Urban Renewal, Municipal Revitilization: The case of Curitiba, Brazil

SOUTHWEST OF SÃO Paulo lies the Brazilian city of Curitiba, a metropolitan area of more than 2.5 million people. It has come to symbolize a mix of public planning initiatives and private sector responses that provides an alternative, forward-looking approach to the restructuring of medium size urban centres. While the city is famous for its innovations in public transport, notable accomplishments have also been achieved in downtown rejuvenation, recreational and flood control facilities, ecological endeavours, industrial infrastructure, and improving the socioeconomic safety nets.
This book begins by noting that although traditional economic factors were a precondition for the industrialization and dramatic expansion of the city (per capita income rose from just below the national average to 65 per cent above it in a generation), it is necessary to take note of other factors to explain the magnitude and success of the changes.
The underlying themes of the success are:
· The strength of individual visions and their implementation, more than a comprehensive urban planning.
· Implementation aimed at improvement and rarely at optimization. This decision-making process relied heavily on “rules of thumb”, or what the author calls “judgmental heuristics”. This involves taking short cuts that facilitate problem-solving while, at the same time, remaining aware of the biases that can emerge because of the use of incomplete information during calculation.
· The most important aspect of this success has not been the rejuvenation of Curitiba’s downtown area, the unique restructuring of its public transportation system, nor even a change in the city’s economic base, but rather the way in which all of these have been achieved.

The first chapter introduces the geographical and socioeconomic background of Curitiba, and the context for local change. There follows a description of the regional forces contributing to Curitiba’s recent growth, including fiscal incentives, financing concessions and the improvement of the industrial infrastructure. These are drawn from state government studies from the early 1980s. Chapter 2 describes the role of the urban planning process and, in particular, the formulation of a master plan, which began to be implemented in 1966. This plan included many objectives outlined in the guidelines, which were never a reflection of some calculation of economic optimization but, rather, a complex of considerations with trade-offs in objectives and ways of implementing them.

Chapter 3 describes the implementation of these guidelines over 40 years and the changing priorities of different municipal administrations. There is a focus on transportation, linear growth and land use. Large-scale pedestrianization transformed the downtown area, and flood control opened up new spaces for parks and other green spaces. It was only in the late 1970s that neighbourhood centres, low-income projects and improvements to low-income housing and health were addressed. Chapters 4 to 7 consider some of the areas of Curitiba’s development more closely, including its industrial development and the changing nature of the city’s development, especially in the 1980s when the agenda shifted to include the development of the outlying neighbourhoods. Chapter 6 looks more closely at the ecological implications of the city’s development and at the emerging idea of an environmentally correct city. Chapter 7 outlines the responses of the private sector over the last 40 years, of both large foreign enterprises and local producers and entrepreneurs.

It is clear that Curitiba’s master plan had such an important impact because its guidelines were influenced not only by a long-term vision but were also subject to modification along the way. An important part of this process has been the inclusion of the city’s interest groups, in order to gather political and economic support as activities progressed. This has also been one of the criticisms o