Design for Living: The dense green city of Curitiba

Rua das Flores, Curitiba

It’s all on now. In the wake of Cyclone Gabby and the Auckland Anniversary Weekend storm, some politicians are saying we need more greenery in our cities, so we can’t have more density. It’s not true. We need both and we can have both. In Curitiba, a city of 1.9 million people in southern Brazil, they’ve been remarkably successful doing it.

Like Auckland, Curitiba has tripled in size since 1970. But where the growth here has been a mix of massive sprawl and poorly regulated infill housing, with an absurd failure to manage transport needs, Curitiba chose a different path.

They planted millions of trees and built 16 public parks and 14 forests inside the urban city limits. The Iguacu River, which runs through the middle, has retained its meandering course, with parkland all along its banks. In heavy rains, the parks form a floodplain, keeping the water away from buildings and overfull drains.

They even use sheep, in the middle of the city, to keep the grass down. The city now has 50 square metres of green space per person. In 1970, it was a mere 1sq m.

In Curitiba they planted millions of trees and built 16 public parks and 14 forests inside the urban city limits.

In the 1980s, Curitiba developed the world’s first bus rapid transit system. Five roads emanate from a central hub, like prongs on a star. Private vehicles have a single lane on each side while the buses run both ways down the middle and do not have to stop for cross traffic.

There’s a single, cheap ticket price, no matter how far you’re going. And, from 1991, the stations have had a “futuristic” glass tube design, to make them eye-catching and engage the public imagination.

Curitiba's bus stop system.

It works so well, Curitibanos use bus transit for 70 per cent of their daily trips. The air is cleaner, carbon emissions are far lower and construction costs were a small fraction of the costs of tunnelled or elevated light rail.

The centre of the city has many pedestrian-only streets and there’s a big network of cycleways too.

The greenery and the transit and pedestrianisation are all part of the same thing. When a city devotes most of its public space to cars, it struggles to find room for trees and parks. So it sprawls into the countryside, which gives it more space but also increases the demand for cars.

Curitiba, Brazil

When cars aren’t so important, there’s more room on the public land we currently give to roads: for trees, grass, gardens, swales for stormwater runoff, all the practical benefits and pleasures of a green city.

How did Curitiba do it, when most other cities in South America stuffed themselves full of cars?

Two factors. First, they built up, not out. Suburban sprawl would have undermined the whole idea.

Curitiba, Brazil. They built up, not out.

Second: great leadership. Curitiba was planned in the 1970s by the architect Jaime Lerner, who then became mayor with the authority to make his ideas work.

Lerner was first appointed to office when a fascist junta ruled Brazil, but his achievements were so popular, he was re-elected with an overwhelming majority once democracy was restored in the 1980s.

When Bill McKibben, founder the climate action movement 350.org, visited Curitiba, he said this: “I met very few cynics. The resigned weariness of Westerners about government, which leaves only fanatics and hustlers running for office, had lifted from this place.”

Design for Living appears weekly in Canvas magazine.