Brasília was created in the 1950s by architect Oscar Niemeyer as an avant-garde city of the future. Built in just four years (1956-1960), the hotels stand together, there is a hospital area, an embassy area, residential areas (almost no shops)…all connected by majestic avenues. Motorists don’t suffer the congestion that plagues their compatriots, but few cities are so hostile to pedestrians. The distances are so great that nobody thinks of walking or even cycling. The capital of Brazil was planned for the greater glory of the automobile. Despite its undeniable beauty and uniqueness, the Brasilia model became obsolete.
But Brazil has a city of the future. It’s called Curitiba. The inauguration of Brasilia was still fresh when this city, 1,400 kilometers south of the capital, introduced an innovative public transport system – the metro on wheels – with futuristic stops in the form of a transparent tube, thanks to the courage of a mayor appointed by the dictatorship, Jaime Lerner (Curitiba, 1937–2021), architect and urban planner. A revolution began. High impact and low cost.
In that half-century, the population has tripled to 1.8 million residents, while public policies have made Curitiba a green icon, a sustainable capital, a pedestrian-friendly place, and the envy of the entire country for its immaculate streets. A city with 48 parks and 13 million square meters of native vegetation. Quite unknown abroad, apart from environmental circles, where he collects awards, or among those who follow in detail the legal adventures of the current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was imprisoned in a police station in Curitiban.
Two words are enough to sum up the secret of the formula that has made Curitiba a model of sustainability: orderly growth, an anomaly in the country that gave the world the word favela, that neighborhood that emerges amidst the disorder of the peripheries of Cities housing poor workers. The weakest flank in the face of extreme weather events such as torrential rains that kill hundreds of Brazilians in their precarious homes every year.
Japan Square in Curitiba where the Monument to Japanese Immigration is located. Daniel Castellano
Curitiba — 100 kilometers from the coast, almost 700 kilometers from the Iguazú Falls and the state capital of Paraná — listened to city planners to decide how it wanted to grow. And even more striking was that the politicians complied with the recommendations.
You will never see trees for a moment while strolling through this town, founded at the end of the 17th century as a town of prospectors and which grew thanks to the muleteers who brought mules into the mines. Although the first park dates back to 1886, the rest have been laid out over the last 50 years. Green spaces total 60 square meters per inhabitant, five times more than the 12 square meters recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a minimum.
The people of Curitiban are proud of their environmental awareness and are definitely asking for more to strengthen the greener formula. “Ideas that made waves in the 1970s haven’t been improved,” said Grasiela Azevedo, a 41-year-old process analyst. He is among the first generation of students to become environmentalists at school, teaching and supervising their parents. “Public transport is so chaotic at rush hour that I ride my bike,” he says on a walk. The cycle path network has a length of 250 kilometers and it is planned to reach 400 kilometers in two years.
After several years in which the mayors no longer prioritized sustainable growth and environmental issues, the municipality is again led by a city planner. Rafael Greca (Curitiba, 67), a student of Lerner (the man who planted the seeds of transformation), begins updating the legacy through an ambitious plan for Curitiba to adapt to and mitigate climate change. “Global warming is a trend, not humanity’s destiny. we can change it We have to convince people. AND [actuar] not only in the jungle, but also in our cities. “Here we plant 100,000 trees a year,” proclaims the city council in his office, where four decades ago it was decided that it was important to bring recycling to every corner of the community.
Environmental education has become such a big part of the school that the neighbors recycle 22% of their rubbish. The national average? 3%. The people of Curitiban diligently separate their rubbish and are careful not to throw a piece of paper on the floor. To encourage recycling among the poorest, they can trade cardboard and other recyclable waste for fruit and vegetables. This collective success story was born with the first pedestrian street in Brazil. Let’s go back to 1972. Businessmen are furious at the mayor’s crazy idea of banning cars on a busy commercial street, XV Street. Lerner uses his ingenuity: Work starts on a Friday evening, making Monday morning a reality. And when it’s time to open the shops, he’ll place some kids in the middle of the street to draw, neutralizing any boycott.
This was not an isolated case, but part of a carefully crafted roadmap by a team of brave young men. By multiplying parks, they reduced the risk of flooding and squats suitable for slums that would soon become favelas. They expropriated private forests from extended families; they became a general amusement. The Curitiba beaches that the locals joke about.
The change germinated in a public institution, under what at first sight were unfavorable conditions given that it is a conservative city and Brazil was still ruled by the military. But even in the place where the first Brazilian university was founded in 1912, the global boom of the late 1960s could be felt. “Curitiba experienced an explosion of ideas, of the master plan [urbanístico] “It was the result of a very broad public discussion, the first architects had just graduated and Mayor Lerner had the courage to apply it,” explains Rosane Popp, architect and urban planner at the Curitiba Institute for Urban Research and Planning (Ippuc). Acronym in Portuguese). ). An organization that has produced three mayors, including the mythical Lerner and the current one, who came to Ippuc on a scholarship at the age of 17.
A three-body bus operates in an exclusive lane of public transport. Daniel Castellano
Cathedral of Our Lady of the Light of the Pines, spiritual center of a conservative city like Curitiba. Daniel Castellano
Extending the best of the original recipe to neighborhoods is part of the plan to stop the climate crisis. The main ingredient, seasoned with recycling, parks, etc., is the revolutionary public transport system that 250 cities around the world – including Bogotá, Istanbul, Marrakech or Seoul – have introduced. It’s called BRT (Bus Rapid Transit).
And it meant a radical redesign to decentralize bus routes. A north-south and an east-west axis as well as a ring network that connects the districts structure the transport system. About twenty terminals allow connections between the lines as they work like a subway, but on land. For six reais (just over a euro or a dollar) you can travel throughout the entire route network.
The great invention was to create a central and exclusive lane through which three-body articulated buses that move like worms circulate at full speed; they are more than 80 kilometers long; and on each side a road for cars and motorcycles with a speed limit of 30 kilometers per hour to allow pedestrians to cross the road without being overwhelmed.
Suely Hass, the planning director of Ippuc, where fifty architects are designing the city’s future, stresses that the main lines of the original plan are still being applied, with appropriate updates. They merely allowed more trade in residential areas to reduce travel. According to the urban planners’ script, the city gradually grew around these traffic axes without the infrastructure suffering as a result. The high-rise buildings are concentrated along the main axes and the further away you are from them, the fewer floors the buildings have.
Curitiba, the epicenter of the Lava Jato investigation, Brazil’s biggest corruption case, is a right-wing, wealthier, less unequal and much whiter society than the Brazilian average. Most of its neighbors are descendants of immigrant families who came from Poland, Italy, Germany, Japan or the Ukraine with little luggage and dreams of prosperity. Thanks to the land ceded by the authorities, they have created a future for themselves.
Niemeyer left his mark in Curitiba with a museum in the shape of an eye. The curving white building and botanical gardens—French-style and complete with a greenhouse—are Curitiba’s postcards. The subway stations also have the advantage of being easily accessible with strollers and those who need a walking stick or wheelchair. They allow travelers to board through multiple doors at lightning speed and protect them on winter days like this one in June, when the temperature drops to 10 degrees and it can rain for 48 hours at a time.
The museum known by Oscar Niemeyer as the Museum of the Eye: an architectural icon of Curitiba. Daniel Castellano
The challenge now is to make transport just as attractive as before and, of course, less polluting. The BRT carries around 600,000 passengers daily. “If the city continues with the current policy, emissions will increase, so we have to assume a disruptive scenario,” warns architect Popp.
Among the innovations, two stand out: the improvement of the connection between the districts and the fact that the buses that connect them also have an exclusive lane, so that private cars no longer present competition. The goal is for them to handle 85% of shifts by 2050 (about 50% today). Many neighbors complain about the overcrowding of the buses, some would like a subway. “What they don’t know is that every kilometer of subway is 1,000 times more expensive than GRT [el sistema actual]”They dream of it because São Paulo has a subway,” replies the mayor.
“My authority does not come from imposition, the true leader must develop an understanding of what is necessary and thus assume joint responsibility,” says the politician, who is in his third term in office. He cannot stand for re-election.
Nalyn Moriah, 26, a musician and leader of a children’s choir from the Periphery, embodies one of the dreams of Lerner, the pioneer mayor who said in a 2018 interview with El País Semanal, “Neighborhood life will save the city school.” , sports and shopping must be nearby. Culture, theater or museums can be the focus.”
While people in other parts of Brazil lose up to four hours a day commuting to and from work — hence the love of social media — Moriah has lived in the same neighborhood for most of her life. He teaches at the civic center where he learned to play the guitar as a teenager. Since he almost always travels by bus or on foot, he knows where he can improve: “It works better in the center than in the suburbs, there could be more buses, the fleet could be more modern, with more frequent schedules…” “, but she’s hooked. She never thought of leaving town.
In his opinion, the fight against climate change insists too much on individual behavior, while the solution will only be collective. “Maybe plastic is the big cancer, we have to fight it from production,” he emphasizes.
Curitiba is a service city that also produces cars, a key sector for the emergence of a middle class in Brazil. President Lula, who unlike his predecessor has pledged to protect the Amazon, has just announced incentives to buy cars at popular prices to boost the industry and endear himself to the middle class. “It goes against the grain of history,” warns the mayor. “I want the President of the Republic to offer subsidies to promote electric urban public transport.”
The city’s mayor, Rafael Greca, urban planner, photographed in his city hall office. Daniel Castellano
Architects and urban planners Roseane Popp (left) and Suely Hass of the Institute for Urban Planning and Research (IPPUC), the driving force behind Curitiba’s green revolution.Daniel Castellano
Curitiba’s first 70 electric buses are bought, the old landfill has been turned into a pyramid covered with thousands of solar panels that generate electricity. They are planting trees at breakneck speed. And the crown jewel: a new sustainable neighborhood that will replace the favela that sprung up a decade ago in an area that’s a nature reserve. The 1,700 families settled in this flooded area are being relocated next door to houses they are building themselves. It is a project worth almost 50 million euros, of which the French development agency is contributing 38 million euros.
Curitiba attracted international attention with its good environmental practices as early as the 1990s. That attracted the Inter-American Development Bank. Other organizations joined, so that capital and foreign loans made most of the projects possible. Mayor Greca highlights the tough fiscal adjustments he made when he returned to the mayor’s office in 2016 after a first term in the 1990s to keep accounts healthy and attract funding.
The streets look beautiful because their neighbors take care of them, as José Francisco Chaerki says: “If someone throws a can or a piece of paper, everyone will get their attention. “I’m sure it’s not from Curitiba,” says this man, who drives an Uber proudly to supplement his money with a car wash. He uses public transport to get to the other place of work because it takes less time than driving.
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