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Curitiba: A Model City
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20693 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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9 / 1992 |
3,155 Words |
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Kris Herbst
Kris Herbst is a writer for Global Press in Washington, D.C. |
Curitiba, a city of 1.6 million in southern Brazil, has become a world-recognized model of urban planning and environmental practices. Until recently, few people outside of Brazil had even heard of Curitiba (pronounced "koo-ree-CHEE-bah"), but today the city attracts delegations of politicians, planners, environmentalists, and journalists seeking to discover how, in a Third World region where cities are suffering from over population and poverty, Curitiba is known as a "city that works."
Curitiba is "a model city of the future," according to the director of New York City's Department of Environmental Protection. It received the International Institute for the Conservation of Energy's annual award in 1990 for promoting energy efficiency through planning. In the same year, the United Nations gave Curitiba two environmental program awards for its innovative recycling and other environmental programs.
Recent opinion polls show that a large majority of Curitiba's citizens say there is no place they would rather live. Working within the limits of a Third World city budget, Curitiba's administrators have succeeded in making the city a highly livable place with a serried of simple, low-cost innovations that are applicable to both Third and First World cities.
As a result, Curitiba is a green city of parks, and because of its unusual structure, city because of its unusual structure, city residents can move around swiftly, whether by automobile or on an extremely efficient bus system. It is a "rechargeable" city that recycles, in the words of Mayor Jaime Lerner, and it encourages even its poorest residents to participate in cultural and economic activities.
City planners in Curitiba first harnessed the city's growth during a period of rapid national urbanization that began in the 1950s and peaked in the early '60s--a period that became known as Brazil's "economic miracle." Brazil embarked on a massive program of modernization, largely funded by foreign loans that accelerated it transformation into an urban and semi-industrialized country. Freeways and high-rises were constructed in city centers, and poor and displaced families from rural areas filled squatter settlements (favelas) constructed in ravines and on hillsides in the cities.
Curitiba's population mushroomed during those years as mechanization of agriculture caused a massive migration from rural areas to cities. It has been one of the fastest growing cities in Brazil since
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