but Lerner points out that, as in numerous situations where survival is difficult, the law turns a blind eye. ‘In this country, if you are over-protective nothing will work. According to law a child must not work, but the law looks aside when the child is hungry, homeless or is working for a drug trafficker’. We visited the first of these homes. Curitiba is now considered the safest town in Brazil.

Slums and Trash for Food

Curitiba has slums: some of the same shantytown favelas that dominate most Third World cities have sprouted on the edge of town as the population has rocketed. But even they are different, hopeful in palpable ways.

Rehabilitation of the run-down areas started by adding the public services which they lacked, paving the streets and in particular working with the communities adjoining the favelas or shacks; their opinion was requested on all the projects. It was found that in shaky economics, shanty towns are a possible response to the immense influx of people without resources. It is surely better to improve them rather than to ignore or demolish them. Often, furthermore, the new constructions proposed in place of slums are violently rejected by the inhabitants. We must admit that our distaste for this approach is not economic but cultural. Town planning based on rational considerations alone is completely unsympathetic, in contrast to planning which originates in popular instincts regarding space and the urban image.

Twenty years ago it was suddenly discovered that waste-disposal sites were full. Since new sites were anti-ecological and an incinerator would be polluting and too expensive, it was necessary to invent a slogan: ‘Waste which is not waste’. Immediately the waste was recycled in exemplary fashion. After a few appearances on television, Lerner succeeded in persuading everyone to sort their waste by hand for selective collection; 40 per cent of the waste can be recycled (50kg of recycled paper avoids the need to cut down a tree, and Curitiba saves a thousand trees per day). Organic waste is put to one side and used as manure. This is a way of earning money. Three-quarters of the population are truly interested. Curitiba is the nation’s number one recycler, separating about 19 percent of its garbage.

Curitiba encourages recycling through incentives such as the Cambio Verde program, which enables poor citizens to exchange their metal and glass waste for fresh produce. Since lorries on the road system cannot reach the paths in the favelas, the slum dwellers are ‘paid’ for their rubbish. They sort the rubbish from the town and are repaid with vegetables, fruit, bus tickets and so on (green exchange). The waste is carried to a factory outside the town and is sorted for sale. The people working the sorting conveyors or bringing waste in are often very poor, alcoholics or homeless. This is much less expensive than hunting for inaccessible clandestine waste dumps in the favelas. And thus, the slums are clean.

“Seconds after a man tossed an empty can onto a dark street, I watched a child dart from a corner to collect and redeem it for cash or food through Curitiba’s world-renowned Cambio Lixio trash exchange program.”

The city also maintains a trash museum at its central recycling center. Valuables recovered from the trash are on display, including a verified pre-Classic Greek sculpture that somehow found its way from the Louvre Museum in Paris to Curitiba.

A House of My Own, On My Own Lot, Built Myself

Though the population continues to grow steadily, itfs indeed possible that Curitiba may have broken the back of its social problems. Since many of the people in the favelas have been evicted from their homes in the countryside, a house is an urgent need. Not just a shelter –a house they own, on a lot they own.

Abandoning the policy of small, scattered sites, the city bought one of the few large plots of land left within its limits, a swath of farmland bounded by several rivers called Novo Bairro, or New Neighborhood. We stood on a rise in Novo Bairro and watched as bulldozers scraped and contoured the hills. This cleared field would soon be home to 50,000 families, perhaps 200,000 people.

Small houses crept like a tidemark across the land. The city was not building the homes — the new landowners were, sometimes with the aid of a city mortgage on a small pile of bricks and windows. Every third house seemed to be doubling as a building supply store; and everywhere, people plastered, framed, roofed. “Sixty percent of the lower-income people are involved in the construction industry anyhow,” says one COHAB (Curitiba’s public housing program) executive. “They know how to build.” And although the mayor insists on high quality accommodation, he too encourages do-it-yourself; it is often much cheaper than hastily-built barracks and is more suitable.

And here is the moving part: With your plot of land comes not only a deed and a pair of trees (one fruitbearing and one ornamental), but also an hour downtown with an architect. “The person explains whatfs important to him — a big window out front, or room in the kitchen. They tell how many kids they have, and so on. And then we help draw up a plan,” says one architect, who has more than 3,000 of “his” homes scattered around the city. “Most people can only afford to build one room at a time, so we also show them the logical order to go in,” another designer explains.

The houses are all smaller than most Americans would want to live in, but they all say something about the people who built them. “It’s a house built out of love,” says the housing chief. “And because of that, people won’t leave it behind. They’re going to consolidate their lives there, become part of the city.”

One of the first structures to go up at Novo Bairro was a glass tube bus station, linking this enclave to the rest of the city. “Integration” is a word one hears constantly from official Curitiba, another of its mantras. It means knitting together the entire city — rich, poor, and in-between — culturally and economically and physically. Hitoshi Nakamura is the city parks commissioner and one of Lerner’s longtime collaborators. “We have to have communication with the people of the slums,” he said one day as we were talking about the problems posed by settlers invading fragile bottomlands along the rivers. “If we don’t, if they start to feel like falvelados, then they will go against the city . . . If we give them attention, they don”t feel abandoned. They feel like citizens.”

Buses With a Heart for the Poor – Social Services on Wheels

One of Curitiba’s more established social programs is on wheels. Old converted buses, some even equipped with classrooms, travel to the neediest areas of the city, bringing basic services and education on personal health and the environment.

The five buses in the Linha da Economica program serve as mobile markets, together making more than 90 stops in the city’s poor areas each month. The Economica buses are unmistakable, with larger-than-life-sized cartoons of toothpaste tubes, vegetables and meats welcoming people inside. Stripped of their seats and modified to have narrow shopping aisles, the buses are filled floor to ceiling with produce, toiletries and other staples. The government-subsidized goods are sold at a third of regular market prices. The program also subsidizes Curitiba’s farmers by selling their blemished or overrun produce, which they otherwise might have destroyed.

The Olhos da Agua (”eyes of water”) is another one of Curitiba’s social programs on wheels. The bus aims to teach low-income residents about the fragility of the city’s ecosystem and the importance of a healthy environment. Many of Curitiba’s poor have settled on the banks of the city, which rest on the basin of several rivers. As a result, Curitiba is continuously challenged with maintaining clean water. The Olhos da Agua bus brings student groups to riverbanks to conduct water analysis, which is turned over to scientists who use it to measure Curitiba’s water quality. The bus is also equipped with a video room, a presentation area and a three-dimensional map of the Curitiba water basin.

The Linha do Lazer (”leisure bus”), staffed with college-aged gym teachers, offers games and activities to kids at poor schools that don’t have physical education curriculum. The multicolored bus is packed with clowns, board games and art supplies. The staff also teaches healthy living and even leads yoga classes. The Linha do Lazer also makes stops at senior centers, children’s hospitals and outdoor festivals. Keeping healthy is also the message of the Ca’rie Zero (”zero cavity”) bus, which travels to schools and parks to teach oral hygiene, including dental care. An oversized set of jowls spans the bus’s interior, and Ca’rie Zero staff don toothbrush costumes to carry home the importance of healthy habits. And the show isn’t just for the kids. In recent years, local industries have booked visits from Ca’rie Zero to teach their factory workers proper dental care.

“I watched children playing on park equipment that I learned was transported to Curitiba by an old city bus, later converted into a mobile recreation center.”

Mobile Open Air Markets

In any metropolis, particularly in the Third World, businesses and officials find it difficult to associate with the informal network – illicit street vendors and homeworkers. Often there are collisions. Lerner recommends close connection between the two. His town has decided to invite the ragged band of vendors who clutter the streets into open-air markets which travel from one district to another. For residents who cannot pay the high prices in shopping centres, hardware stores or supermarkets, these markets will become pleasant bazaars which sell cheap clothing, building materials and bargains ranging from typewriters to tubas.

Fishing Rods for the Poor

Curitiba’s current mayor, CassioTaniguchi, with his latest project, Linhao de Emprezo, teaches unemployed Curitibanos technical skills, then provides them with leased storefronts and tax reductions to establish small businesses.

City of Learning and Loving – Books and Internet for Everyone

Curitiba created and set up Unilivre, the Open University for the Environment, which trains professionals and citizens, teachers, educationalists, administrators and official managers of property, concierges and police. It was instituted in an old quarry in a park.

When they built a library for the city, instead of building a central building, the Mayor decided to put little libraries all over the city, so that all the children could get to the library by walking for no more than twelve minutes. If a child was too poor to buy books, she could collect garbage on her way to the library, recycle it and get paid in all the books she ever needed for school. Every child was given access to the World Wide Web where they can communicate for free and research subjects of interest internationally.

“I saw people lining up all hours of the night to log on at free, public Internet terminals along Rua 24 Horas — one of the city’s lively pedestrian-only streets, lined with shops and restaurants.”

Some of the citizens complained that children from outside the city were coming to use the libraries. They said the parents of these children weren’t part of the city and did not pay taxes. When the mayor heard this, he said, “When we begin to love the children, we must love all of the children. And if the city does not love these children too, then these children will grow up hating the city. And if these children hate the city, they will destroy the city.”

Citizens-Oriented, Decentralized Government Services

A decentralized and accessible government has been a cornerstone of Curitiba’s planning philosophy since the Master Plan was approved in the 1960s. Curitiba’s “citizenship streets” — mini-malls of government branch offices located throughout the city — are perhaps its best example of bringing city hall down to size.

The first citizenship street, Boqueirao, opened in 1995, in conjunction with Curitiba’s hosting the United Nations’ Habitat World Day. This was the first time the international event had been held in a Latin American country. Five additional malls have been constructed since then, at major bus terminals throughout the city. Curitiba’s citizenship streets were funded in part by the InterAmerican Development Bank to fulfill its mission of better integrating communities with government.

Each citizenship street houses a regional branch of the various city offices. Nearby residents and commuters can access municipal departments, banking offices, state and federal agencies, and special courts all in one location. The streets also host libraries, markets, sports facilities and community meeting rooms.

When I visited the Rua Cidadania Pinheirinho citizenship street in the Pinheirinho neighborhood, I saw working-class Curitibanos applying for assistance at the city’s affordable housing office. In the same citizenship street, men stood in line at the Banco Social to obtain low-rate loans for jump-starting a small business. I watched people pay their property taxes, register their children for local schools, file for discounted transit passes and sign up for military service. And although the lines were slow, they were a sharp contrast to the notoriously long lines in centralized government offices.

The mayor also has the political will, so he had many ideas that the city’s government fortunately could implant, for instance, the decentralization of the administration — not simply a deconcentration. [That is for] activities to be in the regional offices of the municipality, to solve the problems there and not bring them back to the main office. And now with technology, you can access . . . most of the services of the municipality through the Internet, so you can solve [your problem] in your own home.

“I think these conditions can be set up much more for the citizens, so we are creating really a democratic access to all services. It’s true that most of the services of the municipality are directed to the poor people, but this is one of the characteristics of our society in Brazil. So most of the programs are directed to low-income families.”

A City Honoring It’s History

In their Master Plan for Curitiba, they created a historic zone, preserving old buildings by permitting the transfer of building rights from historic plots to vacant ones. Thus, owners of old buildings who couldn’t afford to restore them could trade them to the city and build elsewhere without paying municipal taxes.

The results of the urban planners’ efforts are stretches of historic blocks, with 100-year-old buildings restored and preserved. I walked through the historic Largo da Ordem, one of the liveliest and most popular areas of the city, to see how the old buildings are being used as bustling museums, bars, restaurants and shops. Throughout the evening, people filled up outdoor dinner tables surrounded by charming antiquity — in stark contrast to the modern, cubed architecture elsewhere in the city. A performance space, with vaulted ceilings, impressive fountains and small waterways, is at the center of the vibrant Largo da Ordem. One Sunday morning, I walked out to find the area closed off to cars for the weekly fair: The cobblestone streets were filled with thousands of people listening to music, shopping for handicrafts and eating everything from coconuts to weinerschnitzel.

Economics, Industry and Jobs

When Lerner took over as mayor for the first time, he realized that the city needed industry: its traditional role as a governmental and financial center couldn’t support the population boom that was clearly coming. He could have simply offered huge tax breaks to anyone who promised jobs. Instead, acting quickly before speculators could run up the price, the city used eminent domain to purchase about 40 square kilometers of land seven miles downwind of downtown. The government put in streets and services, housing and schools, and linked the area solidly to the bus system, building a special “worker’s line” that ran to the biggest poor neighborhood. It also enacted a series of regulations — stiff laws on air and water pollution and on the conservation of green space.

These are not all reserved for industry, but contain a mixture of accommodation, enclosures, services, and recreational areas, and are equipped with a good system of internal and external transport. It is a ’60s dream which has rarely been realized. Time for travelling to work is minimal, either because people live in green town development or because they have a special line connecting them to the main working area remaining in the city. To start the economic mechanism, it was necessary to provide financial incentives to foreign industries to set up there, since local firms had refused to take the risk.

“What we’ve found is that regulation attracts good industries, the kind we want,” says Oswaldo Alves. Foreign corporations were among the first to see the advantages; Volvo built a factory, lured in part by the chance to work out improved bus designs with city planners. And new businesses continued to arrive throughout the 1980s, drawn as much by the quality of life for executives fleeing Sao Paolo as by the ease of doing business with nearby Argentina and Paraguay. Even in the teeth of Brazilfs endless recession and inflation, the number of jobs continued to increase. By 1990 there were 346 factories in the Industrial City, generating 50,000 direct jobs and 150,000 indirect ones — and 17 percent of the entire state’s tax revenue.

Workers benefit from the quality of the surroundings, the excellent transport system, and the health, education and food services. On average, they spend three hours a day less in travel, than the same workers at Sao Paulo.

A place for living

Creating that kind of identity, instilling whatever it is that keeps people from giving their lives over to gangs or to shopping malls, in a city that has tripled in size over two decades is far from easy.

I set out one day on the bike path that ran by my apartment, pushing my baby in her stoller, intent on compiling a sensory catalogue of a little of the urban pleasure Curitiba offered. On this sunny afternoon, the path was crowded with cyclists.

We walked by a sandy soccer field jammed with eight year-old boys. Past a Bavarian beer house and a bike-rental stand, the path reached the Parque Sao Lourenc,o, whose big lake was one of the original flood-control projects. On the left a shepherd gathered the municipal herd of sheep, which had finished trimming the grass for the day. Swans and geese floated on the lake; at the lakefs head sat the former glue factory, now the Municipal Creativity Center, with a ceramics studio, a sculpture garden, and a giant chess set with pieces the size of children.

Curitiba is a true place, a place full of serendipity. It is as alive as any urban district in the world: poems pasted on telephone poles, babies everywhere. The downtown, though a shopping district, is not a money-making machine. It is a habitat, a place for living — the exact and exciting opposite of a mall.

I had to remind myself, wandering through Curitiba, that without the planning and the risky gambles that created the conditions for it to evolve, its center would likely be dangerous and dying. There is one subtle reminder every Saturday morning. Municipal workers roll out huge sheets of paper down the pedestrian mall and set out pots of paint so that hundreds of kids can recreate the sit-in that drove away the cars and launched this pleasure-filled street at the beginning of Lernerfs first term.

To learn from Curitiba, the rest of the world would have to break some long-standing habits. And the hardest habit to break, in fact, may be what Lerner calls the “syndrome of tragedy, of feeling like we’re terminal patients.” Many cities have “a lot of people who are specialists in proving change is not possible. What I try to explain to them when I go visit is that it takes the same energy to say why something can’t be done as to figure out how to do it.”

Keeping the balance

Restoration of the town is the concern at all levels but is mainly discussed at the top. Lerner thinks that the town authorities should know how to balance the two vital elements – necessity and possibility. A part of his day is devoted to dealing with particular requests, from maintenance of public lighting to ensuring that buses are punctual.

The other part of his time is spent in reflecting on what will happen in the town of the future after he retires. How many inhabitants will there be in 20 years? Where and how will they live? How will they go to work? Where will they throw their rubbish? Lerner says that “The mayor who limits himself to current problems fails the city of tomorrow, whereas a mere visionary stumbles in all the ruts of today.”

The memory of the efforts of 20 years ago to construct a town of make-do and ecology is the stuff of today’s personal history of the inhabitants and continues across the generations. The inhabitants have the feeling of participating in a novel ecological operation and of giving an example to the world.

Despite citizen concern over its future leadership, Curitiba revealed itself to be a city committed to maintaining its traditions. After 40 years of practice, there is a shared responsibility ingrained in the citizenry to do so. And it’s that identity that just might be Curitiba’s best defense against inertia in its future.

The Kind of Leader the World Needs More

Most Brazilian politicians begin their career as fabulous celebrities and end up barricaded behind the doors of their mansions, in fear of violence, the press or their rivals. Lerner walks peacefully in his town; he says the only people who ask him to stop are autograph-hunters.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

This article is a summary of the following articles :

1. “Creative Curitiba – the urban design of Curitiba, Brazil”, The Architectural Review, May 1999 by Lucien Kroll at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3575/is_1227_205/ai_54956126
2. “Curitiba’s Urban Experiment: The Development of Brazil’s City of the Future”, a PBS Frontline/World Fellows Project, December 2003 at http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/fellows/brazil1203/master-plan.html
3. “Curitiba, Brazil, A Livable City” by Bill McKibben at YES! Magazine Summer 1999 Issue http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=1258
4. “A New Design for Human Enterprise” by William McDonough, 2002 at http://www.mcdonough.com/writings/new_design.htm

Keywords : curitiba, city, civilization, design, transportation, mass-transit-system, poverty, waste, food, co-responsibility, co-intelligence, co-creation, eco-literacy, eco-intelligence, ecosocionomics solutions, leadership, community, community-entrepreneurship, children, love, learning, internet, library, books, decentralization, institutional diversity, policentricity, land-reform, housing, democracy
(use search box to list entries with one of these keywords)