Curitiba: City Planning at its Best

Over 30 years ago, Curitiba city planners developed an extensive bus system that operates for less than a tenth of what a subway costs to operate (Photo: Flickr - BuenosAiresPhotographer.com.

Curitiba is the capital city of Paran, one of Brazil’s southernmost states. While Curitiba faces the same problems as other cities around the world – overcrowding, poverty, pollution and funding constraints – Curitba’s city planners have come up with some creative and inexpensive ways to address them:

• Developed an extensive bus system that operates for less than a tenth of what a subway costs to operate
• Implemented recycling programs to address both pollution and poverty
• Created industrial areas to attract new business
• Expanded green spaces
• Preserved historical areas to revitalize neighborhoods and grow tourism

In 1964, with a population of more than 430,000 people, Curitiba’s Mayor, Ivo Arzua issued a call for proposals to prepare Curitiba for new growth. A team of architects and planners from the Federal University of Paraná – led by Jamie Lerner – laid out plans to minimize urban sprawl, reduce downtown traffic, preserve Curitiba’s historic district and provide easily accessible and affordable public transit. Lerner’s team also proposed adding main linear transit arteries to Curitiba to provide direct, high-speed routes in and out of the city. Their proposal was adopted and eventually came to be known as the Curitiba Master Plan.

After his plan for Curitiba was adopted in 1968, Lerner created the city’s first urban planning department to help organize and direct further redevelopment efforts. The city did several things:

• Created Rua Quinze do Novembro at the heart of commercial Curitiba – Brazil’s first pedestrian-only street
• Adopted a trinary road design, called the Sistema Trinário, to minimize traffic in the city, whose population had now surpassed 600,000. The new system sandwiched a central two-lane street restricted to buses and local car traffic between wide, fast-moving one-way streets
• Began developing an industrial zone on the city’s outskirts, which they called Industrial City

In the 1980s in the midst of a widespread economic recession, rising urban poverty and increasing deforestation rates in Brazil, Curitiba rolled out a number of eco-friendly and social programs for their more than 900,000 residents.

• “Green areas” protected from future development were established in Curitiba, and several parks were dedicated to the city’s different ethnic and immigrant groups
• Curitiba’s transit system was expanded and a color-coded system for the various bus lines was created
• Regional administrations were established to decentralize government
• A citywide recycling program was initiated in which Curitibanos separated organic waste and trash, plastic, glass, and metal. The city sold the salvage to cover the costs of operation

Curitiba had grown to more than 1.4 million people when in 1992 it hosted the World Cities Forum, an advance event leading up to the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development, Earth Summit. The event brought international attention to Curitiba for its bold urban planning. Throughout the 1990s, Curitiba continued to add green spaces and cultural sites, including a new botanical garden and an opera house. As well as new red multicabin buses, carrying up to 270 people each, which were integrated into its transit system, and high-speed bus stops, called tubes.

Curitiba is now home to more than 1.8 million people and continues to be an example for city planners around the world.