On Sunday, I had the good fortune of seeing a documentary called A Convenient Truth: Urban Solutions from Curitiba, Brazil, which was released in 2007. It was shown as part of a film and discussion series entitled Positive Films for a Positive Future at the public library in Albany, California, which I find to be a good idea in itself. In a straightforward way, the film examines environmental and social innovations in Curitiba, a city of roughly two million people located in an inland area in southern Brazil, focusing on four areas: transportation, recycling, affordable housing, and parks.

This trailer gives a taste of the film:

The film begins with the following quote by composer John Cage:

“I can’t understand why people are frightened by new ideas. I’m frightened by old ones.”

This spirit is reflected in the story that this film tells about the people of Curitiba, who faced many problems seen in cities the world over as a result of rapid urbanization from the 1940s to 1960s. With scarce public funds, they had to be inventive to respond to challenges such as traffic jams and waste, but over time they developed solutions that have attracted the attention of diverse cities around the world.

The film then takes a look at Curitiba’s innovations in transportation. The documentary highlights the role of visionary leaders, such as mayors Jaime Lerner and Cassio Taniguchi, in the city’s unique approach to transportation. The city adopted a policy of development that favored people over cars, and in 1972 created Brazil’s first pedestrian street shortly after Jaime Lerner became mayor. An existing street in a commercial area was converted to a pedestrian area in just 72 hours over the course of a long weekend. Initially, business owners on the street feared a drop in sales from their stores, and threatened to sue the government. However, they soon found that their businesses prospered as the street attracted more visitors and shoppers. Before long, other merchants asked the city government to extend the pedestrian street to include the blocks where their shops were located.

Curitiba is perhaps best known for its Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system, which many cities have sought to adapt and implement. Curitiba’s system is designed to provide many of the advantages of a subway at a tiny fraction of the cost of building a subway. It provides five routes that radiate from the city center. Bus stops every 500 meters make the system convenient to the vast majority of residents and businesses. The tube stations used for boarding buses allow quick entry by large numbers of people (who pay as they enter a station so there are no delays while boarding a bus) and are accessible to people with disabilities. As part of a “trinary road system,” buses travel along dedicated lanes that allow them to avoid traffic congestion. (These photos depict the tube stations, trinary road system, and other features of the city’s transportation system.) At peak times, buses arrive at a bus stop as often as every 50 seconds. Due to the many benefits of the system, over 60 percent of the city’s residents commute by bus, despite a rate of car ownership that is high by Brazilian standards.

The city’s bus system is organized by the city government, which then pays private companies that operate bus lines according the kilometers traveled. The public-private partnership has, the documentary asserts, been a success for the city government, bus companies, and Curitiba’s citizens.

Recycling is another area of innovation that is a focus of the film. Shantytowns, known in Brazil as favelas, can contribute to pollution when the lack of a sanitation system forces their residents to dump waste directly into rivers or streams. Under Jaime Lerner, the city of Curitiba started a program in which the city enabled residents of these favelas to earn bus tokens by bringing trash and organic waste to collection trucks brought near their neighborhood. Another program invited young people to collect plastic for recycling and rewarded them with toys made from recycled materials. Again facing a scarcity of funds, the city created a unique waste separation station in 1989 that also served as a job training and rehabilitation program and also initiated a city-wide campaign to encourage families to separate their waste. These efforts led to a UN award for their unprecedented rates of success. Curitiba sells the materials it collects to a growing number of manufacturers, and its sales pay for its waste collection, job training, and other programs.

In affordable housing, Curitiba has also challenged convention. Affordable housing in Brazil, as in many other places, tends to be concentrated in areas that are far from sources of employment or are otherwise separated from the rest of the community. Curitiba under Mayor Taniguchi tried a different approach, bringing schools, fitness centers, daycare, and other facilities into the areas where affordable housing had been built. It also designed new affordable housing to incorporate storefronts. Residents were offered free training in business development and other areas suited to their skills, and many go on to own and operate stores on the site in the same complex where they live. Others choose to start small manufacturing or craft businesses, which they may operate in nearby warehouses owned by the city after completing training. Altogether, about 5,700 businesses were formed and 39,000 jobs created through these programs.

Curitiba has also become a city of parks, partly as a creative response to the environmental problems and financial constraints it faced. Some of Curitiba’s favelas were located on flood plains, leading to frequent damage during the rainy season. Faced with the high cost of building canals, levees, and dams, the city took a different approach, building parks in flood-prone areas and providing opportunities for residents of shantytowns to relocate to homes in safer areas. In one case, this cost about one-fifth of the cost of building concrete canals, and had the added benefit of increasing property values near the new park, which resulted in more tax revenues. A large expansion in the number and size of the cities parks has also led tourists to spend more time in the city, with the average stay increasing from one night to three, according to a city official interviewed for the film.

Another person who is interviewed for the documentary cites the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, and contends that the risks faced by poor people living in environmentally unstable areas could be averted by the kinds of policies that Curitiba has developed. Yet another argues that the climate crisis itself would not be the grave threat that it is if all cities were like Curitiba. The people of Curitiba, the film suggests, are proud of their city, and feel that they are owners and creators of the solutions for which it is known. The film concludes with a montage of images of cities around the world, including Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, Paris, Capetown, and Sydney, that are working to adapt solutions developed in Curitiba.

While no city is a utopia, Curitiba offers not only solutions, but also the inspiration that we need to recognize that the problems we face, including our financial limitations, can inspire us to imagine alternatives to the thinking of the past and create new structures that strengthen our environment and community.

Evan

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