Re the below
Yee-ha!!
hugs
j
************
BTW can any recall who was it who marvelled at:
"The starry heavens above and the moral order within."
[ And, perhaps we might add:
"and the inclusive society around." ? ]
More hugs
******************
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>From: "Michael Gurstein" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: "futurework" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: Fw: cj#1116> Curitiba: A City Managed by Common Sense
>Date: Fri, Aug 11, 2000, 7:21 AM
>
> Not much about ICT but worth taking a look at nevertheless...
>
> MG
>
> ============================================================================
> Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 20:34:33 -0700
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (undisclosed list)
> From: Tom Atlee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: Curitiba: A City Managed by Common Sense
>
> Dear friends,
>
> It always gives me hope when I'm reminded of the remarkable
> city of Curitiba, Brazil, which I've known about for about 8
> years. If you are interested in more detailed information,
> there's an extensive description in Bill McKibben's HOPE,
> HUMAN AND WILD (Little, Brown & Co., 1995). Curitiba so
> inspired me that I included it in my "imagineering" story
> about the first major (future) experiment in co-intelligent
> politics in http://www.co-intelligence.org/S-PatandPat.html
> . All of us could forward the Curitiba story below to
> officials in our city governments, just to suggest what's
> possible....
>
> Coheartedly,
>
> Tom
>
> _ _ _ _
>
>
> A City Managed By Common Sense
>
> Residents of Curitiba, Brazil, think they live in the best
> city in the world, and a lot of outsiders agree. Curibita
> has 17 new parks, 90 miles of bike paths, trees everywhere,
> and traffic and garbage systems that officials from other
> cities come to study. Curibita's mayor for twelve years,
> Jaime Lerner, has a 92 per cent approval rating.
>
> There is nothing special about Curitiba's history, location
> or population. Like all Latin American cities, the city has
> grown enormously - from 150,000 people in the 1950s to 1.6
> million now. It has its share of squatter settlements, where
> fewer than half the people are literate. Curibita's secret,
> insofar that it has one, seems to be simple willingness from
> the people at the top to get their kicks from solving
> problems. Those people at the top started in the 1960s with
> a group of young architects who were not impressed by the
> urban fashion of borrowing money for big highways, massive
> buildings, shopping malls and other showy projects. They
> were thinking about the environment and about human needs.
> They approached Curibita's mayor, pointed to the rapid
> growth of the city and made a case for better planning.
>
> The mayor sponsored a contest for a Curibita master plan. He
> circulated the best entries, debated them with the citizens,
> and then turned the people's comments over to the upstart
> architects, asking them to develop and implement a final
> plan. Jaime Lerner was one of these architects. In 1971 he
> was appointed mayor by the then military government of
> Brazil.
>
> Given Brazil's economic situation, Lerner had to think
> small, cheap and participatory - which was how he was
> thinking anyway. He provided 1.5 million tree seedlings to
> neighborhoods for them to plant and care for. ('There is
> little in the architecture of a city that is more
> beautifully designed than a tree,' says Lerner.) He solved
> the city's flood problems by diverting water from lowlands
> into lakes in the new parks. He hired teenagers to keep the
> parks clean.
>
> He met resistance from shopkeepers when he proposed turning
> the downtown shopping district into a pedestrian zone, so he
> suggested a thirty-day trial. The zone was so popular that
> shopkeepers on the other streets asked to be included. Now
> one pedestrian street, the Rua das Flores, is lined with
> gardens tended by street children.
>
> Orphaned or abandoned street children are a problem all over
> Brazil. Lerner got each industry, shop and institution to
> 'adopt' a few children, providing them with a daily meal and
> a small wage in exchange for simple maintenance gardening or
> office chores. Another Lerner innovation was to organize the
> street vendors into a mobile, open-air fair that circulates
> through the city's neighborhoods.
>
> Concentric circles of local bus lines connect to five lines
> that radiate from the center of the city in a spider web
> pattern. On the radial lines, triple-compartment buses in
> their own traffic lanes carry three hundred passengers each.
> They go as fast as subway cars, but at one-eightieth the
> construction cost.
>
> The buses stop at Plexiglas tube stations designed by
> Lerner. Passengers pay their fares, enter through one end of
> the tube, and exit from the other end. This system
> eliminates paying on board, and allows faster loading and
> unloading, less idling and air pollution, and a sheltered
> place for waiting - though the system is so efficient that
> there isn't much waiting. There isn't much littering either.
> There isn't time.
>
> Curitiba's citizens separate their trash into just two
> categories, organic and inorganic, for pick-up by two kinds
> of trucks. Poor families in squatter settlements that are
> unreachable by trucks bring their trash bags to neighborhood
> centers, where they can exchange them for bus tickets or for
> eggs, milk, oranges and potatoes, all bought from outlying
> farms.
>
> The trash goes to a plant (itself built of recycled
> materials) that employs people to separate bottles from cans
> from plastic. The workers are handicapped people, recent
> immigrants, and alcoholics.
>
> Recovered materials are sold to local industries. Styrofoam
> is shredded to stuff quilt for the poor. The recycling
> program costs no more than the old landfill, but the city is
> cleaner, there are more jobs, farmers are supported and the
> poor get food and transportation. Curitiba recycles
> two-thirds of it garbage - one of the highest rates of any
> city, north or south.
>
> Curitiba builders get a tax break if their projects include
> green areas. Jaime Lerner says, 'There is no endeavor more
> noble than the attempt to achieve a collective dream. When a
> city accepts as a mandate its quality of life; when it
> respects the people who live in it; when it respects the
> environment; when it prepares for future generations, the
> people share the responsibility for that mandate, and this
> shared cause is the only way to achieve that collective
> dream.'
>
> (Source: The Global Ideas Bank
> http://www.globalideasbank.org )
>
> quoted in Global Village News and Resources. A free
> subscription is available from [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more
> information, see introduction to GVNR #4, at the end of this
> email.
>
> _ _ _ _
>
>
> PS: Curitiba update from Tom:
>
> Although the undated article above is a bit out of date
> (e.g., former Mayor Jaime Lerner is now governor of the
> state of Parana, of which Curitiba is the capital) the city
> is still remarkable. Tonight on the web I found the
> following more recent data:
>
> Acclaimed nationally and internationally for its innovative
> urban solutions, the city relies on the country's most
> efficient public transportation system and boasts 52 square
> meters of green area per inhabitant, causing it to be called
> "Brazil's Ecological Capital." The current administration,
> led by Mayor C�ssio Taniguchi, is bringing successful
> experiences to the other 26 municipalities that comprise the
> city's metropolitan area.
> http://members.tripod.com.br/myworld/curitiba.htm
>
> Curitiba is among the fastest growing cities in Brazil. Its
> water resources are being compromised by precarious sewage
> infrastructure, irregular developments along the riverbanks
> and garbage entering the water system. Since 1996, the city
> encouraged local residents to take responsibility for their
> water resources by involving the community in monitoring
> water quality and mobilizing the community in environmental
> management. 140 key people in schools, environmental
> organizations, universities, neighbourhood associations, Boy
> Scout groups, etc., have been trained and supported to
> mobilize their membership. More than 5000 people have now
> been involved in monitoring the environmental conditions of
> the city's rivers, using sight, smell and simple field
> analysis kits, and sending results to the city's department
> of the environment. Another 135,000 people have
> participated in related environmental education and cleanup
> activities. http://www.iclei.org/mia98-99/curitiba.htm
>
> A virtual field trip of Curitiba, created in 1999, can be
> found on http://www.busways.com/pages/vtrip.html.
>
> <snip>
> _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
>
> Tom Atlee * The Co-Intelligence Institute * Eugene, OR
> http://www.co-intelligence.org
> http://www.co-intelligence.org/CIPol_Index.html
>
>
>
>
