At the radio show Living on Earth, host Steve Curwood recently interviewed the former mayor of a planned city that has a strong emphasis on public transit and quality of life.
From the transcript …
“CURWOOD: Some say the best-planned city in the world is Curitiba, the eighth largest metropolis in Brazil and the capital of the state of Paraná. And much of the credit goes to the the charismatic architect and urban planner Jaime Lerner, who was mayor of Curitiba three times and twice the governor of Paraná. The path to sustainable success he says is often found in doing simple things quickly that enhance the life of a city. Now in his eighth decade and retired from politics, Jaime Lerner has traveled the world and documented some ways various cities create pleasant and sustainable atmospheres in a book called Urban Acupuncture. …
“CURWOOD: Your book isn’t so much a manual about how to make your city sustainable, more sustainable. It’s more an ode to those little things that make a city vibrant — pinpricks you call them. So why did you choose to write a book that focuses on these tiny, little details?
“LERNER: I didn’t want to write a manual, because I wanted to provide the people the sense of what makes a city. … People, they have so many ideas and there’s so many things that can make people happier. I give an example. In my city we had a dentist. At the end of the week, Friday afternoon, he went to his window. He was good clarinet player, and he played a concert.
“And people, they knew that every Friday afternoon this guy is giving a concert of clarinet. It’s not about works; it’s about feelings, feeling a city.
“Sometimes to make a change in a city takes time. The process of planning takes a lot of time. Sometimes it has to take time, but you can through local interventions, pinpricks, you can start to give a new energy to a city…
“A city has to give opportunity to everything, music, poetry. In my state it’s 399 municipalities. We didn’t have money, for instance, for a small city of 4,000 people to have a theater. So what we did, we organized a cultural convoy with 10 buses, recycled buses. One bus was recycled for theater, the other for dance, the other for music, the other for opera, and they travelled all around the state during 5 years. We had an average of 1,500 spectators every night.”
More at Living on Earth.
Photo: Thomas Hobbs; Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0
Curitiba couldn’t afford a subway and decided to focus on buses. The stations look like little subway stations. 
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