Curitiba and Hope

And so the story of Curitiba begins with its central street, Rua Quinze-the
one that the old plan wanted to obliterate with an overpass. Lerner insisted
instead that it should become a pedestrian mall, an emblem of his drive for
a human-scale city. "I knew we'd have a big fight," he says. "I had no way
to convince the store-owners a pedestrian mall would be good for them,
because there was no other pedestrian mall in Brazil. But I knew if they had
a chance to actually see it, everyone would love it."

To prevent opposition, he planned carefully. "I told my staff, 'This is like
war.' My secretary of public works said the job would take two months. I got
him down to one month. Maybe one week, he said, but that's final. I said,
'Let's start Friday night, and we have to finish by Monday morning.'" And
they did-jackhammering the pavement, putting down cobblestones, erecting
streetlights and kiosks, and putting in tens of thousands of flowers.

"It was a horrible risk-he could easily have been fired," said Oswaldo
Alves, who helped with the work. But by midday Monday, the same storeowners
who had been threatening legal action were petitioning the mayor to extend
the mall. The next weekend, when offended members of the local automobile
club threatened to "reclaim" the street by driving their cars down it,
Lerner didn't call out the police. Instead, he had city workers lay down
strips of paper the length of the mall. When the auto club arrived, its
members found dozens of children sitting in the former street painting
pictures. The transformation of Curitiba had begun.

Cheapness is one of the three cardinal dictates of Curitiban planning. Many
of the city's buildings are "recycled." The planning headquarters is in an
old furniture factory; the gunpowder depot became a furniture factory; a
glue plant was turned into the children's center. An old trolley stationed
on the Rua Quinze has become a free babysitting center where shoppers can
park their kids for a few hours. The city's parks provide the best example
of brilliance on the cheap. When Lerner took office for the first time in
1971, the only park in Curitiba was smack downtown - the Passeio Publico, a
cozy zoo and playground with a moat for paddleboats and a canopy of old and
beautiful ipé trees, which blossom blue in the spring. "In that first term,
we wanted to develop a lot of squares and plazas," recalls Alves. "We picked
one plot, we built a lot of walls, and we planted a lot of trees. And then
we realized this was very expensive."

At the same time, as luck would have it, most Brazilian cities were
installing elaborate flood-control projects. Curitiba had federal money to
"channelize" the five rivers flowing through town, putting them in concrete
viaducts so that they wouldn't flood the city with every heavy summer rain
and endanger the buildings starting to spring up in the floodplain.

"The bankers wanted all the rivers enclosed," says Alves; instead, city hall
took the same loan and spent it - on land. At a number of sites throughout
the city, engineers built small dams and backed up the rivers into lakes.
Each of these became the center of a park; and if the rains were heavy, the
lake might rise a foot or two-perhaps the jogging track would get a little
soggy or the duck in the big new zoo would find itself swimming a few feet
higher than usual. "Every river has a right to overflow," insists parks
chief Nicolau Klupel.

Mostly because of its flood-control scheme, in 20 years-even as it tripled
in population-the city went from two square feet of green area per
inhabitant to more than 150 square feet per inhabitant. The official
literature always points out, with understandable pride, that this figure is
four times the World Health Organization standard of 12 square meters. From
every single window in Curitiba, I could see as much green as I could
concrete. And green begets green; land values around the new parks have
risen sharply, and with them tax revenues.

Though the population continues to grow steadily, it's indeed possible that
Curitiba may have broken the back of its social problems. Since many of the
people in the favelas have been evicted from their homes in the countryside,
a house is an urgent need. Not just a shelter-a house they own, on a lot
they own.

Consider housing. Until the mid-1980s, COHAB, Curitiba's public housing
program, was fairly standard. It built more units per capita than any other
Brazilian city and did a good job of scattering them around in small pockets
so they blended in with neighborhoods. But the main source of funding, the
national housing bank, collapsed in 1985. At the same time, the demand for
housing skyrocketed as the countryside poured into the favelas. Abandoning
the policy of small, scattered sites, the city bought one of the few large
plots of land left within its limits, a swath of farmland bounded by several
rivers called Novo Bairro, or New Neighborhood.

We stood on a rise in Novo Bairro and watched as bulldozers scraped and
contoured the hills. This cleared field would soon be home to 50,000
families, perhaps 200,000 people. Small houses crept like a tidemark across
the land. The city was not building the homes-the new landowners were,
sometimes with the aid of a city mortgage on a small pile of bricks and
windows. Every third house seemed to be doubling as a building supply store;
and everywhere, people plastered, framed, roofed.

"Sixty percent of the lower-income people are involved in the construction
industry anyhow," says one COHAB executive. "They know how to build." And
here is the moving part: With your plot of land comes not only a deed and a
pair of trees (one fruit bearing and one ornamental), but also an hour
downtown with an architect. "The person explains what's important to him-a
big window out front, or room in the kitchen. They tell how many kids they
have, and so on. And then we help draw up a plan," says one architect, who
has more than 3,000 of "his" homes scattered around the city.

"Most people can only afford to build one room at a time, so we also show
them the logical order to go in," another designer explains.

At the moment, in the center of Novo Bairro, COHAB is building "Technology
Street," an avenue of 24 homes, each built using some different construction
technique-bamboo covered with plaster, say-so that people can get ideas for
the kind of house they might want. The houses are all smaller than most
Americans would want to live in, but they all say something about the people
who built them. "It's a house built out of love," says the housing chief.
"And because of that, people won't leave it behind. They're going to
consolidate their lives there, become part of the city."

One of the first structures to go up at Novo Bairro was a glass tube bus
station, linking this enclave to the rest of the city. "Integration" is a
word one hears constantly from official Curitiba, another of its mantras. It
means knitting together the entire city-rich, poor, and
in-between-culturally and economically and physically. Hitoshi Nakamura is
the city parks commissioner and one of Lerner's longtime collaborators. "We
have to have communication with the people of the slums," he said one day as
we were talking about the problems posed by settlers invading fragile
bottomlands along the rivers. "If we don't, if they start to feel like
falvelados, then they will go against the city....If we give them attention,
they don't feel abandoned. They feel like citizens."

To learn from Curitiba, the rest of the world would have to break some
longstanding habits. And the hardest habit to break, in fact, may be what
Lerner calls the "syndrome of tragedy, of feeling like we're terminal
patients." Many cities have "a lot of people who are specialists in proving
change is not possible. What I try to explain to them when I go visit is
that it takes the same energy to say why something can't be done as to
figure out how to do it."

Excerpted from The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to
Hope in a Time of Fear, edited by Paul Rogat Loeb. See www.theimpossible.org.