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Brazilian best clean city of the world :Curitiba
The origional from from web page :http://www.natcap.org/sitepages/pid67.php
about NATURAL CAPITALISM: CREATING THE NEXT INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION by
Paul Hawken,Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins:Chapter14
THE CURITIBA EXAMPLE OF THE BEST GREEN CITY OF THE WORLD
Curitiba is a southeastern Brazilian city with the population of Houston or Philadelphia. It shares with hundreds of similar-sized cities a dangerous combination of scant resources plus explosive population growth. Curitiba's metro-area population grew from about 300,000 in 1950 to 2.1 million in 1990, when 42 percent of the population was under the age of 18. Another million residents are expected by 2020.
Most cities so challenged, in Brazil as throughout the South, have become centers of poverty, unemployment, squalor, disease, illiteracy, inequity, congestion, pollution, corruption, and despair. Yet by combining responsible government with vital entrepreneurship, Curitiba has achieved just the opposite. Though starting with the dismal economic profile typical of its region, in nearly three decades the city has achieved measurably better levels of education, health, human welfare, public safety, democratic participation, political integrity, environmental protection, and community spirit than its neighbors, and some would say than most cities in the United States. It has done so not by instituting a few economic megaprojects but by implementing hundreds of multipurpose, cheap, fast, simple, homegrown, people-centered initiatives harnessing market mechanisms, common sense, and local skills. It has flourished by treating all its citizens--most of all its children--not as its burden but as its most precious resource, creators of its future. It has succeeded not by central planning but by combining farsighted and pragmatic leadership with an integrated design process, strong public and business participation, and a widely shared public vision that transcends partisanship. The lessons of Curitiba's transformation hold promise and hope for all cities and all peoples throughout the world.
At 6:00 on a Friday evening in 1972, an hour after the law courts had closed, the renewal of Curitiba began. City workmen began jackhammering up the pavement of the central historic boulevard, the Rua Quinze de Novembro. Working round the clock, they laid cobblestones, installed streetlights and kiosks, and planted tens of thousands of flowers. Forty-eight hours later, their meticulously planned work was complete. Brazil's first pedestrian mall--one of the first in the world--was ready for business. By midday Monday, it was so thronged that the shopkeepers, who had threatened to sue because they feared lost traffic, were petitioning for its expansion. Some people started picking the flowers to take home, but city workers promptly replanted them, day after day, until the pillage stopped. The following weekend, when automobile-club members threatened to retake the street for cars, their caravan was repulsed by an army of children, painting watercolors on mall-length rolls of paper unfurled by city workers. The boulevard, now often called Rua das Flores, the Street of Flowers, quickly became the heart of a new kind of urban landscape. The children of those children now join in a commemorative paint-in every Saturday morning. The city is blessed with twenty downtown blocks of pedestrian streets that have regenerated its public realm and reenergized its commerce and its polity.
Of the many initiatives that changed the city's direction, the historic boulevard's bold resurrection, just before it was to have been destroyed for an overpass, was the most emblematic. At that time nearly every city in the world was demolishing its historic core so bigger roads could handle the onslaught of cars carrying people between districts zoned for disparate activities. But in 1971, when Brazil was still under military dictatorship, the governor of Paran State had chosen as mayor of its capital city a thirty-three-year-old architect, engineer, urban planner, and humanist named Jaime Lerner. Cheery, informal, energetic, intensely practical, with the brain of a technocrat and the soul of a poet, Lerner was selected not only for his knowledge of the city's needs but also for his supposed lack of political talent: The governor wanted someone politically nonthreatening. Unexpectedly, Lerner turned out to be a charismatic, compassionate, and visionary leader who ultimately ended his three terms, totaling a record twelve years, as the most popular mayor in Brazilian history.
His terms alternated with those of three other mayors because of Brazil's single-consecutive-term limit. Since then, Lerner has been twice elected governor of Paran. From that loftier position, he and the new mayor, his protege Cassio Taniguchi, are seeking to coordinate the state's and city's responses to migration, sewage, and other joint issues that neither can address alone. Now Lerner is spoken of as a plausible candidate for president of Brazil. He has also helped train, inspire, and propagate a generation of disciples whose influence extends far beyond Brazil.
The effectiveness, common sense, and political resonance of Lerner's policies, and their reliance on wide participation, were made possible by earlier and vibrant public debate to form a broad and durable political consensus. As a result, all six post-1971 mayors of Curitiba, though politically diverse--one was an outright opponent of Lerner's--have followed compatible policies, each respectfully advancing prior achievements while adding his own stamp. Five of the six were architects, engineers, or planners who treated the city and its political leadership as a design problem, continuously unfolding as the city's 1965 master plan shed its rigidities and evolved to meet changing needs. Those six mayors' twenty-eight years (and counting) of good management have generated a flow of interconnected, interactive, evolving solutions, mostly devised and implemented by partnerships among private firms, non-governmental organizations, municipal agencies, utilities, community groups, neighborhood associations, and individual citizens. Curitiba is not a top-down, mayor-dominated city; everyone respects the fact that, while it is served by leaders, many of the best ideas and most of their implementation come from its citizens. It encourages entrepreneurial solutions.
Lerner believed, as the late ecologist Rene Dubos put it, that "trend is not destiny." Rejecting the destruction of people-centered cities to rebuild them around cars, Lerner aimed to regain the vibrancy and diversity of the street life he'd enjoyed as a child, playing outside his Polish immigrant father's dry-goods store on the street of the main railway station. Having served previously as the president of the Curitiba Research and Urban Planning Institute (IPPUC), the nucleus of the city's innovative design ideas since the mid-1960s, he and his design colleagues saw Curitiba as a living laboratory to test their novel concept; but there was no time to lose. With its human population doubling each decade but with no new vision of urbanism, the city was rapidly developing clogged streets, bad air, and a dwindling sense of community. Lerner knew that to reverse these symptoms of excessive automobility, he had to move quickly and take risks. The revitalization of the Rua Quinze provided a symbolic focus for emerging attitudes about the purpose of both cities and their inhabitants. Residents and observers consider it a model worth emulating.
Some extracts of the detailed study on Curitiba city , Brazil from the book chapter 14
In the developing countries of the South, such whole-system thinking is at a premium, because the new pattern of scarcity that is the cor-nerstone for the arguments of this book—abundant people but scarce nature—has arrived there early and with a vengeance. For the developing world, most acutely, the relevant question will be: How many problems can be simultaneously solved or avoided, how many needs can be met, by making the right initial choices? And how can those choices be linked into a web of mutually supporting solutions, creating a healthy economic, social, and ecological system that develops both better people and thriving nature?
when 42 percent of the population was under the age of 18.Another million residents are expected by 2020. Most cities so challenged, in Brazil as throughout the South, have become centers of poverty, unemployment, squalor, disease, illiteracy,inequity, congestion, pollution, corruption, and despair. Yet by com-bining responsible government with vital entrepreneurship, Curitibaas achieved just the opposite. Though starting with the dismal economic profile typical of its region, in nearly three decades the city hasachieved measurably better levels of education, health, human welfare,public safety, democratic participation, political integrity, environmental protection, and community spirit than its neighbors, and somewould say than most cities in the United States. It has done so not by nstituting a few economic megaprojects but by implementing hundreds of multipurpose, cheap, fast, simple, homegrown, people-centered
initiatives harnessing market mechanisms, common sense, and local skills. It has flourished by treating all its citizens—most of all its children—not as its burden but as its most precious resource, creators
of its future. It has succeeded not by central planning but by combining farsighted and pragmatic leadership with an integrated design process,strong public and business participation, and a widely shared public
vision that transcends partisanship.
TRANSPORTATION AND LAND USE
Curitiba’s best-known innovations are in “growing along the trail of
memory and of transport,” as Lerner puts it. “Memory is the identity of
the city, and transport is the future.” Transportation, he realized, is not
only a way to move people but also a way to guide land-use and control
growth patterns, so as to influence not just traffic routes and modes but
also origins and destinations. Heretically, rather than expropriating
and demolishing centrally located buildings to widen roads—the
“urban renewal” that in so many cities has created a desolate, grid-
locked core fed by overcrowded highways—Lerner’s administration
chose to adapt existing streets, losing only a few buildings throughout
the city. Along the center of each of five interlinked growth axes, three
parallel avenues were modified. The middle one carried express buses
both ways, flanked by local traffic. The other two, one block to either
side, were one-way high-capacity roads to or from downtown. This
express-avenue system achieved the performance of a huge thorough-
fare nearly two hundred feet wide by spreading it over three existing
adjacent streets. The construction it required was completed in only
four years.
Matching the density of population to the capacity to transport it,
new zoning specified that the buildings nearest the bus avenues could
have up to six times as much floorspace as land area, grading down to a
ratio of one for properties farthest away from transit. Extra density—
up to two additional stories’ worth in a few specific areas with enough
infrastructure to support it—was later sold by the city at 75 percent of
its market value, paid in cash or land that was then reused to build low-
income housing. Parks were renewed to revitalize the arts, culture, and
history of the urban core. Many historic buildings were protected and
refurbished; owners were reimbursed for the foregone land develop-
ment rights, which were transferred to other districts. The city’s rich
ethnic heritage was honored and preserved.A ceremonial gate and spe-
cial center was created for each main culture, operated mainly by its
descendants. Mixed use was encouraged, ensuring the availability of
downtown housing and a match of densities between housing and
commercial needs. The city financed a special block-long covered
arcade of shops open twenty-four hours a day to help keep the down-
town lively throughout the night. The urban core, relieved of commer-
cial pressures that would otherwise generate extreme densities, was
returned to pedestrian priority as the focus of a renewed sense of com-
munity.Ordinary streets remained small and human-scaled; the histor-
ically evolved patterns and varying sizes of streets meant that the ratio
of street area to private land remained far smaller than in a grid layout.
The axial road/transit corridors shaped the city’s subsequent evolu-
tion. But before developing those corridors and hence boosting land
values, the city strategically bought nearby land in selected areas and
built low-income housing on it so as to ensure affordable access to jobs,
shops, and recreation. In addition, the city built schools, clinics, day-
care centers, parks, food distribution centers, and cultural and sports
facilities throughout its suburbs, democratizing amenities previously
available only to those who journeyed downtown. It thereby reduced
the need to travel and strengthened the outlying neighborhoods, which
also gained a great diversity of convenient shops. Small-scale, low-
income housing was blended throughout the city in an effort to foster
equity and social integration. The open availability of land-use plans
and rules reduced uncertainty and thus discouraged land speculation.
A further recent blow was struck against speculation by introducing a
public Geographic Information System that gives everyone equal access
to information about all the land in the city. To help keep that database
up-to-date, building permits require disclosure of job, traffic, parking,
and other specifics needed for sound urban and budget planning. (The
city runs mainly on property taxes.) Zoning has been based on consid-
erations including geography, hydrology, topography, climate, winds,
and cultural and historical factors—not just the tax base, political
pressures, or developers’ proposals.
Even with this orderly development pattern, how could a city pro-
vide its rapidly growing population with transportation without chok-
ing the higher-density areas? What Curitiba did not do was to turn over
its destiny to traffic engineers, who seldom adequately understand the
complex urban dance between land use and society, space, and move-
ment. Instead, Lerner relied on urbanists and architects, mainly from
IPPUC, all of whom approached transportation and land use, hydrol-
ogy and poverty, flows of nutrients and of wastes, health and education,
jobs and income, culture and politics, as intertwined parts of a single
integrated design problem. In addressing needs for transportation—
considered as access, not necessarily as mobility—they followed a set
of simple principles: Favor universal access over private cars. Support
human needs; don’t promote particular transport modes. Meet the
requirements of the poorest.And don’t spend money you don’t have.
Curitiba started its transportation overhaul with buses because it
had buses and couldn’t afford anything else; but first it needed different
buses. The old vehicles, originally built on truck chassis designed as
much for hauling animals as people, were noisy, bumpy, uncomfort-
able, slow, and awkwardly high off the ground. Passengers had to crowd
up steep stairs and jam through doors narrowed to discourage fare eva-
sion. But the IPPUC architects and engineers devised a wholly new
kind of bus, optimized for people, comfort, economy, and rapid flow.
Their double- or (since 1991) triple-length express buses, “articulated”
with pivoted sections for rounding corners, have up to five extrawide
doors. Locally assembled by Volvo, they can carry up to 270 passengers,
using 42 percent less fuel per seat-mile—even less per seat-trip,
because they cover their routes in one-third the time.
Curitiba’s system for using buses, dating back to 1928, also needed to
be fundamentally reconceived, from routes to boarding procedures,
administration to finance, politics to policies. A jumble of mismatched
regional concessions had to be melded into an integrated and efficient
transport system built on simple new technologies. Manual routing
and scheduling were switched to homegrown software, later commer-
cialized. On the express routes, buses now pull up alongside an inven-
tion of Lerner’s team, called a “tube station”12
—an elevated glass
cylinder parallel and adjacent to the bus lane, entered through a turn-
stile, displaying clear maps, and accessible by the handicapped.
Matched doors open on both station and bus. There are no stairs: Both
floors are at the same height, like a subway and its platform. All the
departing passengers disembark through one end of the tube station
and board from the other, again just like a well-run subway.Depending
on the time and route, this switch takes an average of about thirty sec-
onds—as long as a bus conductor would need to collect fares from
roughly seven passengers if they hadn’t previously paid their fares on
entering the tube stations. Instead, the bus needs only a driver, so it can
carry more passengers, faster, at lower cost. Rush-hour express buses
move once a minute. The bigger bus, wider doors, and tube station, plus
automatic controls—the buses operate traffic lights to maintain their
priority—achieve three times the average passengers-per-hour, and
the average speed, of a traditional bus. This reduces idle capital (69 per-
cent fewer buses do the same job), fuel, pollution, noise, and cost, and
shaves about 40minutes off a typical daily commute. The whole system
is designed not just to deliver its passengers pleasantly and safely but to
do so quickly, so they’ll have more time for family, friends, and enjoying
life.
Each lane of express buses carries 20,000 passengers per hour. That’s
about as many as a subway carries; indeed, it’s just like a subway, except
that it costs at least 100 times less (tenfold less than a surface train) and
can be installed in six months, not a generation. Rio built subways that
carry one-fourth as many passengers as Curitiba’s buses yet cost 200
times as much. By avoiding those huge capital costs, and their perpetual
operating costs, Curitiba instead freed up funds for many of its social
improvements.
Curitiba is widely believed to have the finest bus system, if not the
finest public transportation system, in the world.More than 1,250 buses
of 9 varieties are matched to their specific duties so as to leave fewer
empty seats. Two hundred forty-five carefully integrated radial, loop,
and connector routes of 12 color-coded kinds, linked by 25 terminals,
blanket the entire city and its environs. The buses make 17,300 daily
trips on nearly 500 route-miles, covering 230,000 bus-miles per day—
a distance of nine times around the world. The British Guardian news-
paper reported that Curitiba’s efficient bus service “makes London
seem antediluvian. Bus jams never happen, vandalism is unknown”—
even to the beautiful but deliberately fragile glass tube stations—
because of pervasive civic pride. People could easily evade the bus fare,
too, by walking into either open end of the terminals, but they don’t,
because they reciprocate the city’s palpable respect.
The bus system is entirely self-financing from fares; the city con-
tributes only the streets, stations ($4.5 million for all 200-odd stops),
and lights. It sets the fare, routes, schedules, and operating standards.
The forty-five-U.S.-cent fare covers all other costs, including the $45
million fleet of buses, plus a profit to the ten private operating firms.
The rate structure repays one percent of the operator’s fleet investment
per month—a strong incentive to reinvest. Financial controls on the
operating companies are strict, audited, open to public inspection, and
WATER, WASTEWATER, AND GREEN SPACE
Designing land-use in conjunction with transport reduced congestion
and smog, saved energy, revitalized neighborhoods, and solidified civic
spirit. But the success of the plan depended also on a less visible dimen-
sion: water. Curitiba lies between two major rivers and contains five
smaller ones. For two centuries, people and rivers lived in harmony. But
in the 1950s and 1960s, migrants from failed coffee plantations—dis-
placed by mechanically harvested crops like soybeans—started set-
tling in floodplain shantytowns. Meanwhile, impervious surfaces and
other encroachments on natural drainage caused worsening floods
through the city center. Multimillion-dollar channelization projects
proved of minimal benefit. The problem had become acute when
Lerner first took office. His designers decided to switch from fighting
flooding to exploiting the water as a gift of habitat. They passed strin-
gent riparian-zone protective laws, turned riverbanks into linear parks,
and used small ditches and dams to form new lakes, each the core of a
new park. This “design with nature” strategy stopped the flooding, and
cost far less than traditional flood-control methods. Now, planners
quip, heavy rains just make the ducks in the parks float a meter higher.
Unused streamside buildings were meanwhile turned into sports and
leisure facilities.Community groups sprang up to protect the parks, use
them for environmental education, and integrate this into school pro-
grams. The flood-control greenways also worked well as antipollution
buffers from nearby slums.
15
A strategic objective throughout has been
to protect the giant Iguaçu basin from serious contamination, since this
river within the city provides nearly all of the metro area’s drinking
water. Sixteen parks, cherished as public assets, form the first line of
defense for this vital water resource.
At the same time, the city introduced a five-yard setback require-
ment (intended as a space for gardens) for all new buildings outside the
core. It limited residential construction to 50 percent of a site’s area, and
banned impervious paving of open space. It provided permanent pro-
tection for vegetation in the low-density one-third of the city, and tax
relief for woods and gardens: Over 1,100 private woodlands are now
registered, and the tax-relieved private green space exceeds four square
miles. All these features allow rainwater to soak in where it falls, and
massively greened the city. Curitiba also planted hundreds of thou-
sands of trees everywhere: “We provide the shade, you provide the
water.”TOne-sixth of the city is wooded. Two nurseries provide 150,000 tree and
shrub seedlings and 2.2 million plant seedlings per year.Without a per-
mit, no one may cut down a tree, even on his or her own land, and the
permit requires replanting two trees for every one that is removed.
Complementing the private gardens and woods is public green
space, which in 25 years, even as the city’s population grew 2.4-fold,
expanded from five to 581 square feet per person—four times as much
as the UN recommends or New Yorkers enjoy. The city protects nearly
seven square miles of parks, nine forests, a Botanical Garden, five Envi-
ronment Gardens, two Environmentally Protected Areas totaling five
square miles along major rivers, 282 squares, and 259 pocket gardens.
Curitiba’s CD-ROM catalogs the 242 species of birds known and the 48
more suspected to live in the city; many have fled into the city’s parks
from encroaching suburbs. There’s a profusion of amphibians and
mammals and 50 kinds of snakes, and once-native species of various
animals are being reintroduced. After a month’s residence in the city,
author Bill McKibben reported that “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.”
INDUSTRY AND COMMUNITY
Curitiba’s economy was traditionally that of an agricultural market
town and food processor. But in the past 20 years it’s become an indus-
trial and commercial powerhouse as well, linked to other cities in South
America by rail, road, and two airports—one of them highly computer-
ized and the second-largest in Brazil. Situated 190miles southwest of São
Paulo, Curitiba lies within 800 miles of the producers of 70–80 percent
of Brazil’s GDP, and nestles between the capitals of Brazil, Argentina,
Uruguay, and Paraguay—a total market of 200 million people.
Mayor Lerner realized early on that to serve and employ its bur-
geoning population, the city would need to balance its commercial and
service businesses with new light and medium industry. Before land
speculators could move in, the city therefore planned in 1972 and
bought in 1975 sixteen square miles of land, six miles west of downtown
Curitiba, for its Industrial City. To ensure affordable housing near the
jobs, it preinstalled low-income dwellings, schools, services, cultural
facilities, streets, bus links (including a special one to the largest poor
neighborhood), and protected open space: Nearly as much of the trees
are the city’s lungs, cleaning the air and blocking no Industrial City is
occupied by woods as by factories.
The city then recruited more than 500 nonpolluting industries, which provide one-
fifth of its total jobs—50,000 directly and 150,000 indirectly. To
encourage firms to reduce, reuse, and recycle, they’re all required to dis-
pose of their solid wastes on their own land.Workers can walk or bike
to work from their nearby homes at no cost and use their monthly
transport vouchers to buy bikes. Companies are attracted by Curitiba’s
marketing cachet. International firms are well represented, partly
because of the high quality of life: Executives reckon they save twenty
commuting hours a week compared to what they would experience in
São Paulo, or nine years per lifetime.
Curitiba didn’t begin its urban development significantly richer or
poorer than other cities in southern Brazil. In 1980, its per-capita GDP
was only 10 percent above the Brazilian average. But by 1996, that mar-
gin had surged to 65 percent. More important, the effectiveness of
municipal services had increased poor citizens’ monthly household
income from, say, $300 to the equivalent of $400 or even $500. What
created this huge margin of advantage for poor Curitibans? Not direct
transfer payments from the city’s municipal budget, which in 1992
stood at a quarter billion dollars for a city of 1.3 million, or $156 per
capita—one-eighth that of Detroit. Rather, Curitiba’s funding for
social services is spent more effectively than in probably any city in the
North.
The municipal government is dedicated to solutions that are simple,
fast, fun, and cheap, to what McKibben calls “constructive pragmatism.”
Lerner, convinced that hope is sustained by visible change for the better,
inculcated a culture of speed: “Credit cards give us goods quickly, the
fax machine gives us the message quickly—the only thing left in our
Stone Age is the central governments.”City Hall’s credibility in Curitiba
comes from its creating a big park in only twenty days, or launching a
vast recycling program within months of its conception. Curitibans
have also come to expect what is too often a rarity in Brazil: transparent,
honest, and accountable government. Any politician foolish enough to
stray from these ideals would be promptly skewered by the wags of the
Boca Maldita—a picturesque section of the Luiz Xavier mall devoted
to public grousing. The real and powerful deterrent is that the city has
built what planner Jonas Rabinovitch calls “genuine mechanisms...to
give broad-based legitimacy to its interventions. One example: Pe
vote for the improvements they would like to see in their neighborhood
when they pay property taxes.”
Since the rapidly changing value of the inflation-prone national
currency can be hard to calculate, some Curitiban commentators mea-
sure urban investments in a novel unit: the cost of asphalting one kilo-
meter of street, or about a half million dollars. For example, a tube
station costs the equivalent of 0.5 km; a Lighthouse of Knowledge, 0.2
km. The latter is a brightly colored, 52-foot-high, lighthouse-shaped
library of about 7,000 volumes, including the Lições Curitibanas—a
ten-volume text on Curitiba’s history, culture, civics, and environment
that’s a fundamental element of all primary schooling. Poor students
obtain their set in exchange for recyclable garbage. Its print run of
enough copies to instruct at least a third of a million children (over
four years) sounds like a good use of the cost of 3 km of asphalt. The
Lighthouses are also gaining Internet connections, and house Brazil’s
first public terminals. The top of each Lighthouse is a nighttime watch-
tower containing a light and a policeman, keeping the neighborhood
safe for the children to come and go. Lighthouses of Knowledge are
sprouting around the city, with the aim of having one within walking
distance of every child’s home.
In Curitiba, everything is recycled. A gunpowder magazine became
a theater. A mansion was converted into the planning headquarters, an
army headquarters into a cultural foundation, a foundry into a popular
shopping mall, and the oldest house into a publications center. The old
railway station became a rail museum, and a glue plant a Creativity
Center where children make handicrafts (which the city’s tourist shops
then sell to fund social programs). A quarry became a famous
amphitheater and a cable-and-polycarbonate-birdcage opera house
(built in 60 days).A garbage dump was converted into the noted 11-acre
Botanical Garden that is home to 220,000 species, and another derelict
quarry into the Free University of the Environment. Constructed of old
tires and utility poles, the Free University provides courses for every-
one—shopkeepers, building managers, journalists, teachers, home-
makers, and (mandatorily) taxi drivers—on the land-use and
environmental issues related to their work.
Curitiba’s buses get recycled, too. The average vehicle in service is
only 3.5 years old, compared with the Brazilian average of eight and the
legal limit of ten. Curitiba’s depreciated buses often become mobile
job-training centers. Parked in the slums and reoutfitted, they are called
Linha do Oficio (“The Jobs Route” or “The Line to Work”), and staffed
by locally recruited, frequently rotated teachers who offer training in
more than forty in-demand trades or disciplines to more than 10,000
people a year, mainly on nights and weekends. A three-month course
costs only two bus tokens—less than a dollar. Other recycled buses
become clinics, classrooms, baby-sitting centers, food markets, soup
kitchens, and coaches for weekend excursions in the parks.
These innovations owe much to the staffing of the city’s municipal
departments. They’re often led by women and are heavily populated by
architects—professional problem-solvers—rather than by the more
traditional sorts of bureaucrats skilled at explaining why problems
can’t be solved. The interdisciplinary charrette—the architect’s stan-
dard design process—is Curitiba’s primary problem-solving mecha-
nism. Conceptual tests of new ideas lead quickly to their application.
Risks are taken in the expectation that mistakes will be made, quickly
detected and diagnosed, and corrected.When budgets can’t support an
entire new program, it’s launched anyway so that learning can begin
while more resources or economies are sought. Failures are frequent,
hard lessons constant, struggles to improve unrelenting. Guided by the
reservoir of experience in IPPUC and by the collective wisdom of its
diverse citizenry, Curitiba experiments and improves as assiduously as
any startup company. From the outside, it may look easy, but it’s not.
Rabinovitch emphasizes the many challenges that Curitiba’s govern-
ment has regularly faced. The process by which it seeks to overcome
them, however, through persistent application of whole-system think-
ing, is far more important than particular successes.
CHILDREN AND HEALTH, GARBAGE AND NUTRITION
Many of Curitiba’s children and adolescents have concerns as funda-
mental as where their next meal is coming from. As an island of
decency and success in a slough of despondency, the city gave rise by
the early 1990s to some 209 slum areas, containing one-ninth of its pop-
ulation, which were starting to suffer from diseases borne by rats and
contaminated water. By Lerner’s third term (1989–92), he therefore
faced a doubled population and heightened social challenges. His
response was to redouble Curitiba’s long-standing efforts to support its
poorest citizens, especially its children, who were the special concern of
the city’s First Lady.
The city’s emphasis on its children starts with discreetly provided
amily-planning advice and continues with early prenatal and postnatal
are. Medical improvements have cut infant mortality by nearly one-
fth in four years. By 1996 it was still slightly over twice the U.S. average,
ut one-third the Brazilian average, the lowest in the country, and being
eadily reduced. Poor children receive regular visits from health work-
rs and obligatory free checkups, recorded in a personal health book,
ntil age five. Preventive health care is emphasized throughout the
chools, day-care, and childhood/teen centers. The city has 88 health
ations, five of which operate round-the-clock. Each has a drugstore
hat distributes 81 commercial and traditional medicines for free—3
million doses per month, covering four-fifths of the most common
onditions, and bulk-purchased to save packaging costs.
Because health depends critically on sanitation and nutrition,
uritiba found a creative way to fund both by turning garbage into
alue. Experts warned that when the city exceeded a million inhabi-
ants, it would need not only subways but also a costly mechanical plant
or separating its 800 daily metric tons of garbage. On both scores,
uritiba chose a different path. The 1989 “Garbage That Isn’t Garbage”
nitiative led more than 70 percent of households to sort recyclables for
hrice-weekly curbside collection by the green trucks of the private firm
hat won a public competition for the franchise. Organics go in one
lastic bag; paper, metal, glass, and the like in another. Two-thirds of
he separately bagged recyclables are recovered and sold. This loop-
osing offset over half the system’s operating cost, which previously
ften represented the largest item in the municipal budget. Sorting sta-
ons, built from secondhand parts, hire the homeless, the disabled, and
ecovering alcoholics. Landfill use has been reduced by one-sixth in
eight, and even more in volume. Groundwater is protected from con-
amination by leaching garbage. Curitibans’ paper recycling alone saves
200 trees a day.
The city also funds a Garbage Purchase Program16
from what it would otherwise have paid to collect trash in the poorer neighbor-
oods, where normal collection was next to impossible because trucks
ouldn’t reach unpaved alleys. Now, in the “Green Exchange” project, a
mall truck pulls up in one of more than 100 squatter sectors of the city
nd rings its bell. Tens of thousands of the area’s citizens respond by
ringing bags of garbage to swap for food: 60 kilograms of trash earn
0 tickets, enough for a month’s food (or bus tokens, school notebooks,
or Christmas toys) for an entire family. Two kilos of recyclables earn
one kilo of food. Similar exchanges, all totaling close to 100 metric tons
a month, occur at schools and factories. McKibben quotes the ticket
book’s cover: “You are responsible for this program. Keep on cooperat-
ing and we will get a cleaner Curitiba, cleaner and more human.You are
an example to Brazil and even to the rest of the world.”
These food exchanges address many needs at once. The rice, beans,
potatoes, onions, oranges, garlic, eggs, bananas, carrots, and honey they
supply are seasonal surplus produce bought from local farmers, helping
keep them on the land. Public health is served by encouraging the clear-
ance of litter from hard-to-reach land, mainly near the rivers. That
effort is supplemented by a temporary-jobs-for-cleanup program
called “All Clean,” funded by the city but organized by 135 neighbor-
hood associations, which hires unemployed or retired people who need
the income.With cleanup, too, comes community pride: vegetable gar-
dens, dug by out-of-school children and coached by now-employed
peasants, sprout from former dumps. All these initiatives rely not on
capital-intensive mechanization but on public participation.
Nutrition is improved not just by Green Exchange but by diverse
efforts reaching many of the city’s 700,000 poorest residents. Some
families can get garden plots in the suburbs, through the neighborhood-
association-centered Community Orchards Program, to grow food for
their own use and for sale. One such program has established farms
next to day-care, school, and neighborhood association buildings where
city agronomists provide seeds, materials, tools, and advice. Another
effort organizes restaurants and others to distribute meals and surplus
produce to the needy. The City Department of Health offers instruction
in homegrowing medicinal plants. To help the poor stretch their bud-
gets and to discourage price-gouging, the city has tried a computerized
phone system that informs shoppers of the current prices of 222 staples
in the dozen largest supermarkets. Family Warehouses even bulk-buy
food, toiletries, and cleaning goods for resale to low-income families at
30 percent below retail.
EDUCATION, DAY CARE, AND JOBS
With nearly 100 children born daily, Curitiba must spend 27 percent of
its budget on education. Its 120-odd schools, many reused for adult
education at night, have achieved one of Brazil’s highest literacy rates
(over 94 percent by 1996) and lowest first-grade failure rates. Environ-
mental education, too, starts in early childhood and is not just taught in
isolation but integrated across the core curriculum. A top priority of
the city since 1971, it portrays the environment not just as parks but as
the place and the social setting that forms tomorrow’s citizens. Dozens
of Centers for Integrated Education operate near conventional schools,
providing half of each student’s instructional time from better-trained
teachers.
Schooling is only one element in an extensive network of child-
oriented social services.More than 200 day-care centers, free for lower-
income families and open 11 hours a day (long enough to support
working parents), are situated next to many schools and provide four
meals a day for some 12,000 children who would otherwise wander the
slums while their parents were away at work. (Their hunger pangs
could also lead them, as in other Brazilian cities, to sniff glue—an ulti-
mately fatal practice. Curitiba recently tackled this addiction by work-
ing with the leading manufacturer to add a foul-smelling substance to
its glue, a step that has gone far toward eliminating glue-sniffing
nationwide.) The centers also offer instruction in caring for younger
children and growing vegetables. Many companies and individuals
receive tax waivers for sponsoring day-care positions through vouch-
ers, helping to finance new centers. One measure of the community’s
solidarity is that through patient negotiation, without police involve-
ment, local gangs that initially committed some vandalism to the day-
care centers ended up getting involved in their work. Similarly, when
gangs initially tore up flower beds at the new Botanical Garden, inter-
preting their vandalism not as a venting of hostility but as a cry for help
led to hiring them as assistant gardeners.
Boarding schoolchildren can work part-time from their own dor-
mitories, delivering newspapers and magazines (which also promote
literacy); half their earnings are banked for them until they’re older. Or
they can work in a uniformed service either delivering packages or
carrying parcels for shoppers in the street markets. Working school-
children can also get school support, sports, culture, and computer
courses. Older children are given apprenticeships, entry-level jobs,
and job training, often in environmental skills—forestry, ecological
restoration, water pollution control, public health. They can earn half
the minimum wage in parks, flower shops, and private gardens. The
Program for Childhood and Adolescence Integration (PIÁ—a pun on
pía, Guarani slang for “kid”), an 8-to-6 effort for school dropouts aged
7–17, has 64 centers.Half teach with an environmental emphasis, reaching
more than 4,000 children.Altogether, PIÁ serves some 30,000 children.
As in the city’s other social programs, loop-closing abounds: For example,
kids learn gardening by growing flowers (the city provides the seeds),
sell them to city parks, earn money and self-respect, gain skills, and
qualify for real jobs.
Curitiba’s few hundred street children—far fewer than in other
Brazilian cities—are registered and are well known to street-smart
social workers, who seek to win their trust and enroll them in the many
programs, shelters, and foster arrangements that offer food, love, and
support. Children who stay in school are given scholarships in the form
of family food baskets, and can get part-time entry-level jobs plus
health care, transportation, and job training.
STRAGGLERS AND ARRIVALS
A similarly impressive range of efforts supports the homeless and the
needy elderly and disabled, with many programs achieving multiple
aims. For example, Dial Solidarity stands ready to pick up any second-
hand furniture and appliances, which will be repaired by apprentices in
carpentry and upholstering, then resold at nominal cost in street mar-
kets in the neediest neighborhoods (or sometimes donated). The oldest
slum contained for a time a traveling circus tent in which children made
toys—for themselves, day-care centers, and others in need—out of
recyclables. The toys were based partly on prototypes created by indus-
trial design students: A plastic mineral-water bottle turned into a toy
tube station. Programs for the elderly (“Third Age”) are designed not as
mere recreation but as a foundation for an independent and active life,
promoted by such physical activities as yoga, dance, and physiotherapy.
Another key goal is to give an economic role to marginal and poten-
tially alienated or resentful individuals—integrating them as active,
self-reliant citizens with pride in their contribution to the community.
Job markets match up employers with qualified applicants, but the sev-
enteen hundred peasants arriving monthly from the countryside,
though offered basic orientation, often have trouble finding work. The
city is trying to organize a thousand poor handcart collectors of recy-
clables to help them get a fair price. Shoeshiners and street vendors are
similarly organized and offered good sites at regular times: Rather than
being expelled or harassed, Curitiba invites them to take their place in
the fabric of the city, licenses them, and gives them the status, stability,
and business advantage of stalls and pushcarts.
In a 170-household pilot project, some poor families constructed
their own decent cottages with municipal long-term land-and-materials
financing, at a cost equivalent to two packs of cigarettes a month.With
a dwelling upstairs and a shop downstairs, these small “trade villages”
brought vital services into the slums, fostered dignity, and turned their
residents into active citizens with a stake in their neighborhood. Lerner
is now leading Paraná State toward a policy of providing microcredit
and land tenure in new rural villages that are expected to receive one-
fourth of the state’s landless peasants by 1999, delaying by at least a gen-
eration their flow to the city.
Nonetheless, that flow has continued to overwhelm Curitiba’s abil-
ity to house migrants in some 14,000 low-income dwellings dispersed
through existing neighborhoods. The city therefore recently created a
new district, planned to lodge up to 30,000 additional migrant families.
Since many peasants arrive with building skills, the city created a build-
it-yourself program that gives each poor family a plot of land, a title
deed, building materials, two trees—one fruit, one ornamental—and
an hour’s consultation with an architect. The custom design, with
advice on the sequence of later room-by-room expansion, bears no
additional cost and yields a vastly better result than impersonal cinder-
block hovels. Each house’s uniqueness in layout, appearance, and even
building technology (samples of which line a Technology Street) sig-
nals the personal validation of each of the neighborhood’s new citizens.
And among the district’s first building projects was the tube station
linking it into the rest of the city. As Lerner says, a city with ghettos—
ghettos of poor or of rich—isn’t a city.Despite its Teutonic heritage of
conservatism, Curitiba doesn’t begrudge its generous help for the poor,
because it’s frugally and effectively carried out. Nor do taxpayers com-
plain that government can’t work, because their government so clearly
does. Curitiba is a city short on cynics and long on citizens.
IDENTITY AND DIGNITY
Strengthening civil society is the focus of many other important pro-
grams in Curitiba. The larger bus terminals contain “Citizenship
Streets”—clusters of satellite municipal offices that bring City Hall to
its constituents where they change bus lines. (Suburban “neighborhood
City Halls” came even earlier.) The Citizenship Streets also offer infor-
mation on training, business loans, and job opportunities; the largest
one is even integrated with a street market. This decentralization of
services to the most local possible level reflects the user-friendly,
customer-service orientation of all municipal services. Their design is
streamlined to save citizens’ time, so that a sick mother, for example,
can schedule a clinic or specialist appointment, day care, and any other
required support with a single phone call. The 4,500 beds at 36 hospi-
tals, and 1,700 daily doctor’s appointments, are also centrally dis-
patched for users’ convenience.
Another strong emphasis, from childhood up, is the availability of
public information, on the sound principle that “the better citizens
know their city, the better they treat it.” The city’s array of telephone-
and Web-based resources and hotlines—and the responsiveness of the
city workers and volunteers taking the calls—would do credit to a
metropolis ten times its size. There are hotlines not just for kids at risk,
potholes, and gas leaks but also for air, water, noise, land pollution,
ugliness, and bandit tree-cutting. The social lines alone handle 28,000
calls a day—six per citizen per year. The resulting sense of participa-
tion is so ingrained that instead of graffiti scrawled on public walls,
Curitibans politely tape poems to utility poles. In comparison with
Americans who often don’t know their next-door neighbors, Curitibans
consider one another all neighbors, and in contrast with their historical
reserve, are starting to show signs of downright gregariousness. As
McKibben puts it, this vibrant city is “a habitat, a place for living—the
exact and exciting opposite of a mall.”
These, then, are some of the ways in which Curitiba’s creative,
coherent, highly integrated design approach turns isolated problems—
public transport and housing, trash and food, jobs and education—
into interrelated generators of new resources and social cohesion. Even
a task like mowing the parks’ grass reflects the goals of an integral phi-
losophy: Instead of running noisy, smelly, oil-consuming mowing
machines, a municipal shepherd moves his flock of thirty sheep around
as needed. In due course, the wool and the sheep too are recycled, turn-
ing surplus grass into more income for social programs.
SYNTHESIS
Teasing apart the strands of the intricate web of Curitiban innovation
reveals the basic principles of natural capitalism at work in a particu-
larly inspiring way. Resources are used frugally. New technologies are
adopted. Broken loops are reclosed. Toxicity is designed out, health in.
Design works with nature, not against it. The scale of solutions matches
the scale of problems. A continuous flow of value and service rewards
everyone involved in ever-improving efficiency. As education rejoins
nature and culture to daily life and work,myriad forms of action, learn-
ing, and attitude reinforce the healing of the natural world—and with
it, the society and its politics. For Curitiba has discovered a way to tran-
scend natural capitalism, supplementing its principles and practices
with others that start to achieve what we may call human capitalism.
Walter Stahel notes that traditional environmental goals—nature pro-
tection, public health and safety, resource productivity—can together
build a sustainable economy. But, he adds, only by adding ethics, jobs,
the translation of sustainability into other cultures—and we would
add, citizenship—can we achieve a sustainable society.
17
But how, finally, is the city working? In early-1990s surveys, over 99
percent of Curitibans said they wouldn’t want to live anywhere else, 70
percent of São Paulo residents thought life would be better in Curitiba,
and 60 percent of New Yorkers wanted to leave their glittering city.
Among Curitiba’s noteworthy achievements,
benchmarked annually to spur further gains, are 95 percent literacy,
96 percent basic vaccina-tion, 99.5 percent of households with drinking
water and electricity, 98 percent with trash collection, 83 percent with at
least a high-school education, three-fourths of households owner-occupied,
one-third the national average poverty rate, and 72-year life expectancy.
Curitibans enjoy 86 percent weekly newspaper circulation, 25 radio stations,
14 cable and TV stations, three orchestras (even a famous harmonica
orchestra), 20 theaters, 30 public libraries, 74 museums and cultural
buildings. The Culture Foundation’s monthly program of events, gen-
erally with free or very cheap admission, exceeds 40 pages.With a 1996
per-capita GDP of only $7,827—27 percent of America’s—Curitibans
have created what the well-traveled Bill McKibben calls “one of the
world’s great cities.”
Of course, Curitiba has significant problems still ahead of it: A third
of metro-region houses are unsewered, 8 percent of its citizens still live
in slums (compared with one-third in Rio), and nearly half its children
are not yet completing grade school. Because of its success, Curitiba
attracts much of the surrounding misery of southern Brazil, and can-
not possibly handle all of it. But on the whole, its imperfections are of
the variety that McKibben quotes from the Brazilian newsmagazine
Veja: “It rains a lot, the streets are slippery, and drivers still go through
red lights. Its virtues, however, are unbeatable.”19
Curitiba doesn’t present itself as a turnkey model for literal replica-
tion, for no two cities are alike enough for such copying to work.
Rather, Lerner calls his city “not a model but a reference.”20
Perhaps its
most impressive achievement is that a simple philosophy and persistent
experimentation and improvement have created a First World city in
the midst of the Third World—breaking what Lerner calls the “syn-
drome of tragedy” that paralyzes progress, and replacing it with dignity
and hope. Curitiba’s central political principle since 1971 has been con-
sistent and profound: to respect the citizen/owner of all public assets
and services, both because all people deserve respect and because, as
Lerner insists, “If people feel respected, they will assume responsibility
to help solve other problems.” Closing the broken loop of politics, this
principle recycles the poor and hungry, the apathetic and illiterate, into
actively contributing citizens.
Lewis Mumford called cities a “symbol of the possible.”21
On the southern plateau of Brazil, one city has hauled itself out of tough cir-
cumstances by the strength of good design. Its design mentality treats a
wide variety of needs not as competing priorities to be traded off and
compromised but rather as interlinked opportunities for synergies to
be optimized. In Curitiba, its results show how to combine a healthy
ecosphere, a vibrant and just economy, and a society that nurtures
humanity. Whatever exists is possible;
Curitiba exists; therefore it is possible. The existence of Curitiba holds
out the promise that it will be first of a string of cities that redefine the
nature of urban life.
about NATURAL CAPITALISM: CREATING THE NEXT INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION by
Paul Hawken,Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins:Chapter14
THE CURITIBA EXAMPLE OF THE BEST GREEN CITY OF THE WORLD
Curitiba is a southeastern Brazilian city with the population of Houston or Philadelphia. It shares with hundreds of similar-sized cities a dangerous combination of scant resources plus explosive population growth. Curitiba's metro-area population grew from about 300,000 in 1950 to 2.1 million in 1990, when 42 percent of the population was under the age of 18. Another million residents are expected by 2020.
Most cities so challenged, in Brazil as throughout the South, have become centers of poverty, unemployment, squalor, disease, illiteracy, inequity, congestion, pollution, corruption, and despair. Yet by combining responsible government with vital entrepreneurship, Curitiba has achieved just the opposite. Though starting with the dismal economic profile typical of its region, in nearly three decades the city has achieved measurably better levels of education, health, human welfare, public safety, democratic participation, political integrity, environmental protection, and community spirit than its neighbors, and some would say than most cities in the United States. It has done so not by instituting a few economic megaprojects but by implementing hundreds of multipurpose, cheap, fast, simple, homegrown, people-centered initiatives harnessing market mechanisms, common sense, and local skills. It has flourished by treating all its citizens--most of all its children--not as its burden but as its most precious resource, creators of its future. It has succeeded not by central planning but by combining farsighted and pragmatic leadership with an integrated design process, strong public and business participation, and a widely shared public vision that transcends partisanship. The lessons of Curitiba's transformation hold promise and hope for all cities and all peoples throughout the world.
At 6:00 on a Friday evening in 1972, an hour after the law courts had closed, the renewal of Curitiba began. City workmen began jackhammering up the pavement of the central historic boulevard, the Rua Quinze de Novembro. Working round the clock, they laid cobblestones, installed streetlights and kiosks, and planted tens of thousands of flowers. Forty-eight hours later, their meticulously planned work was complete. Brazil's first pedestrian mall--one of the first in the world--was ready for business. By midday Monday, it was so thronged that the shopkeepers, who had threatened to sue because they feared lost traffic, were petitioning for its expansion. Some people started picking the flowers to take home, but city workers promptly replanted them, day after day, until the pillage stopped. The following weekend, when automobile-club members threatened to retake the street for cars, their caravan was repulsed by an army of children, painting watercolors on mall-length rolls of paper unfurled by city workers. The boulevard, now often called Rua das Flores, the Street of Flowers, quickly became the heart of a new kind of urban landscape. The children of those children now join in a commemorative paint-in every Saturday morning. The city is blessed with twenty downtown blocks of pedestrian streets that have regenerated its public realm and reenergized its commerce and its polity.
Of the many initiatives that changed the city's direction, the historic boulevard's bold resurrection, just before it was to have been destroyed for an overpass, was the most emblematic. At that time nearly every city in the world was demolishing its historic core so bigger roads could handle the onslaught of cars carrying people between districts zoned for disparate activities. But in 1971, when Brazil was still under military dictatorship, the governor of Paran State had chosen as mayor of its capital city a thirty-three-year-old architect, engineer, urban planner, and humanist named Jaime Lerner. Cheery, informal, energetic, intensely practical, with the brain of a technocrat and the soul of a poet, Lerner was selected not only for his knowledge of the city's needs but also for his supposed lack of political talent: The governor wanted someone politically nonthreatening. Unexpectedly, Lerner turned out to be a charismatic, compassionate, and visionary leader who ultimately ended his three terms, totaling a record twelve years, as the most popular mayor in Brazilian history.
His terms alternated with those of three other mayors because of Brazil's single-consecutive-term limit. Since then, Lerner has been twice elected governor of Paran. From that loftier position, he and the new mayor, his protege Cassio Taniguchi, are seeking to coordinate the state's and city's responses to migration, sewage, and other joint issues that neither can address alone. Now Lerner is spoken of as a plausible candidate for president of Brazil. He has also helped train, inspire, and propagate a generation of disciples whose influence extends far beyond Brazil.
The effectiveness, common sense, and political resonance of Lerner's policies, and their reliance on wide participation, were made possible by earlier and vibrant public debate to form a broad and durable political consensus. As a result, all six post-1971 mayors of Curitiba, though politically diverse--one was an outright opponent of Lerner's--have followed compatible policies, each respectfully advancing prior achievements while adding his own stamp. Five of the six were architects, engineers, or planners who treated the city and its political leadership as a design problem, continuously unfolding as the city's 1965 master plan shed its rigidities and evolved to meet changing needs. Those six mayors' twenty-eight years (and counting) of good management have generated a flow of interconnected, interactive, evolving solutions, mostly devised and implemented by partnerships among private firms, non-governmental organizations, municipal agencies, utilities, community groups, neighborhood associations, and individual citizens. Curitiba is not a top-down, mayor-dominated city; everyone respects the fact that, while it is served by leaders, many of the best ideas and most of their implementation come from its citizens. It encourages entrepreneurial solutions.
Lerner believed, as the late ecologist Rene Dubos put it, that "trend is not destiny." Rejecting the destruction of people-centered cities to rebuild them around cars, Lerner aimed to regain the vibrancy and diversity of the street life he'd enjoyed as a child, playing outside his Polish immigrant father's dry-goods store on the street of the main railway station. Having served previously as the president of the Curitiba Research and Urban Planning Institute (IPPUC), the nucleus of the city's innovative design ideas since the mid-1960s, he and his design colleagues saw Curitiba as a living laboratory to test their novel concept; but there was no time to lose. With its human population doubling each decade but with no new vision of urbanism, the city was rapidly developing clogged streets, bad air, and a dwindling sense of community. Lerner knew that to reverse these symptoms of excessive automobility, he had to move quickly and take risks. The revitalization of the Rua Quinze provided a symbolic focus for emerging attitudes about the purpose of both cities and their inhabitants. Residents and observers consider it a model worth emulating.
Some extracts of the detailed study on Curitiba city , Brazil from the book chapter 14
In the developing countries of the South, such whole-system thinking is at a premium, because the new pattern of scarcity that is the cor-nerstone for the arguments of this book—abundant people but scarce nature—has arrived there early and with a vengeance. For the developing world, most acutely, the relevant question will be: How many problems can be simultaneously solved or avoided, how many needs can be met, by making the right initial choices? And how can those choices be linked into a web of mutually supporting solutions, creating a healthy economic, social, and ecological system that develops both better people and thriving nature?
when 42 percent of the population was under the age of 18.Another million residents are expected by 2020. Most cities so challenged, in Brazil as throughout the South, have become centers of poverty, unemployment, squalor, disease, illiteracy,inequity, congestion, pollution, corruption, and despair. Yet by com-bining responsible government with vital entrepreneurship, Curitibaas achieved just the opposite. Though starting with the dismal economic profile typical of its region, in nearly three decades the city hasachieved measurably better levels of education, health, human welfare,public safety, democratic participation, political integrity, environmental protection, and community spirit than its neighbors, and somewould say than most cities in the United States. It has done so not by nstituting a few economic megaprojects but by implementing hundreds of multipurpose, cheap, fast, simple, homegrown, people-centered
initiatives harnessing market mechanisms, common sense, and local skills. It has flourished by treating all its citizens—most of all its children—not as its burden but as its most precious resource, creators
of its future. It has succeeded not by central planning but by combining farsighted and pragmatic leadership with an integrated design process,strong public and business participation, and a widely shared public
vision that transcends partisanship.
TRANSPORTATION AND LAND USE
Curitiba’s best-known innovations are in “growing along the trail of
memory and of transport,” as Lerner puts it. “Memory is the identity of
the city, and transport is the future.” Transportation, he realized, is not
only a way to move people but also a way to guide land-use and control
growth patterns, so as to influence not just traffic routes and modes but
also origins and destinations. Heretically, rather than expropriating
and demolishing centrally located buildings to widen roads—the
“urban renewal” that in so many cities has created a desolate, grid-
locked core fed by overcrowded highways—Lerner’s administration
chose to adapt existing streets, losing only a few buildings throughout
the city. Along the center of each of five interlinked growth axes, three
parallel avenues were modified. The middle one carried express buses
both ways, flanked by local traffic. The other two, one block to either
side, were one-way high-capacity roads to or from downtown. This
express-avenue system achieved the performance of a huge thorough-
fare nearly two hundred feet wide by spreading it over three existing
adjacent streets. The construction it required was completed in only
four years.
Matching the density of population to the capacity to transport it,
new zoning specified that the buildings nearest the bus avenues could
have up to six times as much floorspace as land area, grading down to a
ratio of one for properties farthest away from transit. Extra density—
up to two additional stories’ worth in a few specific areas with enough
infrastructure to support it—was later sold by the city at 75 percent of
its market value, paid in cash or land that was then reused to build low-
income housing. Parks were renewed to revitalize the arts, culture, and
history of the urban core. Many historic buildings were protected and
refurbished; owners were reimbursed for the foregone land develop-
ment rights, which were transferred to other districts. The city’s rich
ethnic heritage was honored and preserved.A ceremonial gate and spe-
cial center was created for each main culture, operated mainly by its
descendants. Mixed use was encouraged, ensuring the availability of
downtown housing and a match of densities between housing and
commercial needs. The city financed a special block-long covered
arcade of shops open twenty-four hours a day to help keep the down-
town lively throughout the night. The urban core, relieved of commer-
cial pressures that would otherwise generate extreme densities, was
returned to pedestrian priority as the focus of a renewed sense of com-
munity.Ordinary streets remained small and human-scaled; the histor-
ically evolved patterns and varying sizes of streets meant that the ratio
of street area to private land remained far smaller than in a grid layout.
The axial road/transit corridors shaped the city’s subsequent evolu-
tion. But before developing those corridors and hence boosting land
values, the city strategically bought nearby land in selected areas and
built low-income housing on it so as to ensure affordable access to jobs,
shops, and recreation. In addition, the city built schools, clinics, day-
care centers, parks, food distribution centers, and cultural and sports
facilities throughout its suburbs, democratizing amenities previously
available only to those who journeyed downtown. It thereby reduced
the need to travel and strengthened the outlying neighborhoods, which
also gained a great diversity of convenient shops. Small-scale, low-
income housing was blended throughout the city in an effort to foster
equity and social integration. The open availability of land-use plans
and rules reduced uncertainty and thus discouraged land speculation.
A further recent blow was struck against speculation by introducing a
public Geographic Information System that gives everyone equal access
to information about all the land in the city. To help keep that database
up-to-date, building permits require disclosure of job, traffic, parking,
and other specifics needed for sound urban and budget planning. (The
city runs mainly on property taxes.) Zoning has been based on consid-
erations including geography, hydrology, topography, climate, winds,
and cultural and historical factors—not just the tax base, political
pressures, or developers’ proposals.
Even with this orderly development pattern, how could a city pro-
vide its rapidly growing population with transportation without chok-
ing the higher-density areas? What Curitiba did not do was to turn over
its destiny to traffic engineers, who seldom adequately understand the
complex urban dance between land use and society, space, and move-
ment. Instead, Lerner relied on urbanists and architects, mainly from
IPPUC, all of whom approached transportation and land use, hydrol-
ogy and poverty, flows of nutrients and of wastes, health and education,
jobs and income, culture and politics, as intertwined parts of a single
integrated design problem. In addressing needs for transportation—
considered as access, not necessarily as mobility—they followed a set
of simple principles: Favor universal access over private cars. Support
human needs; don’t promote particular transport modes. Meet the
requirements of the poorest.And don’t spend money you don’t have.
Curitiba started its transportation overhaul with buses because it
had buses and couldn’t afford anything else; but first it needed different
buses. The old vehicles, originally built on truck chassis designed as
much for hauling animals as people, were noisy, bumpy, uncomfort-
able, slow, and awkwardly high off the ground. Passengers had to crowd
up steep stairs and jam through doors narrowed to discourage fare eva-
sion. But the IPPUC architects and engineers devised a wholly new
kind of bus, optimized for people, comfort, economy, and rapid flow.
Their double- or (since 1991) triple-length express buses, “articulated”
with pivoted sections for rounding corners, have up to five extrawide
doors. Locally assembled by Volvo, they can carry up to 270 passengers,
using 42 percent less fuel per seat-mile—even less per seat-trip,
because they cover their routes in one-third the time.
Curitiba’s system for using buses, dating back to 1928, also needed to
be fundamentally reconceived, from routes to boarding procedures,
administration to finance, politics to policies. A jumble of mismatched
regional concessions had to be melded into an integrated and efficient
transport system built on simple new technologies. Manual routing
and scheduling were switched to homegrown software, later commer-
cialized. On the express routes, buses now pull up alongside an inven-
tion of Lerner’s team, called a “tube station”12
—an elevated glass
cylinder parallel and adjacent to the bus lane, entered through a turn-
stile, displaying clear maps, and accessible by the handicapped.
Matched doors open on both station and bus. There are no stairs: Both
floors are at the same height, like a subway and its platform. All the
departing passengers disembark through one end of the tube station
and board from the other, again just like a well-run subway.Depending
on the time and route, this switch takes an average of about thirty sec-
onds—as long as a bus conductor would need to collect fares from
roughly seven passengers if they hadn’t previously paid their fares on
entering the tube stations. Instead, the bus needs only a driver, so it can
carry more passengers, faster, at lower cost. Rush-hour express buses
move once a minute. The bigger bus, wider doors, and tube station, plus
automatic controls—the buses operate traffic lights to maintain their
priority—achieve three times the average passengers-per-hour, and
the average speed, of a traditional bus. This reduces idle capital (69 per-
cent fewer buses do the same job), fuel, pollution, noise, and cost, and
shaves about 40minutes off a typical daily commute. The whole system
is designed not just to deliver its passengers pleasantly and safely but to
do so quickly, so they’ll have more time for family, friends, and enjoying
life.
Each lane of express buses carries 20,000 passengers per hour. That’s
about as many as a subway carries; indeed, it’s just like a subway, except
that it costs at least 100 times less (tenfold less than a surface train) and
can be installed in six months, not a generation. Rio built subways that
carry one-fourth as many passengers as Curitiba’s buses yet cost 200
times as much. By avoiding those huge capital costs, and their perpetual
operating costs, Curitiba instead freed up funds for many of its social
improvements.
Curitiba is widely believed to have the finest bus system, if not the
finest public transportation system, in the world.More than 1,250 buses
of 9 varieties are matched to their specific duties so as to leave fewer
empty seats. Two hundred forty-five carefully integrated radial, loop,
and connector routes of 12 color-coded kinds, linked by 25 terminals,
blanket the entire city and its environs. The buses make 17,300 daily
trips on nearly 500 route-miles, covering 230,000 bus-miles per day—
a distance of nine times around the world. The British Guardian news-
paper reported that Curitiba’s efficient bus service “makes London
seem antediluvian. Bus jams never happen, vandalism is unknown”—
even to the beautiful but deliberately fragile glass tube stations—
because of pervasive civic pride. People could easily evade the bus fare,
too, by walking into either open end of the terminals, but they don’t,
because they reciprocate the city’s palpable respect.
The bus system is entirely self-financing from fares; the city con-
tributes only the streets, stations ($4.5 million for all 200-odd stops),
and lights. It sets the fare, routes, schedules, and operating standards.
The forty-five-U.S.-cent fare covers all other costs, including the $45
million fleet of buses, plus a profit to the ten private operating firms.
The rate structure repays one percent of the operator’s fleet investment
per month—a strong incentive to reinvest. Financial controls on the
operating companies are strict, audited, open to public inspection, and
WATER, WASTEWATER, AND GREEN SPACE
Designing land-use in conjunction with transport reduced congestion
and smog, saved energy, revitalized neighborhoods, and solidified civic
spirit. But the success of the plan depended also on a less visible dimen-
sion: water. Curitiba lies between two major rivers and contains five
smaller ones. For two centuries, people and rivers lived in harmony. But
in the 1950s and 1960s, migrants from failed coffee plantations—dis-
placed by mechanically harvested crops like soybeans—started set-
tling in floodplain shantytowns. Meanwhile, impervious surfaces and
other encroachments on natural drainage caused worsening floods
through the city center. Multimillion-dollar channelization projects
proved of minimal benefit. The problem had become acute when
Lerner first took office. His designers decided to switch from fighting
flooding to exploiting the water as a gift of habitat. They passed strin-
gent riparian-zone protective laws, turned riverbanks into linear parks,
and used small ditches and dams to form new lakes, each the core of a
new park. This “design with nature” strategy stopped the flooding, and
cost far less than traditional flood-control methods. Now, planners
quip, heavy rains just make the ducks in the parks float a meter higher.
Unused streamside buildings were meanwhile turned into sports and
leisure facilities.Community groups sprang up to protect the parks, use
them for environmental education, and integrate this into school pro-
grams. The flood-control greenways also worked well as antipollution
buffers from nearby slums.
15
A strategic objective throughout has been
to protect the giant Iguaçu basin from serious contamination, since this
river within the city provides nearly all of the metro area’s drinking
water. Sixteen parks, cherished as public assets, form the first line of
defense for this vital water resource.
At the same time, the city introduced a five-yard setback require-
ment (intended as a space for gardens) for all new buildings outside the
core. It limited residential construction to 50 percent of a site’s area, and
banned impervious paving of open space. It provided permanent pro-
tection for vegetation in the low-density one-third of the city, and tax
relief for woods and gardens: Over 1,100 private woodlands are now
registered, and the tax-relieved private green space exceeds four square
miles. All these features allow rainwater to soak in where it falls, and
massively greened the city. Curitiba also planted hundreds of thou-
sands of trees everywhere: “We provide the shade, you provide the
water.”TOne-sixth of the city is wooded. Two nurseries provide 150,000 tree and
shrub seedlings and 2.2 million plant seedlings per year.Without a per-
mit, no one may cut down a tree, even on his or her own land, and the
permit requires replanting two trees for every one that is removed.
Complementing the private gardens and woods is public green
space, which in 25 years, even as the city’s population grew 2.4-fold,
expanded from five to 581 square feet per person—four times as much
as the UN recommends or New Yorkers enjoy. The city protects nearly
seven square miles of parks, nine forests, a Botanical Garden, five Envi-
ronment Gardens, two Environmentally Protected Areas totaling five
square miles along major rivers, 282 squares, and 259 pocket gardens.
Curitiba’s CD-ROM catalogs the 242 species of birds known and the 48
more suspected to live in the city; many have fled into the city’s parks
from encroaching suburbs. There’s a profusion of amphibians and
mammals and 50 kinds of snakes, and once-native species of various
animals are being reintroduced. After a month’s residence in the city,
author Bill McKibben reported that “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.”
INDUSTRY AND COMMUNITY
Curitiba’s economy was traditionally that of an agricultural market
town and food processor. But in the past 20 years it’s become an indus-
trial and commercial powerhouse as well, linked to other cities in South
America by rail, road, and two airports—one of them highly computer-
ized and the second-largest in Brazil. Situated 190miles southwest of São
Paulo, Curitiba lies within 800 miles of the producers of 70–80 percent
of Brazil’s GDP, and nestles between the capitals of Brazil, Argentina,
Uruguay, and Paraguay—a total market of 200 million people.
Mayor Lerner realized early on that to serve and employ its bur-
geoning population, the city would need to balance its commercial and
service businesses with new light and medium industry. Before land
speculators could move in, the city therefore planned in 1972 and
bought in 1975 sixteen square miles of land, six miles west of downtown
Curitiba, for its Industrial City. To ensure affordable housing near the
jobs, it preinstalled low-income dwellings, schools, services, cultural
facilities, streets, bus links (including a special one to the largest poor
neighborhood), and protected open space: Nearly as much of the trees
are the city’s lungs, cleaning the air and blocking no Industrial City is
occupied by woods as by factories.
The city then recruited more than 500 nonpolluting industries, which provide one-
fifth of its total jobs—50,000 directly and 150,000 indirectly. To
encourage firms to reduce, reuse, and recycle, they’re all required to dis-
pose of their solid wastes on their own land.Workers can walk or bike
to work from their nearby homes at no cost and use their monthly
transport vouchers to buy bikes. Companies are attracted by Curitiba’s
marketing cachet. International firms are well represented, partly
because of the high quality of life: Executives reckon they save twenty
commuting hours a week compared to what they would experience in
São Paulo, or nine years per lifetime.
Curitiba didn’t begin its urban development significantly richer or
poorer than other cities in southern Brazil. In 1980, its per-capita GDP
was only 10 percent above the Brazilian average. But by 1996, that mar-
gin had surged to 65 percent. More important, the effectiveness of
municipal services had increased poor citizens’ monthly household
income from, say, $300 to the equivalent of $400 or even $500. What
created this huge margin of advantage for poor Curitibans? Not direct
transfer payments from the city’s municipal budget, which in 1992
stood at a quarter billion dollars for a city of 1.3 million, or $156 per
capita—one-eighth that of Detroit. Rather, Curitiba’s funding for
social services is spent more effectively than in probably any city in the
North.
The municipal government is dedicated to solutions that are simple,
fast, fun, and cheap, to what McKibben calls “constructive pragmatism.”
Lerner, convinced that hope is sustained by visible change for the better,
inculcated a culture of speed: “Credit cards give us goods quickly, the
fax machine gives us the message quickly—the only thing left in our
Stone Age is the central governments.”City Hall’s credibility in Curitiba
comes from its creating a big park in only twenty days, or launching a
vast recycling program within months of its conception. Curitibans
have also come to expect what is too often a rarity in Brazil: transparent,
honest, and accountable government. Any politician foolish enough to
stray from these ideals would be promptly skewered by the wags of the
Boca Maldita—a picturesque section of the Luiz Xavier mall devoted
to public grousing. The real and powerful deterrent is that the city has
built what planner Jonas Rabinovitch calls “genuine mechanisms...to
give broad-based legitimacy to its interventions. One example: Pe
vote for the improvements they would like to see in their neighborhood
when they pay property taxes.”
Since the rapidly changing value of the inflation-prone national
currency can be hard to calculate, some Curitiban commentators mea-
sure urban investments in a novel unit: the cost of asphalting one kilo-
meter of street, or about a half million dollars. For example, a tube
station costs the equivalent of 0.5 km; a Lighthouse of Knowledge, 0.2
km. The latter is a brightly colored, 52-foot-high, lighthouse-shaped
library of about 7,000 volumes, including the Lições Curitibanas—a
ten-volume text on Curitiba’s history, culture, civics, and environment
that’s a fundamental element of all primary schooling. Poor students
obtain their set in exchange for recyclable garbage. Its print run of
enough copies to instruct at least a third of a million children (over
four years) sounds like a good use of the cost of 3 km of asphalt. The
Lighthouses are also gaining Internet connections, and house Brazil’s
first public terminals. The top of each Lighthouse is a nighttime watch-
tower containing a light and a policeman, keeping the neighborhood
safe for the children to come and go. Lighthouses of Knowledge are
sprouting around the city, with the aim of having one within walking
distance of every child’s home.
In Curitiba, everything is recycled. A gunpowder magazine became
a theater. A mansion was converted into the planning headquarters, an
army headquarters into a cultural foundation, a foundry into a popular
shopping mall, and the oldest house into a publications center. The old
railway station became a rail museum, and a glue plant a Creativity
Center where children make handicrafts (which the city’s tourist shops
then sell to fund social programs). A quarry became a famous
amphitheater and a cable-and-polycarbonate-birdcage opera house
(built in 60 days).A garbage dump was converted into the noted 11-acre
Botanical Garden that is home to 220,000 species, and another derelict
quarry into the Free University of the Environment. Constructed of old
tires and utility poles, the Free University provides courses for every-
one—shopkeepers, building managers, journalists, teachers, home-
makers, and (mandatorily) taxi drivers—on the land-use and
environmental issues related to their work.
Curitiba’s buses get recycled, too. The average vehicle in service is
only 3.5 years old, compared with the Brazilian average of eight and the
legal limit of ten. Curitiba’s depreciated buses often become mobile
job-training centers. Parked in the slums and reoutfitted, they are called
Linha do Oficio (“The Jobs Route” or “The Line to Work”), and staffed
by locally recruited, frequently rotated teachers who offer training in
more than forty in-demand trades or disciplines to more than 10,000
people a year, mainly on nights and weekends. A three-month course
costs only two bus tokens—less than a dollar. Other recycled buses
become clinics, classrooms, baby-sitting centers, food markets, soup
kitchens, and coaches for weekend excursions in the parks.
These innovations owe much to the staffing of the city’s municipal
departments. They’re often led by women and are heavily populated by
architects—professional problem-solvers—rather than by the more
traditional sorts of bureaucrats skilled at explaining why problems
can’t be solved. The interdisciplinary charrette—the architect’s stan-
dard design process—is Curitiba’s primary problem-solving mecha-
nism. Conceptual tests of new ideas lead quickly to their application.
Risks are taken in the expectation that mistakes will be made, quickly
detected and diagnosed, and corrected.When budgets can’t support an
entire new program, it’s launched anyway so that learning can begin
while more resources or economies are sought. Failures are frequent,
hard lessons constant, struggles to improve unrelenting. Guided by the
reservoir of experience in IPPUC and by the collective wisdom of its
diverse citizenry, Curitiba experiments and improves as assiduously as
any startup company. From the outside, it may look easy, but it’s not.
Rabinovitch emphasizes the many challenges that Curitiba’s govern-
ment has regularly faced. The process by which it seeks to overcome
them, however, through persistent application of whole-system think-
ing, is far more important than particular successes.
CHILDREN AND HEALTH, GARBAGE AND NUTRITION
Many of Curitiba’s children and adolescents have concerns as funda-
mental as where their next meal is coming from. As an island of
decency and success in a slough of despondency, the city gave rise by
the early 1990s to some 209 slum areas, containing one-ninth of its pop-
ulation, which were starting to suffer from diseases borne by rats and
contaminated water. By Lerner’s third term (1989–92), he therefore
faced a doubled population and heightened social challenges. His
response was to redouble Curitiba’s long-standing efforts to support its
poorest citizens, especially its children, who were the special concern of
the city’s First Lady.
The city’s emphasis on its children starts with discreetly provided
amily-planning advice and continues with early prenatal and postnatal
are. Medical improvements have cut infant mortality by nearly one-
fth in four years. By 1996 it was still slightly over twice the U.S. average,
ut one-third the Brazilian average, the lowest in the country, and being
eadily reduced. Poor children receive regular visits from health work-
rs and obligatory free checkups, recorded in a personal health book,
ntil age five. Preventive health care is emphasized throughout the
chools, day-care, and childhood/teen centers. The city has 88 health
ations, five of which operate round-the-clock. Each has a drugstore
hat distributes 81 commercial and traditional medicines for free—3
million doses per month, covering four-fifths of the most common
onditions, and bulk-purchased to save packaging costs.
Because health depends critically on sanitation and nutrition,
uritiba found a creative way to fund both by turning garbage into
alue. Experts warned that when the city exceeded a million inhabi-
ants, it would need not only subways but also a costly mechanical plant
or separating its 800 daily metric tons of garbage. On both scores,
uritiba chose a different path. The 1989 “Garbage That Isn’t Garbage”
nitiative led more than 70 percent of households to sort recyclables for
hrice-weekly curbside collection by the green trucks of the private firm
hat won a public competition for the franchise. Organics go in one
lastic bag; paper, metal, glass, and the like in another. Two-thirds of
he separately bagged recyclables are recovered and sold. This loop-
osing offset over half the system’s operating cost, which previously
ften represented the largest item in the municipal budget. Sorting sta-
ons, built from secondhand parts, hire the homeless, the disabled, and
ecovering alcoholics. Landfill use has been reduced by one-sixth in
eight, and even more in volume. Groundwater is protected from con-
amination by leaching garbage. Curitibans’ paper recycling alone saves
200 trees a day.
The city also funds a Garbage Purchase Program16
from what it would otherwise have paid to collect trash in the poorer neighbor-
oods, where normal collection was next to impossible because trucks
ouldn’t reach unpaved alleys. Now, in the “Green Exchange” project, a
mall truck pulls up in one of more than 100 squatter sectors of the city
nd rings its bell. Tens of thousands of the area’s citizens respond by
ringing bags of garbage to swap for food: 60 kilograms of trash earn
0 tickets, enough for a month’s food (or bus tokens, school notebooks,
or Christmas toys) for an entire family. Two kilos of recyclables earn
one kilo of food. Similar exchanges, all totaling close to 100 metric tons
a month, occur at schools and factories. McKibben quotes the ticket
book’s cover: “You are responsible for this program. Keep on cooperat-
ing and we will get a cleaner Curitiba, cleaner and more human.You are
an example to Brazil and even to the rest of the world.”
These food exchanges address many needs at once. The rice, beans,
potatoes, onions, oranges, garlic, eggs, bananas, carrots, and honey they
supply are seasonal surplus produce bought from local farmers, helping
keep them on the land. Public health is served by encouraging the clear-
ance of litter from hard-to-reach land, mainly near the rivers. That
effort is supplemented by a temporary-jobs-for-cleanup program
called “All Clean,” funded by the city but organized by 135 neighbor-
hood associations, which hires unemployed or retired people who need
the income.With cleanup, too, comes community pride: vegetable gar-
dens, dug by out-of-school children and coached by now-employed
peasants, sprout from former dumps. All these initiatives rely not on
capital-intensive mechanization but on public participation.
Nutrition is improved not just by Green Exchange but by diverse
efforts reaching many of the city’s 700,000 poorest residents. Some
families can get garden plots in the suburbs, through the neighborhood-
association-centered Community Orchards Program, to grow food for
their own use and for sale. One such program has established farms
next to day-care, school, and neighborhood association buildings where
city agronomists provide seeds, materials, tools, and advice. Another
effort organizes restaurants and others to distribute meals and surplus
produce to the needy. The City Department of Health offers instruction
in homegrowing medicinal plants. To help the poor stretch their bud-
gets and to discourage price-gouging, the city has tried a computerized
phone system that informs shoppers of the current prices of 222 staples
in the dozen largest supermarkets. Family Warehouses even bulk-buy
food, toiletries, and cleaning goods for resale to low-income families at
30 percent below retail.
EDUCATION, DAY CARE, AND JOBS
With nearly 100 children born daily, Curitiba must spend 27 percent of
its budget on education. Its 120-odd schools, many reused for adult
education at night, have achieved one of Brazil’s highest literacy rates
(over 94 percent by 1996) and lowest first-grade failure rates. Environ-
mental education, too, starts in early childhood and is not just taught in
isolation but integrated across the core curriculum. A top priority of
the city since 1971, it portrays the environment not just as parks but as
the place and the social setting that forms tomorrow’s citizens. Dozens
of Centers for Integrated Education operate near conventional schools,
providing half of each student’s instructional time from better-trained
teachers.
Schooling is only one element in an extensive network of child-
oriented social services.More than 200 day-care centers, free for lower-
income families and open 11 hours a day (long enough to support
working parents), are situated next to many schools and provide four
meals a day for some 12,000 children who would otherwise wander the
slums while their parents were away at work. (Their hunger pangs
could also lead them, as in other Brazilian cities, to sniff glue—an ulti-
mately fatal practice. Curitiba recently tackled this addiction by work-
ing with the leading manufacturer to add a foul-smelling substance to
its glue, a step that has gone far toward eliminating glue-sniffing
nationwide.) The centers also offer instruction in caring for younger
children and growing vegetables. Many companies and individuals
receive tax waivers for sponsoring day-care positions through vouch-
ers, helping to finance new centers. One measure of the community’s
solidarity is that through patient negotiation, without police involve-
ment, local gangs that initially committed some vandalism to the day-
care centers ended up getting involved in their work. Similarly, when
gangs initially tore up flower beds at the new Botanical Garden, inter-
preting their vandalism not as a venting of hostility but as a cry for help
led to hiring them as assistant gardeners.
Boarding schoolchildren can work part-time from their own dor-
mitories, delivering newspapers and magazines (which also promote
literacy); half their earnings are banked for them until they’re older. Or
they can work in a uniformed service either delivering packages or
carrying parcels for shoppers in the street markets. Working school-
children can also get school support, sports, culture, and computer
courses. Older children are given apprenticeships, entry-level jobs,
and job training, often in environmental skills—forestry, ecological
restoration, water pollution control, public health. They can earn half
the minimum wage in parks, flower shops, and private gardens. The
Program for Childhood and Adolescence Integration (PIÁ—a pun on
pía, Guarani slang for “kid”), an 8-to-6 effort for school dropouts aged
7–17, has 64 centers.Half teach with an environmental emphasis, reaching
more than 4,000 children.Altogether, PIÁ serves some 30,000 children.
As in the city’s other social programs, loop-closing abounds: For example,
kids learn gardening by growing flowers (the city provides the seeds),
sell them to city parks, earn money and self-respect, gain skills, and
qualify for real jobs.
Curitiba’s few hundred street children—far fewer than in other
Brazilian cities—are registered and are well known to street-smart
social workers, who seek to win their trust and enroll them in the many
programs, shelters, and foster arrangements that offer food, love, and
support. Children who stay in school are given scholarships in the form
of family food baskets, and can get part-time entry-level jobs plus
health care, transportation, and job training.
STRAGGLERS AND ARRIVALS
A similarly impressive range of efforts supports the homeless and the
needy elderly and disabled, with many programs achieving multiple
aims. For example, Dial Solidarity stands ready to pick up any second-
hand furniture and appliances, which will be repaired by apprentices in
carpentry and upholstering, then resold at nominal cost in street mar-
kets in the neediest neighborhoods (or sometimes donated). The oldest
slum contained for a time a traveling circus tent in which children made
toys—for themselves, day-care centers, and others in need—out of
recyclables. The toys were based partly on prototypes created by indus-
trial design students: A plastic mineral-water bottle turned into a toy
tube station. Programs for the elderly (“Third Age”) are designed not as
mere recreation but as a foundation for an independent and active life,
promoted by such physical activities as yoga, dance, and physiotherapy.
Another key goal is to give an economic role to marginal and poten-
tially alienated or resentful individuals—integrating them as active,
self-reliant citizens with pride in their contribution to the community.
Job markets match up employers with qualified applicants, but the sev-
enteen hundred peasants arriving monthly from the countryside,
though offered basic orientation, often have trouble finding work. The
city is trying to organize a thousand poor handcart collectors of recy-
clables to help them get a fair price. Shoeshiners and street vendors are
similarly organized and offered good sites at regular times: Rather than
being expelled or harassed, Curitiba invites them to take their place in
the fabric of the city, licenses them, and gives them the status, stability,
and business advantage of stalls and pushcarts.
In a 170-household pilot project, some poor families constructed
their own decent cottages with municipal long-term land-and-materials
financing, at a cost equivalent to two packs of cigarettes a month.With
a dwelling upstairs and a shop downstairs, these small “trade villages”
brought vital services into the slums, fostered dignity, and turned their
residents into active citizens with a stake in their neighborhood. Lerner
is now leading Paraná State toward a policy of providing microcredit
and land tenure in new rural villages that are expected to receive one-
fourth of the state’s landless peasants by 1999, delaying by at least a gen-
eration their flow to the city.
Nonetheless, that flow has continued to overwhelm Curitiba’s abil-
ity to house migrants in some 14,000 low-income dwellings dispersed
through existing neighborhoods. The city therefore recently created a
new district, planned to lodge up to 30,000 additional migrant families.
Since many peasants arrive with building skills, the city created a build-
it-yourself program that gives each poor family a plot of land, a title
deed, building materials, two trees—one fruit, one ornamental—and
an hour’s consultation with an architect. The custom design, with
advice on the sequence of later room-by-room expansion, bears no
additional cost and yields a vastly better result than impersonal cinder-
block hovels. Each house’s uniqueness in layout, appearance, and even
building technology (samples of which line a Technology Street) sig-
nals the personal validation of each of the neighborhood’s new citizens.
And among the district’s first building projects was the tube station
linking it into the rest of the city. As Lerner says, a city with ghettos—
ghettos of poor or of rich—isn’t a city.Despite its Teutonic heritage of
conservatism, Curitiba doesn’t begrudge its generous help for the poor,
because it’s frugally and effectively carried out. Nor do taxpayers com-
plain that government can’t work, because their government so clearly
does. Curitiba is a city short on cynics and long on citizens.
IDENTITY AND DIGNITY
Strengthening civil society is the focus of many other important pro-
grams in Curitiba. The larger bus terminals contain “Citizenship
Streets”—clusters of satellite municipal offices that bring City Hall to
its constituents where they change bus lines. (Suburban “neighborhood
City Halls” came even earlier.) The Citizenship Streets also offer infor-
mation on training, business loans, and job opportunities; the largest
one is even integrated with a street market. This decentralization of
services to the most local possible level reflects the user-friendly,
customer-service orientation of all municipal services. Their design is
streamlined to save citizens’ time, so that a sick mother, for example,
can schedule a clinic or specialist appointment, day care, and any other
required support with a single phone call. The 4,500 beds at 36 hospi-
tals, and 1,700 daily doctor’s appointments, are also centrally dis-
patched for users’ convenience.
Another strong emphasis, from childhood up, is the availability of
public information, on the sound principle that “the better citizens
know their city, the better they treat it.” The city’s array of telephone-
and Web-based resources and hotlines—and the responsiveness of the
city workers and volunteers taking the calls—would do credit to a
metropolis ten times its size. There are hotlines not just for kids at risk,
potholes, and gas leaks but also for air, water, noise, land pollution,
ugliness, and bandit tree-cutting. The social lines alone handle 28,000
calls a day—six per citizen per year. The resulting sense of participa-
tion is so ingrained that instead of graffiti scrawled on public walls,
Curitibans politely tape poems to utility poles. In comparison with
Americans who often don’t know their next-door neighbors, Curitibans
consider one another all neighbors, and in contrast with their historical
reserve, are starting to show signs of downright gregariousness. As
McKibben puts it, this vibrant city is “a habitat, a place for living—the
exact and exciting opposite of a mall.”
These, then, are some of the ways in which Curitiba’s creative,
coherent, highly integrated design approach turns isolated problems—
public transport and housing, trash and food, jobs and education—
into interrelated generators of new resources and social cohesion. Even
a task like mowing the parks’ grass reflects the goals of an integral phi-
losophy: Instead of running noisy, smelly, oil-consuming mowing
machines, a municipal shepherd moves his flock of thirty sheep around
as needed. In due course, the wool and the sheep too are recycled, turn-
ing surplus grass into more income for social programs.
SYNTHESIS
Teasing apart the strands of the intricate web of Curitiban innovation
reveals the basic principles of natural capitalism at work in a particu-
larly inspiring way. Resources are used frugally. New technologies are
adopted. Broken loops are reclosed. Toxicity is designed out, health in.
Design works with nature, not against it. The scale of solutions matches
the scale of problems. A continuous flow of value and service rewards
everyone involved in ever-improving efficiency. As education rejoins
nature and culture to daily life and work,myriad forms of action, learn-
ing, and attitude reinforce the healing of the natural world—and with
it, the society and its politics. For Curitiba has discovered a way to tran-
scend natural capitalism, supplementing its principles and practices
with others that start to achieve what we may call human capitalism.
Walter Stahel notes that traditional environmental goals—nature pro-
tection, public health and safety, resource productivity—can together
build a sustainable economy. But, he adds, only by adding ethics, jobs,
the translation of sustainability into other cultures—and we would
add, citizenship—can we achieve a sustainable society.
17
But how, finally, is the city working? In early-1990s surveys, over 99
percent of Curitibans said they wouldn’t want to live anywhere else, 70
percent of São Paulo residents thought life would be better in Curitiba,
and 60 percent of New Yorkers wanted to leave their glittering city.
Among Curitiba’s noteworthy achievements,
benchmarked annually to spur further gains, are 95 percent literacy,
96 percent basic vaccina-tion, 99.5 percent of households with drinking
water and electricity, 98 percent with trash collection, 83 percent with at
least a high-school education, three-fourths of households owner-occupied,
one-third the national average poverty rate, and 72-year life expectancy.
Curitibans enjoy 86 percent weekly newspaper circulation, 25 radio stations,
14 cable and TV stations, three orchestras (even a famous harmonica
orchestra), 20 theaters, 30 public libraries, 74 museums and cultural
buildings. The Culture Foundation’s monthly program of events, gen-
erally with free or very cheap admission, exceeds 40 pages.With a 1996
per-capita GDP of only $7,827—27 percent of America’s—Curitibans
have created what the well-traveled Bill McKibben calls “one of the
world’s great cities.”
Of course, Curitiba has significant problems still ahead of it: A third
of metro-region houses are unsewered, 8 percent of its citizens still live
in slums (compared with one-third in Rio), and nearly half its children
are not yet completing grade school. Because of its success, Curitiba
attracts much of the surrounding misery of southern Brazil, and can-
not possibly handle all of it. But on the whole, its imperfections are of
the variety that McKibben quotes from the Brazilian newsmagazine
Veja: “It rains a lot, the streets are slippery, and drivers still go through
red lights. Its virtues, however, are unbeatable.”19
Curitiba doesn’t present itself as a turnkey model for literal replica-
tion, for no two cities are alike enough for such copying to work.
Rather, Lerner calls his city “not a model but a reference.”20
Perhaps its
most impressive achievement is that a simple philosophy and persistent
experimentation and improvement have created a First World city in
the midst of the Third World—breaking what Lerner calls the “syn-
drome of tragedy” that paralyzes progress, and replacing it with dignity
and hope. Curitiba’s central political principle since 1971 has been con-
sistent and profound: to respect the citizen/owner of all public assets
and services, both because all people deserve respect and because, as
Lerner insists, “If people feel respected, they will assume responsibility
to help solve other problems.” Closing the broken loop of politics, this
principle recycles the poor and hungry, the apathetic and illiterate, into
actively contributing citizens.
Lewis Mumford called cities a “symbol of the possible.”21
On the southern plateau of Brazil, one city has hauled itself out of tough cir-
cumstances by the strength of good design. Its design mentality treats a
wide variety of needs not as competing priorities to be traded off and
compromised but rather as interlinked opportunities for synergies to
be optimized. In Curitiba, its results show how to combine a healthy
ecosphere, a vibrant and just economy, and a society that nurtures
humanity. Whatever exists is possible;
Curitiba exists; therefore it is possible. The existence of Curitiba holds
out the promise that it will be first of a string of cities that redefine the
nature of urban life.
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