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Curitiba, Brazil
Curitiba is the capital of the state of Paraná, Brazil. It has the largest population and economy in Southern Brazil with about 1.8 million people. It is best known for its inventive urban planning that was designed with the idea of future growth, while maintaining a widely used, cheap form of public transportation and preserving green spaces and pedestrian spaces throughout the city.
Curitiba’s First Population Explosion and Urban Planning Experiment
By the 1940s, Curitiba was rapidly growing. The population had jumped from about 50,000 to 150,000 since the turn of the century and the city was not designed for a population of its size. In response to this rapid growth, the city hired Alfred Agache, a French city planner and architect, to redesign the city to accommodate its new size. Agache, however, did not design a city that could continue growing; his plans were not fit for the incipient city.
Curitiba’s Master Plan
As the city continued its unchecked growth, Agache’s urban plan found itself overtaxed. Fearing that the city would transform into massive urban sprawl, Mayor Ivo Arzua opened a contest, whoever developed the best plan to revitalize the city, while preserving its green spaces and character, would get to transform the Curitiba. The future of the city remained in the hands of the contest winner. Jamie Lerner and his team won and developed a plan that would allay Curitibanos’ fears. According to their proposal, they could minimize urban sprawl, reduce traffic downtown, preserve the historical district, and create a public transit system that was sure to be widely used. This proposal, in the process of its implementation, was called the Curitiba Master Plan. This plan included the first widely used bus rapid transit system, a system that was the inspiration for Bogota, Colombia ’s TransMilenio . It also included Brazil’s first pedestrian-only street.
Success of the Master Plan
Curitiba is recognized internationally for its urban planning and as the city has continued to grow to its current population of nearly 2 million people from the 430,000 people who lived there when Arzua first proposed the urban planning contest, it has continued to maintain its original goals. And in 1992, its success was heralded by the honor of hosting the World Cities Forum.
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REFERENCES
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[1] Gnatek, Tim. "Curitiba's Urban Experiment." Frontline. December 2003.
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PICTURE REFERENCES
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