Charlotte Curitiba Citichat 4 June 1999

CITICHAT 16/99 - 4 JUNE 1999


Charlotte, North Carolina and Curitiba, Brazil

I understand that whilst I was away, Citichat copy sent to my office in e-mail and fax form for distribution from both North and South America, didn't travel well and, as a result, you got part copies or no copies! Sorry about that, our whiz kid IT student from the States is back with us for his vac and promises that he'll get everything working properly again. There's a lot to tell you about Johannesburg but I'm going to keep that to early next week as I want to share some thoughts on the balance of our study tour and my side visit to Brazil.

The International Downtown Association (IDA) workshop we attended in Charlotte, North Carolina (where they eat grits and pulled pork and wash it down with a beer called "Blonde" - is it sexist to say, "I'll have another Blonde, please" ?) had an excellent programme with some outstanding speakers on a wide variety of city issues -I'm hoping to get copies of some of the papers which I will make available to those who may be interested. The city has the most unbelievable corporate leadership which works closely with the city in true public/private partnerships in developing and implementing comprehensive plans and programmes for the centre city. As a result it has many strengths - a good transit system, new public housing almost in the centre of town, an amazing commitment to the arts and culture, but it obviously also has some weaknesses. The greatest of these is the lack of retail and street life and much is being done to address these aspects.

From there to Curitiba in Brazil - for two reasons. Firstly, much is spoken about this city and it certainly is often held out as a model particularly related to its public transport system. Back in the early nineties, Michael Cohen, then head of urban development at the World Bank proclaimed, "It's a model for the First World, not just the Third." Two, my youngest son and his wife moved there from New Zealand at the end of last year and I wanted to spend some time with them.

Curitiba is a city of about one-and-a-half million people and is capital of the State of Parana in the southern region of Brazil, a country of one hundred and sixty five million people. Brazil has one of the worst distributions of wealth in the world with a very small, very wealthy group and then half the population living outside the 'consumer economy' meaning that they live without money and on whatever can be scavenged. The country traditionally has displayed the typical third world syndrome of growth without development. In the 1960's, foreign money, attracted by cheap labour and a solicitous military government, poured into Curitiba which tripled its size in thirty years. Agricultural exports gave way to manufacturing with Fiat, Pepsi, Volvo and Volkswagen setting up major plants.

Whilst similar changes were taking place in many other Brazilian cities, Curitiba did not allow itself to be dictated to by the huge economic development but rather set about first developing a plan that included transport, housing, public open space and unique civic programmes.

An article by Julian Hunt in Metropolis Magazine, April 1994, states the following; "At the center of these efforts was Jaime Lerner, and importantly an organisation called the Instituto de Pesquisa e Planejamento Urbano (IPPUC) - Institute of Urban Policy and Planning). Both IPPUC and Lerner's political career were born out of the same crisis - a protest over a plan in the early sixties for a massive elevated highway that would have plowed right through Curitiba'a s historic centre. As a 24 year old architecture student, Lerner played a leading role in defeating the highway and shortly thereafter in 1965, the IPPUC was created by Curitiba's mayor to come up with city planning alternatives. Lerner joined the Institute and within three years became its president. By 1971, at the age of 33, he had proved himself a capable enough technocrat to be appointed by the military dictatorship to his first five year term as mayor. In 1981 he was appointed to his second term"

In 1998 he won an election for mayor but under the new democratic government and today is the Governor of the State of Parana.The planning that Lerner and IPPUC brought to fruition was firstly a public
transport system (now privatised) which is highly efficient and effective. It serves over a million commuters a day and at a cost of a 300th of a subway system. Routes are clearly mapped out and access is provided to every corner of the city. Buses are modern Volvo's, smoke free and consisting sometimes of two
or three articulated sections and carrying up to 300 passengers. Bus shelters are glass tubes in which you pay as you enter so that there is no delay in getting onto the buses nor is there any other physical opportunity for free-riding. Like subways, the buses work on a single rate irrespective of how few or how many buses you have to connect with to get to your destination.

In many areas dedicated bus lanes are provided to speed up the process.

One of the beauties of the system is that now that it is reaching peak efficiency these dedicated bus lanes provide routes for an underground railway, not favoured, or a rapid transport system via monorail, etc., without disturbing the rest of the roadways.

Secondly, there is a very clear overall plan to link residential and transport. Thus the starfish layout of the city has high-rise concentrated from the centre down broad avenues served by the high speed buses and with the land adjacent to the transit area bought by the council for low income housing.

Thirdly much of the centre of the city has basically been closed to traffic, nearly 50 blocks of the historic sector are for pedestrians only.

An extensive park system rings the city which gives Curitiba the highest ratio of green space per person of any industrial city. What I found particularly interesting is that each of these parks has a specific attraction that constantly draws tourists and locals alike. Lerner also utilised disused quarries to provide for Curitiba's Tricentennial celebrations building an opera house in one, a university of the environment in another, an open air concert stage in yet another; all simple, economical structures that are much used. 50 smallish libraries each linked to a school but open to the local community and clearly identified through a 'lighthouse' design are spread throughout the suburbs.

In the late eighties and early nineties Curitiba privatised its garbage collection system and IPPUC was responsible for developing a new approach for implementation. This resulted in trash separation, from an expensive technical function carried out after collection, becoming a household chore. With a programme called "Garbage that is not Garbage" children were taught at school of their responsibility to the environment thereby reaching their parents with the same message. Groceries and bus tickets were offered to the poor in exchange for delivering trash to centralised locations.

Fostering neighbourhood development is combined with council administrative decentralisation in what are called 'Citizenship Streets'. Located near transportation terminals, they provide all the public services that a community could need, health, rates payment, police services, libraries, registration facilities, etc., together with a variety of halls of different sizes for meetings and sports facilities such as a large multi purpose sports hall and gyms. And not expensive. Simple construction and clean unembellished architecture.

My feelings about the city was that it had a distinctive 'feel', and a lot of that feel was similar to a city I worked in in the late seventies in short bursts, Teheran. More orderly, much more greening, lots of trees, less noise, but very similar. I always knew when I was in Teheran and not somewhere else and now I felt I was in Curitiba and no where else. Yet many 'Western' cities, and 'African', could have you anywhere! Julian Hunt, an architect, felt that the city was like North American cities "the sloppy mix of bulky thin-skinned high rises with small masonry and wood-frame buildings, the empty weedy lots, the wasted space waiting for the next round of speculation." But that was 1994 and I think has changed. Probably a city we need to look at more closely as its First World/Third World base is a lot closer to our own than many of the Western models.

Hunt has this to say which I found interesting. "As an architect Lerner brought to city government an understanding of the power of space, much as the lawyer understands the power of law, and the economist that of wealth. He has demonstrated in Curitiba that, as a politician, an architect can use this understanding of public space to communicate ideas about government and society, to forward a unifying programme. He understood how aspects of the public city - walkable downtowns, clean and efficient buses, public opera houses and extensive parks - could become an inclusive political force. It's a lesson that the architectural profession as a whole needs to embrace, particularly in the United States, where architects seem to have stopped believing in the possibilities of their profession, choosing instead to immerse themselves in the corporate world - or the designated alternate path of the "artist/academic" who rarely if ever gets to build. Either way, they occupy a subservient and marginalised position with respect to other professions, contributing to a political culture in which architects and architecture are virtually invisible. In their absence, politics is dominated by lawyers making abstract laws and policymakers making vague policy - while no one speaks up for the power of space." Interesting stuff!!!

Next week, some exciting news on Johannesburg! Ciao!