Sustainable Inspiration from the Third World

Sometimes inspiration can come from the unlikeliest of places. This was most certainly the case for me after reading a chapter entitled "Curitiba" from Bill McKibben's Hope, Human and Wild. This chapter, which focuses on the city of Curitiba, Brazil, is heavily laden with incredible success stories of urban planning and development. McKibben gave a very unique perspective of the things that can be accomplished with a driven, dedicated city government. Though this city is very poor, with an average per capita income of roughly $2,500 (compared to the United States at over 18 times that amount) they manage to keep Curitiba, and its population of 1.8 million, functioning like a well oiled machine. Much of the credit can be given to the city's former mayor, Jaime Lerner (pictured below).

It was his dream to create a city scaled to that of a human instead of the automobile. Because of the poverty level, the majority of people in Curitiba cannot afford a vehicle for transportation. For this reason, city planners have been required to think outside of the box.

While studying architecture at the University of Michigan, I spent a great deal of time focusing on the drastic changes cities faced across the globe with the advent of the automobile. Before this time, cities made much more efficient use of space, as people didn't have the time or resources for frequent long-distance travel (long-distance being a very relative term). Cities at this time were much more intimate and unique. They had character. This was a time before you could easily and correctly predict every restaurant and store likely to be contained within any given urban area. Yet, as the status quo of vehicle ownership has shifted over the 20th century, cities must update antiquated infrastructure to better cater to the needs of their citizens. One of the most extreme changes cities face when updating their century/centuries-old urban fabric is reconfiguring the now-too-narrow width of the streets. Around the time of their development, roads were constructed based on the pedestrians and few horse-drawn carriages they were meant to carry. Obviously, traffic has grown considerably since that time, and the congestion it causes can make city roadways impenetrable to the point of worthlessness.

Bill McKibben outlines this process as it relates to Curitiba. It is obvious to see how this problem becomes extremely difficult to tackle. You can't simply push the buildings aside to create more room. This process requires a complete transformation of proximal buildings as well, requiring now the involvement of building owners, residents, tenants, store owners, etc... A simple idea very quickly becomes a big hairy mess. Furthermore, a transformation like this requires an ample amount of funding; funding Curitiba cannot afford. Here is the ingenious solution Curitiba executed to solve this problem:

"Instead of buying up buildings and tearing them down to widen streets, planners stared at the maps long enough to see that the existing streets would do just fine - as long as they were considered in groups of three parallel avenues. Traffic on the first avenue would flow one way, into town. The middle street would be devoted to buses, driving in dedicated lanes so they could move more quickly. A block over you'd find motorists heading out of town. No highways in the city - three streets still scaled to human beings."

While I continue searching for an appropriate city to reside in after Kalamazoo, I would like to see evidence of creative methods employed to tackle difficult urban planning problems.