World Cities | ||
Case
study: managing rapid urban growth in a
sustainable way in Curitiba, Brazil
“If you want to make life better for people make
the cities better for people.” Jaime Learner
The Rio Earth Summit of 1992 said that there was
the need to move away from the unsustainable
development of recent decades, which took little
account of the finite nature of resources or the
damage being done to our environment.
Sustainable development was seen as essential.
Curitiba is the capital of Parana State and is
found on the South East of Brazil around 1,000km
from Rio de Janeiro.
In a recent survey 99% of Curitiba’s
residents said they were happy with their city.
It has been transformed from an
agricultural city to a manufacturing one through
SUSTAINABLE
PLANNING.
Curitiba has suffered from all the typical
problems brought by rapid urban growth:
·
Mass unemployment;
·
Transport congestion;
·
Lack of basic services and
·
Uncontrolled growth of squatter settlements.
This is a good case study as the city was
located in an LEDC when it started its pathway
to sustainability and shows what can be done
on a budget.
In 2010 the Global Sustainable City Award was
given to Curitiba.
It has a population of almost 2 million people.
Transport
Curitiba has developed a high quality of life
for its inhabitants
by prioritising
people over cars.
Jaime Learner became mayor in the 1971
(until retiring in 2002) and when elected into
office he faced a plan to widen the city streets
to cope with an increasing number of traffic.
Learner did the opposite, he paved the
street and closed it to traffic – Boulevard de
Flores has since spread to span 50 blocks and is
a mall in the street. Learner also believes in
participation of people in the life and
development of the city, and that economic
activity should not be separate from society.
Learner says that there are 3 main issues facing
society in the future –
“Mobility,
sustainability, and identity”.
He feels that if all of these 3 things
were addressed cities could be great places to
live.
By the 1970s the population of Curitiba
had grown tenfold in just 50 years and was
clogged with cars.
Learner knew the solution was in public
transport, but his city was CASH POOR.
He decided to go with SIMPLE methods and used a
bus system to revolutionise transport in the
city.
He designed a system which features;
1.
5 main
arterial traffic
roads
into and out of the city. These routes
had a
central bus lane
that was totally dedicated to 2
directional public transport; not the car. This
was to speed the journey for commuters on the
bus.
This boosts the number of passengers per
bus from 1,000 per day to 2,000. The arterial
roads were also used as growth corridors of the
urban and economic growth of the city.
2.
Triple articulated buses
(bendy buses!); this further boosted the number
of passengers per bus to an incredible 4,000 per
day and Learner claims that it can move more
people than a subway yet is 100 to 200 times
cheaper.
3.
The
buses are coloured
according to their function;
·
Red busses were express buses with fewer stops,
·
Orange busses bring people from outlying
districts to the express routes,
·
Green buses bring suburban people to the express
routes,
·
And grey buses take suburban dwellers direct to
the city centre but make many more stops.
There is only one fare and people can
change busses on the same ticket. There are
interchanges across the city so people can
change directions and busses
4.
Rapid implementation
within 2 years.
5.
Learner also improved this system by designing
an
elevated glass
boarding tube, where people could
shelter and buy their tickets, speeding up the
journey.
The bus doors are wider and open directly
into the tube, maximising access for all types
of users including the disabled. Faster loading
and unloading on the bus means less idling and
cuts the bus travel times.
6.
The bus companies are paid per km driven not per
passenger, this means the bus companies still
want to run services on less popular routes, not
argue over the more popular routes.
Results:
During peak hours busses arrive every 60 seconds
and are always full.
Curitiba has one of the lowest rates of
pollution as a result. An initial 25,000
passengers and that grew to over 2 million
passengers. It is totally funded by the people
who use it and has no government subsidy.
Parks and open space
There are 28 parks and wooded areas in Curitiba,
creating a city landscape which is unlike any
other in a developing city.
The parks were designed to be
INTERCONNECTED
and not isolated to maximise use.
They were designed by Hitoshi Nakamura.
The parks ring the city and some of the
parks were built in 2 months.
The parks
increase the value of
surrounding land, and many of the
parks are dual purpose.
One of the parks is used for flood control from
the Iguazu River in the 1970s. Instead of
putting a concrete channel around a river in
Barigui Park to stop it flooding, they designed
the park to
absorb the flood water
naturally instead, and created lakes to
absorb flood water.
This saved money from expensive hard
engineering projects and the money could be used
in social projects such as schools instead. The
park covers 1.4 million m2.
The parks also
stop squatters
from creating shanty towns in the flood
prone zones.
The owners of skyscrapers alongside the
parks were allowed to add extra stories to their
buildings, if they added green space around the
base of the building or paid extra tax that went
to fund lower income housing.
Curitiba has 4 times the green space recommended
– they even use sheep to “cut” some of the grass
in the park!
Housing and social projects
Curitiba still has slums filled with poor
people.
The city has
a social charter
designed to help them.
The slum dwellers have to cope with regular
floods. The slums will be cleared but to solve
this Curitiba has used
Site and Service
schemes, where the government offers
low interest loans on the land and free house
design for the people.
The residents are trained to build the
houses and make up a large part of the labour
force. The houses have electricity, sewerage and
running water.
“If you want to make life better for people make
the cities better for people.”
Urban growth is also restricted to corridors of
growth - along key transport routes. Tall
buildings are allowed only along bus routes.
COHAB, the public housing programme, is
providing 50,000 homes for the urban poor.
Waste
The city has recycled waste since the late
1980s, well ahead of its time globally in terms
of waste disposal.
It has an organised waste disposal system
the rival of any first world city. The garbage
is separated into
2 categories –
organic and non-organic,
which are collected by 2 separate trucks.
Learner also introduced an “Equation of
co-responsibility” involving the
“green exchange”
– this was Learner’s idea to help the
urban poor.
People in the slums collected rubbish,
and the council paid for the weight collected
using fruit and vegetables.
The council gains here because the people
collect the rubbish in narrower roads where the
council’s collection trucks can’t get to.
This also saves on expensive road
widening.
The recyclable non-organic waste goes to a plant
made of recycled materials!
They are
separated into plastics, paper, and metals and
all are recycled.
Curitiba recycles 2/3s of its waste.
The scheme generates jobs, reduces
landfill and is cheaper than landfill as it
generates money.
There is even a library of recycled books
to be used by school children.
There are also "Lighthouses of Knowledge" in the
city. These are free educational and internet
centres.
Economy
The economy of Curitiba is principally
manufacturing.
Volvo has a big factory there and in 1992
they developed the triple articulated busses.
Volvo was attracted to the city by its educated
work-force, Curitiba has one of the oldest
universities in Brazil.
Brazil has developed rapidly since 1970 to
become a NIC. Curitiba took advantage of these
changes at this time and developed an
Industrial City (Ciudade
Industrial de Curitiba or
C.I.C.)
10 km WSW of the city
The goal of the C.I.C was to upgrade the city’s
economic profile and provide jobs for its
citizens. It had the following features;
1.
In keeping with other developments in Curitiba
SUSTAINABILITY was at its heart. The site was
picked so that the dominant SE trade winds would
blow any pollution away from the Curitiba city,
and nearby water sources would be fully
protected.
2.
Integration of Industrial facilities with public
transport and other services.
3.
The industry was developed with parks around it
limiting the impact on this green land (15% of
the area is still Greenfield).
4.
20,000 housing units have been built in the
area, so workers could cycle to work.
Industry
represents 34.13% and the commerce and service
sectors 65.84%. The CIC is home to many
transnational industries, such as Nissan,
Renault, Volkswagen, Philip Morris, Audi, Volvo,
HSBC, Siemens, ExxonMobil, Electrolux and Kraft
Foods, as well as many well-known national
industries, such as Sadia, O Boticário and
Positivo Informática.
By 2000, over 550 factories were operating in
the industrial city, providing some 50 000
direct jobs and 150 000 indirect jobs.
As well as the industrial city, there are nearly
6000 other industrial enterprises in Curitiba,
right across the full range of industrial
activity. This high level of diversification is
again very beneficial in sustaining the quality
of life of Curitiba’s citizens.
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