Jaime Lerner
"Curitiba: Another City that Works"
Wednesday, June 08, 2005, 12:30 PM
Jaime Lerner is an inspiring planner. He was mayor
of Curitiba three times (1971-75, 1979-83 and 1989-92) and turned that city
into a paradigm of city planning, and not only for developing countries. He
created an infrastructure in Curitiba that kept the city from bursting out
of its seams despite its rapid growth. His bus tickets, which were also
lottery tickets, have become internationally renowned.In 1964, the French government granted Lerner a fellowship to study at the Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment, in Paris. After his studies, he worked at the Department of Urbanism, in Toulouse, and at George Candilis' studio for a short period of time. Back to Curitiba, Lerner designed some buildings such as the Condominio Mateus Leme (1964) and the Loureiro Fernandes School (1966).
In 1965, he was responsible for setting up and defining the structure of the Research and Urban Planning Institute of Curitiba (IPPUC). At the same time, he was involved with Curitiba's Master Plan to guide the City's physical, economic and cultural transformation.
As Mayor of Curitiba for three terms, Jaime Lerner consolidated the City's basic urban transformations and implemented an Integrated Mass Transport System during his first term. Afterwards, in addition to the leading-edge urban planning initiatives, he intensified an encompassing program that resulted in social and environmental advances.
He was elected Governor of Paraná State, in 1994, and re-elected in 1998; which means he will be in office until 2002. Lerner has promoted the greatest economic and social transformation of all of Paraná's history. The State of Paraná has been able to consolidate its position as the country's new industrial hub thanks to a series of policies geared toward attracting productive investments, with the support of Curitiba's successful experience.
As a UN urban planning consultant, he has been involved with planning designs, mass transportation programs and urban projects in several cities of Brazil, Latin America and Asia. Lerner has been awarded very important national and international prizes: the United Nations Environmental Award, granted by the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), New York, (1990); the Child and Peace Award from UNICEF, related to the following programs: “From the Streets to School”, “Protecting Life”, and “the Teacher's University” (1996); the "Thomas Jefferson Medal" from the University of Virginia, USA (1997) and, finally, the "Prince Claus Fund Award", Netherlands (2000).
LECTURE SUMMARY
Jaime Lerner, former mayor of Curitiba and governor of Paraná, contends that any city can be transformed in two years, given political will, strategy and solidarity. (Solidarity might best be understood in our civic vernacular as “a common vision.”) He should know; Curitiba is a case study in rapid change. Civic transformation is a game between leaders and their community, in which each takes turns knocking ideas back and forth.
Successful cities have three common attributes: mobility, sustainability, and solidarity. They acquire these attributes by entering into an equation of full responsibility between leaders, citizens and business. Far from being places of despair and instability, Lerner believes that cities are the last refuge of a common global vision, where mobility, education, health care, quality housing and community vitality are all achievable. “Cities are not a problem; they’re the answer.”
Lerner addressed the first attribute of successful cities, mobility, with a video overview of Curitiba’s revolutionary transport system, which modifies buses to operate like a subway. It moves two million people per day (more than New York’s subways), with an average passenger waiting time of one minute, at a cost that is 1/100th of a subway (or 1/20th of light rail, or 1/10th of a street car). The system is fast, attractive and cheap. And it pays for itself.
The second attribute, sustainability, can be woven through everything in civic transformations. Living where you work is not just sustainable, it’s convenient, efficient and less stressful. Recycling makes sense not just when your landfill options are narrowing; it makes sense when kids teach their parents, so that the recycling rate is over seventy percent, as it is in Curitiba (Portland leads the U.S. with a rate in the high fifties). Cities by their very nature are diverse, and diversity works for people as well as it does for nature: different ages, incomes, housing, commerce, recreation, etc.
Solidarity, or community vision, is perhaps the toughest part of civic success. Lerner has visited dozens of cities, some like Shanghai with 3000 planners and 2000 active projects. It’s not the resources you throw at a problem, it’s the connections you make. In several cases, Lerner has found that kids make the strongest connection between civic leaders and citizens.
Remember, Curitiba’s kids taught the city to recycle. And when Lerner set out to transform Curitiba’s downtown into a pedestrian mall IN ONE WEEKEND, it was the city’s kids, with a day off from school on Monday, whose street-drawing project convinced the local auto club to call off its protest and go home. Keeping street kids in school? Simple, providing the family’s monthly food needs from local farmers more than pays for reduced begging and subsequent careers in street-crime. Fani Lerner, Jaime’s wife, conceived this program after years as a schoolteacher and psychologist, and then spread it throughout Paraná with the help of other mayors and their spouses.
Above all, Lerner likes to work fast and be bold. “The grace of imperfection is better than perfection without grace.” His second video, a design proposal for a section of Sao Paulo, shows this boldness: re-energizing a dead neighborhood by plunking towers and parks in the middle of city blocks, surrounded by salvageable existing buildings. Bringing weekend nightlife into these dead areas by rotating “portable streets” through neighborhoods on buses or streetcars. Each would carry “cultural containers” with restaurants, music, art, theatre, movies, etc. We might reject these ideas as outlandish, crazy and unrealistic, except for one thing. Time and again, Lerner has made the unrealistic a reality.
Besides kids, who are his best allies in transforming communities? Well citizens of course, but most often architects because they are in the business of proposing, journalists, because they can work on a deadline, and philosophers, because they “feel society earlier” than everyone else.
What were Lerner’s thoughts on Portland as he toured the city, met with civic leaders, and even led a design charrette? First of all, Lerner is a downtown kind of guy, and he loved our downtown. After walking just a few blocks in downtown he turned and said, “Good, it is alive.” He loves the diversity of our neighborhoods. He loves our civic spaces but cautions we need to fill the ones we have before building more. He loves our bridges. He loves the views from our freeways, and asks why the place with our best views is merely the “Fastest way to get from one jammed place to another jammed place?” And most of all, he loves our river, and says the biggest challenge we have is connecting the city -not just recreation, but commerce, housing, industry and transportation- to the river, on both sides.