City Hacking
Last night I went to see Jaime Lerner, the renowned former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, speak at the Harvard Design School. Lerner is best known for the progressive programs that he instituted during his tenures as mayor. He and his team found creative ways to solve transportation, environmental, and city planning problems given the limited resources that were available to them. (He says, “if you want to get real creativity, drop a zero from your budget and a zero from your schedule”.) Rather build expensive subways, they built a pioneering bus rapid transit system with dedicated lanes and special bus-level platforms for quick boarding. Rather than building new parks, they preserved existing natural areas. They turned quarries into environmental schools and opera houses. To solve the problem of trash collection in slums, they simply paid the slum-dwellers (in food and cash) to bring in their trash. They turned the service vaults of a hydroelectric dam into a sculpture gallery.
Lerner delighted in telling us how quickly they were able to build certain things (An opera house in two months! A pedestrian mall in three days!) In part, he said that the speed was necessary to keep citizen opposition and bureaucratic obstacles from getting in the way. “Sometimes you have to teach by example,” he said. I couldn’t help thinking of the similarities between his attitude and the internet hacker ethic of “rough consensus and running code”. Rather than committing to expensive, grandiose plans, they were trying out smaller, simpler tweaks (”urban acupuncture”) and actually getting things done.
Of course, in many cases the public participation and review processes are in place for a reason; Robert Moses often acted with similar speed and stealth to pave over many parts of New York. (I’m tempted to think of Lerner as the anti-Moses.) I would love to see an in-depth examination and critique of Lerner’s work on the level of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker; so far, most of the criticism that I’ve found has come from light rail activists who view the Curitiba-style BRT model as a competitor for transportation funding.
My full notes from the talk are here.