[sustran] The Road to Curitiba

[Todd Edelman, Green Idea Factory]

Long article from NY Times about the successes, failures and politics of 
the well-known transformation of Curitiba...

- T

***

The Road to Curitiba
by Arthur Lubow

<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/magazine/20Curitiba-t.html?pagewanted=all>

On Saturday mornings, children gather to paint and draw in the main 
downtown shopping street of Curitiba, in southern Brazil. More than just 
a charming tradition, the child’s play commemorates a key victory in a 
hard-fought, ongoing war. Back in 1972, the new mayor of the city, an 
architect and urban planner named Jaime Lerner, ordered a lightning 
transformation of six blocks of the street into a pedestrian zone. The 
change was recommended in a master plan for the city that was approved 
six years earlier, but fierce objections from the downtown merchants 
blocked its implementation. Lerner instructed his secretary of public 
works to institute the change quickly and asked how long it would take. 
“He said he needed four months,” Lerner recalled recently. “I said, 
‘Forty-eight hours.’ He said, ‘You’re crazy.’ I said, ‘Yes, I’m crazy, 
but do it in 48 hours.’ ” The municipal authorities were able to 
accomplish it in three days, beginning on a Friday night and installing 
paving, lighting, planters and furniture by the end of the day on 
Monday. “Being a very weak mayor, if I start to do it and take too long, 
everyone could stop it through a juridical demand,” Lerner went on to 
explain. “If they stop the work, it’s finished. I had to do it very 
fast, at least in part. Because we had discussed it a great deal. 
Sometimes they have to have a demonstration effect.”

The demonstration worked. Within days, impressed by the increase in 
their business, the once-recalcitrant shop owners were demanding an 
extension of the traffic-free district. Some diehard motorists, however, 
sulked. Lerner heard that a group of them were planning to disregard the 
prohibition and drive their cars into the street on a Saturday morning. 
So he contrived an unbreachable defense. With the cooperation of the 
city’s teachers and a donation of rolls of newsprint and boxes of paint, 
on that morning he assembled several hundred children in the street, 
where they sat and drew pictures. “It was to say, ‘This is being done 
for children and their parents — don’t even think of putting cars 
there,’ ” he told me. The sputtered-out protest was the last resistance 
to the pedestrianization of the shopping area, which has since expanded 
from the original 6 blocks to encompass about 15 today. “Of course, this 
was very emblematic,” Lerner recounted. “We were trying to say, ‘This 
city is not for cars.’ When many mayors at the time were planning for 
individual cars, we were countervailing.” He observed that it was 
emblematic in another way also: “From that point, they said, ‘If he 
could do this in 72 hours, he can do anything.’ It was a good strategy.”

An opening salvo, the creation of the pedestrian zone inaugurated a 
series of programs by Lerner and his colleagues that made Curitiba a 
famous model of late-20th-century urban planning. In the early 1970s, 
when Brazil was welcoming any industry, no matter how toxic its 
byproducts, Curitiba decided to admit only nonpolluters; to accommodate 
them, it constructed an industrial district that reserved so much land 
for green space that it was derided as a “golf course” until it 
succeeded in filling up with major businesses while its counterparts in 
other Latin American cities were flagging. Through the creation of two 
dozen recreational parks, many with lakes to catch runoff in low-lying 
areas that flood periodically, Curitiba managed, at a time of explosive 
population growth, to increase its green areas from 5 square feet per 
inhabitant to an astounding 560 square feet. The city promoted “green” 
policies before they were fashionable and called itself “the ecological 
capital of Brazil” in the 1980s, when there were no rivals for such a 
title. Today, Curitiba remains a pilgrimage destination for urbanists 
fascinated by its bus system, garbage-recycling program and network of 
parks. It is the answer to what might otherwise be a hypothetical 
question: How would cities look if urban planners, not politicians, took 
control?

Although the children who paint on Saturday mornings are no longer 
needed to protect the downtown shopping street from cars, the battle to 
keep Curitiba green is never-ending. Indeed, some say it is going badly 
these days. The rivers, once crystalline, reek of untreated sewage. The 
bus system that has won admirers throughout the world appears to be 
nearing capacity; what’s more, Curitiba, by some measures, has a higher 
per capita ownership of private cars than any city in Brazil — even 
exceeding BrasÃlia, a city that was designed for cars. Curitiba’s 
garbage-recycling rate has been declining over the last six or seven 
years, and the only landfill in the municipal region will be full by the 
end of 2008. Jorge Wilheim, the São Paulo architect who drafted 
Curitiba’s master plan in 1965, says: “When we made the plan, the 
population was 350,000. We thought in a few years it would reach 
500,000. But it has grown much bigger.” The municipality of Curitiba 
today has 1.8 million people, and the population of the metropolitan 
region is 3.2 million. “I know the plan of Curitiba is very famous, and 
I am the first to enjoy it, but that was in ’65,” Wilheim continues. 
“The metropolitan region must have a new vision.”

It is often said of Curitiba that it doesn’t feel like Brazil. Depending 
on who’s speaking, that can be intended as a compliment or a criticism. 
Populated by European immigrants in the 19th century, Curitiba has a 
demographic makeup that is largely more fair-skinned and well educated 
than that of Brazil’s tropical north. It is also unusually affluent. 
Unlike São Paulo, with its startling extremes of wealth and poverty, 
much of Curitiba to an American eye looks familiarly middle class. Even 
the scruffy used-car lots have a seediness reminiscent of Los Angeles, 
not the Rio de Janeiro of “City of God.” The city, especially the large 
downtown, is very clean, thanks to municipal sanitation trucks and the 
freelance carrinheiros, or cart people, who pick up trash to sell at 
recycling centers.

During my visit to Curitiba in March, the city was the host of an 
international biodiversity conference. While I hadn’t known of it when I 
scheduled my trip, the coincidence was about as remarkable as finding a 
design show to greet you in Milan or a wine festival under way in 
Bordeaux. Environmentalism is the heart of Curitiba’s self-identity, and 
the municipal government is always devising new schemes that showcase 
the brand. The rest of the world has caught on, if not yet caught up. 
Ecological awareness is architecturally trendy. This year’s winner of 
the prestigious Pritzker Prize is Richard Rogers 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/richard_rogers/index.html?inline=nyt-per>, 
a longtime proponent of mass transit, lower energy consumption and 
ecologically sensitive buildings. Commercially, real-estate developers 
from Beijing to Santa Monica are brandishing their LEED certificates 
(Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) as they market 
condominiums and office suites to green-minded consumers. While it is 
unusually ambitious, the 25-year plan that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/michael_r_bloomberg/index.html?inline=nyt-per> 
proposed last month for New York is part of an international wave of 
recognition that cities must live more responsibly, especially when it 
comes to their effusions of climate-warming gases and their excretions 
of mountains of solid waste. Bloomberg’s most contentious idea — a 
“congestion tax” on cars entering traffic-clogged districts during peak 
hours — has been working for more than four years in London (and more 
than 30 years in Singapore) to increase the numbers of people using 
public transportation. Interestingly, Curitiba adopted an opposite 
approach, brandishing a carrot instead of a stick. The city planners 
suspected that public transportation would attract more users if it was 
more attractive. And that reasonable assumption turned out to be correct.

The efficient buses that zip across the Curitiba metropolitan region are 
the most conspicuously un-Brazilian feature of the city. Instead of 
descending into subway stations, Curitibanos file into ribbed glass 
tubes that are boarding platforms for the rapid-transit buses. (The 
glass tubes resemble the “fosteritos” that Norman Foster 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/norman_foster/index.html?inline=nyt-per> 
later designed for the metro in Bilbao, Spain.) Curitiba has five 
express-bus avenues, with a sixth in development, to allow you to 
traverse the city with speedy dispatch. In the early 1970s, most cities 
investing in public transportation were building subways or light-rail 
networks. Curitiba lacked the resources and the time to install a train 
system. Lerner says that compared with the Curitiba bus network, a light 
rail system would have required 20 times the financial investment; a 
subway would have cost 100 times as much. “We tried to understand, what 
is a subway?” he recalls. “It has to have speed, comfort, reliability 
and good frequency. But why does it have to be underground? Underground 
is very expensive. With dedicated lanes and not stopping on every 
corner, we could do it with buses.” Because widening the avenues would 
have required a lengthy and costly expropriation process, the planners 
came up with a “trinary” system that embraced three parallel 
thoroughfares: a large central avenue dedicated to two-way rapid-bus 
traffic (flanked by slow lanes for cars making short local trips) and, a 
block over on each side, an avenue for fast one-way automobile traffic.

When the bus system was inaugurated, it transported 54,000 passengers 
daily. That number has ballooned to 2.3 million, in large part because 
of innovations that permit passengers to board and exit rapidly. In 
1992, Lerner and his team established the tubular boarding platforms 
with fare clerks and turnstiles, so that the mechanisms for paying and 
boarding are separated, as in a subway. To carry more people at a time, 
the city introduced flexible-hinged articulated buses that open their 
doors wide for rapid entry and egress; then, when the buses couldn’t 
cope with the demand, the Lerner team called for bi-articulated buses of 
88 feet with two hinges (and a 270-passenger capacity), which Volvo 
manufactured at Curitiba’s request. Comparing the capacities of bus and 
subway systems, Lerner reels off numbers with a promoter’s panache. “A 
normal bus in a normal street conducts x passengers a day,” he told me. 
“With a dedicated lane, it can transport 2x a day. If you have an 
articulated bus in a dedicated lane, 2.7x passengers. If you add a 
boarding tube, you can achieve 3.4x passengers, and if you add double 
articulated buses, you can have four times as many passengers as a 
normal bus in a normal street.” He says that with an arrival frequency 
of 30 seconds, you can transport 36,000 passengers every hour — which is 
about the same load he would have achieved with a subway.

Unfortunately, the trends of bus usage are down. While the system has 
expanded to cover 13 of the cities in the metropolitan region, charging 
a flat fare that in practice subsidizes the trips of the mostly poorer 
workers who live in outlying areas, bus ridership within the Curitiba 
municipality has been declining. “We are losing bus passengers and 
gaining cars,” says Luis Fragomeni, a Curitiba urban planner. He 
observes that, like potential users of public transport everywhere, many 
Curitibanos view it as noisy, crowded and unsafe. Undermining the 
thinking behind the master plan, even those who live alongside the 
high-density rapid-bus corridors are buying cars. “The licensing of cars 
in Curitiba is 2.5 times higher than babies being born in Curitiba,” he 
says. “Trouble.” Because cars are status symbols, attempts to discourage 
people from buying them are probably futile. “We say, ‘Have your own 
car, but keep it in the garage and use it only on weekends,’ ” Fragomeni 
remarks. And the public-transport system must be upgraded continuously 
to remain an appealing alternative to private vehicles. “That 
competition is very hard,” says Paulo Schmidt, the president of URBS, 
the rapid-bus system. During peak hours, buses on the main routes are 
already arriving at almost 30-second intervals; any more buses, and they 
would back up. While acknowledging his iconoclasm in questioning the 
sufficiency of Curitiba’s trademark bus network, Schmidt nevertheless 
says a light-rail system is needed to complement it.

When it comes to modifying human behavior, persuading urban dwellers to 
sort their garbage can be harder than coaxing them to garage their cars. 
Lerner and his allies have claimed that they have succeeded beyond the 
dreams of environmentalists in far more eco-friendly countries, 
including Japan and Sweden. Curitiba was a pioneer in separating 
recyclable materials, with its “Garbage That Is Not Garbage” program, 
inaugurated in 1989. (The city leaders have a flair for slogans.) 
Recycling has assumed a new urgency, because the entire metropolitan 
area contains only one landfill, and it will be exhausted by the end of 
next year. José Antonio Andreguetto, Curitiba’s secretary for the 
environment, told me that 22 percent of the city’s garbage is being 
separated for recycling, a rate that has been declining over the last 
half-dozen years; he says he hopes to bring the number up to 34 percent 
by the end of the current mayor’s term in 2008. Lerner says the numbers 
have been eroding until recently because some recent mayors haven’t 
emphasized the issue, but he maintains that the recycling rate in 
Curitiba is still the highest in the world.

It is very hard to determine how accurate the estimates are for garbage 
separation. “Curitiba began early to look at recycling garbage — that is 
true, and it is good,” says Teresa Urban, a local journalist and 
environmental activist. “But the separation of recycled garbage is a 
little part of all the garbage we have here. There is no tradition of 
participation here. The mayor sold to the people the idea that this is a 
wonderful city. And the people think, This is wonderful, I don’t have to 
do anything.”

Like other left-wing critics, Urban traces the lack of participation to 
an original sin. The progressive urban planning of Curitiba was not 
initiated by a democratic process; it was set in motion by the military 
dictatorship that seized power in 1964 and ruled Brazil until the 
mid-’80s. Its environmentalism is rooted in authoritarianism. “They 
didn’t have to confront the public through public participation, and the 
decisions could be made by urban planners — architects acting as 
politicians,” says Clara Irazábal, who has written a book comparing the 
urban planning experiences of Curitiba and Portland, Ore. The city that 
has been called the most forward-looking in the Western Hemisphere is an 
outgrowth of an era that many Brazilians prefer not to look back on. 
Jaime Lerner, the archangel of the Curitiba green movement, was anointed 
by the dragons of war.

Always an anomaly, Curitiba became a model for our day by defying the 
spirit of the time. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, urban developers 
throughout the world, influenced by Le Corbusier and his followers, were 
remodeling cities to facilitate the easy circulation of people in 
automobiles. But in Curitiba, an informal group of young architects, 
urban planners and civil engineers at the city’s Federal University of 
Paraná, which is the oldest university in Brazil, objected more 
effectively to the mayor’s widening of streets and a proposed highway 
bypass that threatened the historic city center. As luck would have it, 
one of these outraged civil engineers, Fanchette Rischbieter, was 
married to the chairman of the government-controlled investment company 
that was financing the construction of roads in Paraná, the largely 
agricultural state of which Curitiba is the capital. “I said, ‘It 
doesn’t make sense, my wife and her friends are against these people — 
why don’t we make a plan?’ ” Karlos Rischbieter recalls. Selected by the 
city, Jorge Wilheim came up with a master plan that concentrated 
high-density construction along two long rapid-transit axes that skirted 
the center. At least as important as his transportation and zoning 
recommendations was Wilheim’s request for an urban-planning institute to 
implement them. In retrospect, the enthusiastic and talented staff of 
the Institute of Urban Research and Planning of Curitiba, which is known 
by its Portuguese acronym, Ippuc, ensured the success of Curitiba’s 
redevelopment.

Still, there was a lag of five years from the formal adoption of the 
master plan in 1966 until its implementation, which began with the 
governor’s selection of Lerner, who was president of Ippuc, to be mayor 
in 1971. Wilheim the planner needed Lerner the doer to turn abstract 
ideas into inventive reality. Curitiba has been studied more than copied 
(one notable exception is a Curitiba-style bus system in Bogotá, 
Colombia) because unlike Lerner, most mayors stumble over political 
obstacles. “I always tell a story of the ’80s,” Rischbieter says. “A 
friend from São Paulo came with his wife and son to visit Curitiba. He 
did not know this city. I took my car and showed him Curitiba for three 
hours. When I left him at the hotel, he said, ‘What did you show people 
before Jaime Lerner?’ ”

A spark plug of ideas, Lerner, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, 
combines salesmanship and pragmatism. Following his mayoral terms, he 
won election twice as governor of Paraná State, retiring in 2002 at the 
age of 65 to devote himself to his architecture firm and to worldwide 
speaking engagements espousing green urban planning. He has a large head 
that seems to rest directly on wide shoulders; knowing his passion for 
recycling, you might almost believe that his thick-set body has been 
through a compactor. He radiates a highly compressed and infectious 
energy, with a can-do assertiveness that borders on arrogance. “He never 
asked if something was good or not,” Rischbieter remarks. “He would say, 
‘I’ll go do it.’ I would say, ‘You have to go ask people and get their 
opinions.’ He would say, ‘No, they won’t agree with me, and it has to be 
done.’ He is not a political animal, he is a dictator.” Rischbieter 
admires Lerner; others, however, using the same descriptive terminology, 
do not. In the rough-and-tumble of Brazilian politics, it has become 
customary for supporters of populist parties to disparage Lerner (who 
personifies his talented team to allies and foes alike) as a creature of 
the dictatorship. According to this argument, the generals detested 
politicians; they admired technical experts. In Curitiba, they found a 
showplace to display their accomplishments to the world. “The military 
are addicted to planning,” says Fragomeni, who has an ambivalent 
attitude toward Lerner. “If they don’t plan, they don’t go forward. They 
invested in Curitiba. Mr. Lerner may like it or not. His continuity was 
ensured by the military government.” For his part, Lerner says that he 
had a far harder time with the military dictatorship than he did later, 
as an elected official. Under the military regime, he served at the 
pleasure of the governor and the state assembly. “I could be fired the 
next day,” he says. “Being an elected mayor, I was stronger. Nobody 
could fire me.”

In two terms (1971-75 and 1979-83) under the military regime, and then 
in an elected third term (1989-92) after the restoration of democracy, 
Lerner translated the master plan into concrete and leafy reality. Like 
an impatient muralist, he worked on a wide scope at high speed. “I know 
cities that plant 10,000 trees, and they make a whole festival,” he told 
me. “We planted a million trees. I am obsessed with scale.” He sought to 
make a livable city; over time that segued smoothly into an ecological 
city. Parks initially intended as recreational areas would also absorb 
floodwaters and extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Lerner used 
tax breaks to wheedle landowners into turning over portions of their 
property, which typically had little value at the time. In the rocky 
northern district, he converted one flooded quarry into the Wire Opera 
House, which has become a city icon, and another into the Free 
University of the Environment, a non-degree-granting institution that 
educates people on ecological issues. He transformed land that was 
serving as a refuse dump into a botanical garden; named for Fanchette 
Rischbieter, who died in 1989, it features a duck pond, French parterres 
and a classic Victorian greenhouse. The architecture in all three of 
these parks is less noteworthy for its formal design than for its 
building materials — salvaged telephone poles, mesh grating, metal 
tubing — and the speed of construction. From blueprint drafts to opening 
night, the Wire Opera House took about two months to complete. Lerner 
refers to such projects as “urban acupuncture” that energizes the 
development process.

When I would ask people if they thought Lerner could have accomplished 
his reforms under a democracy, people sympathetic to both Lerner and the 
military (like Rischbieter) or critical of both (like Urban) would say 
no; but most, professing admiration for Lerner but distaste for the 
military, said the dictatorship was not a precondition for his success. 
Lerner and Wilheim were emphatic on this point. “Not being a traditional 
politician helped me a lot,” Lerner told me. Nonetheless, by entering 
public life, even a self-professed apolitical man becomes a political 
actor. What struck me was the way in which the return of democracy 
changed Lerner’s core constituency. Under the generals, he was 
vulnerable mainly to the business community. That is why, for instance, 
he had to implement the pedestrian mall so quickly: if the business 
class lost confidence in him, the state assembly would have insisted 
that he be replaced. In a democratic Brazil, Lerner and his successors 
are threatened not just by the rich, but perhaps even more acutely by 
the poor — politically, by populist parties, and demographically, by the 
inexorable population growth. In politics, the pendulum has swung, as it 
always does. For the first time in 15 years, the winning candidate in 
Curitiba’s last mayoral election, in 2004, was not directly associated 
with the Lerner Group, the firm of 10 architects and planners that 
Lerner runs. Still, the new administration is continuing on the path 
that Lerner blazed. More worrisome for Curitiba’s future is the 
demographic trend. Over the past half-century, the state of Paraná 
underwent a radical change, from a labor-intensive coffee economy to a 
mechanized agriculture of soybeans. Hundreds of thousands lost their 
jobs. Many of the dispossessed have relocated to the Curitiba 
metropolitan region, which in Brazil is famously livable. Every day, 
more keep coming.

The “invasions” of homeless people onto unoccupied land spill like ink 
stains over the neatly outlined development maps of the urban planners, 
not only in Curitiba but across Brazil. One Saturday morning, I visited 
the neighborhood of Nossa Senhora da Luz, where a small group of people 
waited with sacks or improvised carts of garbage. The hardscrabble 
community dates from an early invasion of the 1970s. Today the streets 
are paved and the houses are solid cinder block, but unlike downtown 
Curitiba, here it is immediately apparent from the bleak, scrubby 
streetscape and the dark skins of the populace that you are in a 
third-world setting. I was there to observe one of 79 exchange centers 
that the municipality of Curitiba has established in communities where 
the streets are too narrow or too bumpy for large garbage trucks to 
circulate. Instead, people can carry their trash to biweekly collection 
sites and trade four pounds of garbage for one pound of vegetables. 
Mostly they bring plastic, paper and cardboard. At another site, run by 
the community council, more valuable aluminum cans are collected in 
return for money, and at yet another, organic material is traded for bus 
tokens. Compared with middle-class people, the residents of this 
neighborhood do not generate so much recyclable material; much of what 
they trade they prospect for around the city. Curitiba may be more 
successful in enlisting poor citizens to function as part-time 
carrinheiros than in enlightening better-off residents on their civic 
responsibilities.

The largest working-class housing development within Curitiba is called 
Bairro Novo, or “new neighborhood.” It was developed hurriedly, you 
might say frantically, after a band of 3,000 people, at the start of a 
three-day holiday weekend in September 1992, invaded a nearby parcel of 
vacant land where a disused railroad line once operated. This was the 
same sort of stealth tactic that Lerner employed two decades earlier to 
pedestrianize the shopping street, but now it was being used against him 
— coordinated, he maintains, by his political opponents, who controlled 
the governorship then as they do now. Since the security forces are 
directed by the state of Paraná and not the city, there was no way 
Lerner could stop the so-called Ferrovila (or railroad town) invasion. 
He says that he was especially infuriated because his administration had 
been researching the creation of a much larger development on the same 
land, housing 10 times as many people, as well as establishing schools 
and other social services. Instead, his team began planning the Bairro 
Novo on a parcel of land that was slated for development a decade or two 
later. There are 80,000 people living in Bairro Novo today. For a while, 
the illegal squats died off. “If you have a good alternative, you can 
prevent the invasions,” Lerner says.

Recently, invasions have started up again. “There is a feeling that it 
may be politically motivated,” says Fragomeni, the urban planner, who 
served until March as president of Ippuc. He reports that in Curitiba 
today, there are 13,000 households in invasion settlements, 6,000 of 
them in ecologically fragile areas. Squatters often occupy land by 
rivers, both to obtain a water source and because, by law, the 
riverbanks can’t be developed. “The land is forbidden, and it is free at 
the same time,” says Urban, the environmental activist. Raw sewage from 
these settlements flows directly into the rivers. Fragomeni says that 
fewer than 70 percent of Curitiba households have sewer connections. The 
current administration, led by Mayor Beto Richa (who was endorsed by 
Lerner but is not professionally associated with him), is trying to 
alleviate the problem with a new program to clean up the water basin of 
the sadly polluted Bariguà River: relocating people to housing that is a 
little farther from the river, replanting vegetation on the banks and 
linking houses to the sewage system.

The program to reclaim the Bariguà basin was galvanized by the most 
recent invasion in February, when 1,500 people seized land near 
Ferrovila in Bariguà Park and hit a sensitive nerve. Their encampment is 
provocatively close to Ecoville, a controversial upper-middle-class 
development that arose in the mid-’90s along one of the rapid-bus 
corridors. As Lerner acidly observes of Ecoville, “I don’t like this 
project, because it is not ‘eco’ and it is not ‘ville.’ ” Ecoville is a 
self-contained development in which tall buildings loom over patches of 
vegetation and looping roads. It’s an unconvincing version of the 
discredited Corbusian model of “the city in the park,” an idea that the 
developers self-consciously reference by naming one of these buildings 
“Le Corbusier.” Many buildings have been labeled for works by Picasso — 
the Arlequin, the Pierrot, even the Guernica. One noteworthy 
Picasso-christened tower, the Suite Vollard, features 11 full-floor 
residences, each of which is supposed to be able to rotate 
independently. The Suite Vollard is 10 years overdue for occupancy. Its 
engineering is still unproved.

Ferrovila and Ecoville: in close proximity, you can see the politicized 
landless and the profit-minded land developers who threaten Curitiba’s 
status as an ecological city. A reputation can be as hard to uphold as 
to establish. Unlike his three immediate predecessors, Mayor Richa — a 
boyish, blow-dried 41-year-old civil engineer from a prominent political 
family — is not an urban planner. And Ippuc, while still powerful, no 
longer directs the show. Richa has discontinued the longstanding mayoral 
custom, established by Lerner, of attending a weekly meeting at Ippuc. 
Under Lerner and his successors, “the mayor sat in Ippuc, and you felt 
what he wanted,” Fragomeni says. “It was a very verticalized government. 
Ippuc also planned the budget for the city. There’s democracy now, which 
is good. But it is no longer a pyramid; it’s a network. The mayor now 
expects you to propose what Curitiba should look like. He’s not a town 
planner.”

Nor is Curitiba a single town any longer. It’s a conurbation. Planning 
must be for the metropolitan region, not just for the municipality. Does 
it matter that Curitiba bans polluting industries if the neighboring 
town of Araucária has an oil refinery belching smoke on the city line? 
Similarly, if the new immigrants to the poor surrounding communities 
don’t recycle, then Curitiba’s landfill, the only such facility in the 
metropolitan region, will fill up even sooner. Like garbage, water does 
not respect city limits: Curitiba’s water supply depends on reservoirs 
controlled by municipalities outside its borders. What was never simple 
has become even more complex. For a long time, the citizens of Curitiba 
were so proud of the city’s reputation as an urban showplace that they 
kept re-electing urban planners — self-styled technical experts who 
seemed to be above politics and who vaunted their expertise in running 
the buses, building the parks and recycling the garbage. But a mayor 
today must be able to negotiate successfully with other mayors if reform 
is to work. Mayors need to be politicians, even in Curitiba.

***

Arthur Lubow, a contributing writer, last wrote for the magazine about 
the photographer Jeff Wall.

-- 
--------------------------------------------

Todd Edelman
Director
Green Idea Factory

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