7. Case study: Curitiba
7. Case study: Curitiba
Urban planning as continuous adaptation
7.1 Headlines
Location
Curitiba, Brazil, South America
Key dates
1965-present
Key features
Long-term flexible planning framework for urban expansion with an approach to governance and urban form that is adaptable to changing context.
Key lessons
- Curitiba shows that urban planning is about both the implementation of a plan and ongoing strategic and problem-solving functions. Successful planning structures allow for both elements, as in Curitiba where there is a strong relationship between mayor and urban planning and transport authorities. Curitiba demonstrates flexibility and adaptation to the inevitable contextual changes in which towns and cities grow. This includes its adaptability on aspects such as water management, waste management and urban agriculture, public transport accessibility, pedestrian zones, energy use, and the development of parks and other green infrastructure.
- Urban planning managers need to contribute to urban governance beyond making decisions solely about land-use change. Curitiba shows that the benefits of planning are best realised where its coordination and problem-solving aspects are closely tied to how it governs broader place aspects such as those above.
- Problems and issues that appear to be about one issue only are often related to a broader urban context that also needs attention. Issues such as flooding or lack of open space may respond to solutions that tie them together. In Curitiba examples are the creation of new parks in Curitiba that also integrated ponds to contain floodwater, and where waste management and urban agriculture are connected as discussed below.
Key recommendations
- Orientate new towns around public transport nodes and corridors. Map urban densities around these corridors to make sure that there is a sufficient number of people to use transport services. This will help ensure traffic congestion that would follow from disconnected car-dependent settlements is avoided.
- Planners should pay attention to the aspects of planning that go beyond the implementation of the plan. This can be done by establishing an urban planning agency to take an overview of a new town’s development. Unforeseen issues inevitably arise as a new settlement develops. These unforeseen issues need the capacity to solve problems and formulate new ideas from a strong urban planning and management agency.
- Ensure that future development continues to fit within a shared vision of the new town. This should be established at the outset, acknowledging that this vision and its practical planning proposals for development must be adaptable to changing conditions. This can militate against the tendency for planning of new towns to be reactive, responding rather than adapting to challenges. Curitiba has used a combination of strong mayoral leadership and urban planning and transport agencies with substantial powers to do this job.
7.2 Overview
A rapidly expanding city, whose metropolitan region population has now reached 3,700,000 from fewer than 200,000 in the 1950s, Curitiba is known to planners worldwide for its Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) network and sustainability credentials. The city also deserves particular renown, however, for its growth management in the face of intense urbanisation pressures. While Curitiba is not a new town per se, it shares a range of new town management issues and characteristics worth exploring.
Lessons from Curitiba’s experience are keenly sought as cities wrestle with the challenges of managing urban growth. Moreover, the strategies taken in Curitiba are relevant not only to cities in a similar phase of growth, as are found elsewhere in the Global South, but also to Global North cities facing different challenges relating to urban complexity and change.
Curitiba is the largest city and capital of the Southern Brazilian state of Paraná, around 120km from the coast to its east and 400km from São Paolo to its north. The city’s origins are in the 19th century cattle ranching and agriculture that dominate southern Brazil. But present day Curitiba’s story began in the 1960s, when population growth and the expansion of car ownership led to a search for a new plan to guide the city’s development. What emerged was not as straightforward as the city-wide growth plan sought. Instead, Curitiba undertook a wholesale reimagining of urban management. This allied a physical plan to contain and direct urbanisation with multiple cross-sectoral interventions in green space provision, active transport, water and waste.
7.3 Planning frameworks
The Brazilian planning system uses masterplans prepared at the municipal level to determine the pattern and characteristics of future growth, as well as to respond to economic and social challenges. Over time, the nature of masterplans has changed, with those of the 1960s and 1970s now seen as technocratic and rigid. Masterplans written in more recent decades are more openly political and representative of social and environmental interests[159].
Curitiba’s ‘year zero’, at which point its present planning trajectory was established, is 1965. This was when a new masterplan for the city, commissioned to respond to the rapid population growth that had come with industrialisation, was put in place. The so-called ‘Wilheim Plan’, named for its lead author Jorge Wilheim, established the BRT corridors that Curitiba is now most famous for, alongside other initiatives to reshape and grow the city. Since that point, successive masterplans have continued to guide the city’s continued growth. These have done so by incorporating, most prominently, an increasing focus on ecological restoration of the city alongside urban development.
Certain aspects of planning in Brazil and Curitiba are particularly reflective of its context. Most obviously, informal development is a widespread issue. Informal settlement has, since the 1980s, been the locus of reformist policies supporting services provision and allocating property rights[160]. Brazil’s national focus on developing the potential of peripheral regions is also relevant. This is most obviously evident in its development of a new capital city – Brasília – in the under-developed interior of the country. The challenges of accommodating growth at the city-regional scale and of implementing the infrastructure necessary for urban growth are common to many contexts.
7.4 Governance structures
The governance of urban planning in Brazil is closely tied to the country’s development trajectory through the latter half of the 20th century as a rapidly growing resource economy. Land-use planning has by its nature a growth-mindset and focuses on the need to address social problems that come about through rapid urban expansion. National and regional plans have embodied attempts to foster growth in slower-growing regions, to varying levels of effectiveness. The Curitiba case is a successful example of this.
The accomplishments of the Wilheim Plan are not only in the plan itself but in the governance structures established for its implementation. At the 1965 plan’s outset two municipal agencies were set up. These are the URBS (the Curitiba Urbanisation Corporation) as the transport authority; and the IPPUC (Institute of Research and Urban Planning of Curitiba) as the urban planning authority responsible for the implementation of the city’s master plan[161]. The strength and influence of the IPPUC in particular is closely associated with the planning trajectory taken by Curitiba, which has benefited from the centrality and long-term presence of the IPPUC in the overall governance of the city.
7.5 Thematic discussion
Liveable neighbourhoods between infrastructure corridors
The major innovation of the 1965 Wilheim Plan was to adapt Curitiba’s existing radial road structure into five linear transit-oriented axes that cut through the city centre and along which development would be concentrated[162]. This provided a worked proposal for a public transport system and for mixed-use development that would reorientate the city away from a low-density car-dependent future. As a result, the city is mainly known in planning circles for its transport system, which uses the world’s first BRT to achieve efficiencies in the absence of funds for subway construction[163].
This innovation is only one, albeit major, component of a more wholesale approach to urban planning. Combined with land use planning powers to determine densities and use mix, Curitiba’s development fed off the then-current reorientation of planning away from modernism. Instead, Curitiba oriented its planning towards a more human scale approach to favour pedestrianisation, mixed-use neighbourhoods, public transport use, green space and heritage protections[164].
Planning as the gradual building up of small-scale interventions
The implementation of this overall strategy has become almost as well known as the strategy itself. The approach in Curitiba follows the principle that complex urban problems need not demand complex solutions. This focus on simplicity has been combined with a pragmatism that has led to a practical approach to ‘getting things done’. This is the tactical counterpart to the strategy. Its component parts are shown through a series of masterplans that have followed the 1965 plan. This is most obviously found in the so-called ‘urban acupunctures’ - small-scale interventions made at key points within the city, such as public squares, parks and transport interchanges, in order to catalyse change and whose impact goes beyond their scale[165].
These interventions can be as small in scale as tree planning on empty plots. They can be as comparatively large scale as the ‘Citizenship Streets’ initiative, which situated civic centres at transport stations in suburbs throughout the city. This improved accessibility to public services including housing and health support, as well as leisure and sports facilities.
Many built environment interventions, including the Citizenship Streets and the tube-shaped bus terminal design, promote a highly recognisable public architecture that enhances urban legibility. More cynically, it is suggested that a number of public structures in the city seem to exist “with the purpose of simply imprinting the signature of each administration on the urban environment”[166].
Curitiba has also worked on linking aspects of urban resilience such as waste management and urban agriculture. The municipality runs an Urban Agricultura Programme that supports vegetable gardens, urban farms, ‘honey gardens’ and composting facilities[167]. Food access is linked to recycling. “For every 4kg recyclable waste collected the city reimburses its residents with 1kg of fresh fruits, eggs and vegetables or bus transit passes”[168]. Residents can drop off recyclables at local green exchanges including those located at bus interchanges to receive fresh food in return.
7.6 Adaptability and flexibility: Levers and barriers
The measurement of Curitiba’s success in terms of adaptability and flexibility must be assessed against how it has addressed long-term urban challenges. Curitiba has been very effective in the management of its urban change over the past almost-half century. It has been able to address the challenges common to many cities of rapid population growth and a looming tendency towards urban sprawl.
Curitiba’s present trajectory dates back to the 1965 Wilheim Plan and the establishment of the IPPUC planning authority to oversee its implementation. The Wilheim Plan was written by a group of architects influenced by the ideas of Jane Jacobs and a human-centred urban form. This marked an urban transformation worth evaluating for what it can add to our understanding of how urban planning can function as a continuous adaptation to change.
Against the aim of creating a more human-centred, less car-dependent city, Curitiba has fought against the tide of rising car ownership and consumption that follows wage growth. Indeed, in 2010 Curitiba had the highest car ownership rate of any city in Brazil, reflecting its relative economic strength. Even within this context, however, Curitiba is viewed positively, scoring high on the Index of Sustainable Urban Mobility, with especially notable performance on indicators for accessibility of services and environmental quality[169].
The city’s remarkable continuity of planning practice and political leadership in the first two decades that followed the Wilheim Plan is partly due to the close association between the city’s governance and the military dictatorship then leading Brazil. Curitiba could be used as a success story in Brazil’s economic miracle of the 1960s and 1970s. This predisposed the repressive military regime towards the city’s urban planning and management apparatus. It ensured that plans could be implemented without political opposition.
While Curitiba’s planning is rightly regarded as successful in its ability to adapt to change, it is questionable whether it was able to – or indeed needed to – incorporate and interpret the public interest into this flexibility. This is highlighted by the dependence of the Curitiba model upon the ‘locking-in’ of power of the IPPUC which was situated as a technical rather than political organisation. The IPPUC could promulgate technocratic urban management that was insulated from electoral politics without including sufficient citizen participation[170].
In defence of the alliance of planning and politics that implemented Curitiba’s plans, the military junta could be viewed as an external condition that local planners and politicians had no choice but to operate within. The city’s planning approach was later validated by popular mandate with the coming of democracy in the mid-1980s.