Analysis: Post-Jaime Lerner, is Brazil’s Curitiba still a model city?

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Smile city, model city, ecological capital, “one of the best to live in”. Curitiba has had many nicknames, based on urbanistic choices that won awards and were highlighted in international publications.

It is true that criticism was looming, biting at the managers’ heels: “the ideal city for whom?” The not-so-organized growth on the city’s peripheries has always led to questioning the restricted access to the benefits of the capital of Paraná state.

The city’s urban revolution, which occurred mainly from the 1970s through the 1990s, was led by architect Jaime Lerner (1937-2021), and included the paving and closing to traffic of an important city street (Rua XV, in 1972); the adoption of the bus rapid transit system, in dedicated lanes (BRT), as an alternative to the subway, later adopted in hundreds of cities around the world.

The construction of extensive parks in floodable territories, combining the appreciation of free leisure with the fight against irregular occupation; as well as the transformation of an old gunpowder plant, a glue factory and a deactivated quarry into cultural spaces, were other examples.

The plan was to perform “urban acupuncture,” a term Lerner often used and which gives the title to one of his books (Editora Record, 2003). When he left Curitiba’s City Hall in 1993, the postcard era had passed, although the same think tank would remain in power for another two decades.

The architect’s death, in May this year, came at a time when he had been away from public administration for 20 years and said he was frustrated with the direction of the city’s planning.

“My father missed innovation. He believed that the city deserved a broader look, with more transformative projects, and he also had several ideas about several areas, mainly mobility, which he even presented but they never got off the drawing board,” says his daughter Ilana Lerner, director of the Public Library of Paraná.

It is worth noting that Lerner did not create a city from scratch – as early as the 18th century there were rudimentary directions for the urban environment; the first record of formal urban planning in Curitiba dates back to 1943, with the Agache Plan, which foresaw a radial conformation for the urban fabric.

In 1966, the Master Plan was established with the formation of what would become the city’s Institute of Urban Planning (IPPUC), which provided for linear growth along the axes of public transport, whose latest revision occurred in 2015.

Zoning regulations were maintained with an iron fist in order to create housing densification axes – in aerial view one can see how the city’s tallest buildings are distributed in lines that correspond to the structural axes formed by expressways and avenues that concentrate public transportation in exclusive lanes.

It was only in 2001 that federal legislation, through the City Statute, made the drawing of master plans mandatory for municipalities with over 20,000 inhabitants. Despite Curitiba’s pioneering spirit, today there are countless social and environmental challenges in the region.

The city also suffers from its success in attracting more companies and people. The population, which at the time Lerner left office amounted to some 1.3 million, now borders on 2 million.

The city’s Achilles heel, for Madianita Nunes da Silva, a professor in the post-graduate program in Urban Planning at the Federal University of Paraná, is low-income housing. “From the housing policy perspective, Curitiba’s trajectory has been unable to address the problem of low-income housing,” she laments.

“In the policy of urbanization and consolidation of popular settlements, the city has virtually no experience and has failed to innovate – unlike other cities that, since the 1980s, have faced the problem head-on, such as Belo Horizonte, Recife, Santo André and Diadema, in the greater São Paulo area.”

Professor at the Federal Technological University of Paraná Orlando Ribeiro also highlights the “difficulty in reviving the local economy and tourist activity, and promoting the integration of vacant and degraded buildings to the market through rental policies.”

For Marcos Kahtalian, founding partner of Brain market intelligence and vice-president of Sinduscon-PR, another problem is that Curitiba’s Master Plan and Zoning Law contain elements that generate doubts for the market.

For example, the urban priority indexes, which encourage construction in certain regions, are subject to revision every 3 years. “How am I going to have predictability when the real estate market has long deadlines?”

Once the rules are fully clear and the parameters for acquiring potential can be consulted, more efficient regulation will be possible.

Kahtalian agrees that Curitiba’s main challenge, to grow in an organized way, has to do with the capacity to build social interest housing and in the first income bracket in larger numbers. “The city could encourage this construction and a greater verticalization for this range, preventing a large part of this population from having to live in the metropolitan region” – in other words, far from work.

Another of Jaime Lerner’s flagships, sustainability, reached Curitiba long before it was on the national agenda, with the creation of recyclable garbage collection and incentive campaigns for the practice.

Despite the city’s environmental pioneering initiatives, there are currently several challenges in this area, such as tackling flooding in irregular locations – after all, not all of the city is a large drained park. “In the last big rains in Curitiba, in March this year, 156 houses and 624 people were affected in 5 neighborhoods, both central and peripheral,” Ribeiro highlights.

One of the city’s priorities is to tackle floods and address the revitalization of Bairro Novo do Caximba, target of irregular dwellings that are receiving environmental security.

According to the city hall, it would be “the largest social and environmental intervention in the city’s recent history, which will ensure decent housing and sustainable urbanization with transportation infrastructure, leisure and the implementation of a large linear park for the conservation of the environmental protection area.”

Also according to Curitiba’s City Hall, the city has attracted external investments for improvements in low-income housing. The main example would be the solar and photovoltaic energy projects underway in remote neighborhoods.

In the central region, Vale do Pinhão (a parody of Silicon Valley) promotes digitalization and an ecosystem of cooperation along the lines of smart cities.

It is a fact that, today, the tackling of city problems must obey new legislation – with bidding laws and the current legal, environmental, and accessibility requirements, it is only natural that obstacles to innovative initiatives like those of the past arise.

“My father gave a lot of importance to starting, to creating something and putting it into practice as soon as possible before the troublemakers emerged. He knew the importance of presenting projects and executing them, and correcting the course whenever necessary, without having all the answers. This required great courage,” Ilana recalls.