Jaime Lerner February 19, 2004 Gund Hall, Harvard Notes by Joe Hughes --------------------- Every problem has a equation of co-responsibility. To create change in cities, you need not only political will, but also strategy (vision). You need to understand what the city means to its citizens. Strategy is working with needs and potentials. He was influenced by teaching at Berkeley. In Brazil, he spent time in a different community every night. He and his team worked on potentials in the morning, needs in the afternoon. Design is important. Design needs to be able to provide understandable answers to straightforward questions. What is the hidden design/structure of the city? Urban planning is like archaeology--trying to find the hidden design of the city. The city must be a structure of living and working together. Every city that separates living and working is a disaster. The design of San Francisco is the design of the old Camino Real. When you have a clear design, you know what the priorities are. In Curitiba, high-density buildings are only allowed near public transit. Buses in dedicated lanes. Started with 25K riders per day, now 2 million. 100-200 times less expensive per kilometer than DC metro. Can be built in less than 2 years. Not subsidized! Took existing streets and put buses in the middle. They thought they might need to move to subways later. After 30 years, the future of transit is surface. Call him a heretic, but right now their bus system provides headways (time between buses) of 30 seconds-1 minute! You can ride for 300-400km within the system. Dedicated lanes didn't work in many cities (Sao Paulo). You need to manage boarding, fare collection at the same time. (The Curitiba express bus lines have subway-like boarding platforms where fares are collected ahead of time, lowering the time that the bus has to spend at each stop.) Many cities have 3-4 subway lines, but 84% of people are using surface transport. Need to "metronize" the bus. You only need a few numbers to be an expert in transit. A normal bus on a normal street transports x passengers per day. Dedicated lanes: 2x. Articulated buses: 2.5x. Dedicated lanes and articulated buses with boarding platforms: 3.3x. Add double-articulated buses (270-300 passengers): 4x. You can go faster underground, but the signaling takes too much overhead. Took him 50 minutes to go from Berkeley to San Francisco on BART. (Because he needed to wait longer, switch trains, etc.) He could take the bus in 20 minutes. In the past (when Paris and London built their subways), it was cheaper to work underground. These days, it takes 20 years to build an underground subway. And its operation needs to be subsidized! No one from his team was an expert in public transit, only architecture. The Paris metro director said: if you were experts, you'd realize it was not feasible. No city is built to work with individual cars. After the car, people thought that they didn't need transit, but now the cities are all jammed. The car is like our mother in law. We need to take care of her, but we can't let her run our life. Cars are not important. He's not against the car--all his best friends have cars. :] People should use transit for routine trips. Curitiba uses 20% less energy per capita than other Brazilian cities. Used tubular boarding stations because they did not clash with the aesthetic design of the city. Simplicity is important. The world is full of complexity sellers. We should beat them with slippers. How to connect/integrate systems? Cycleways are integrated with parks, not mixed with cars. Had to save a certain percentage of land for environmental reasons. Environmental areas were placed along rivers and valleys for continuity. What is a sustainable city? If you're saving more than you're wasting. Every city should have an eco-clock. (a meter to show energy use vs. conservation). The original plan for Curitiba had parks every 500m in every neighborhood. The community came back and asked, why are you doing this? Creating a park from scratch is costly, and the trees take time to grow. Why not use existing wooded areas? They saved 81 existing woods. Quarry is a wound made in nature--this wound transformed itself. They transformed them into places. They like quarries, if you have one, they'll buy it. The way they dealt with the garbage issue: most cities have problem collecting garbage in the slums. Children were playing in polluted ares. The idea: they bought the garbage. People bring in their garbage for income, rater than the city paying garbage collection companies. They had a recycling problem. Most cities mix up recyclable with organic garbage, then spend effort separating them out and cleaning the recyclables. How did they get people to recycle? Taught the kids at school, they taught their parents. 70% recycling, highest in the world, curb collection. If you see guy in a city looking for a place to put his newspaper, you know he's from Curitiba. If every city in Brazil could do as well at paper recycling, they could save 500 woods per day in Brazil. Most of Brazil's foreign debt is related to big energy projects; so it's important to conserve. They bought surplus crops from farmers, traded that to people for their recyclables, sold the recyclables, used the money to pay the farmers. Taught the kids how to garden, bought the crops they grew. Identity (of living spaces) is one of the most important components of quality of life. They made an effort to create distinctive areas. Had one of the first pedestrian malls, built it in 72 hours . Started Friday night, Monday night it was built. Surprised the opposition, which came around and asked for more pedestrian blocks. Curitiba is one of the most diverse cities in the country. They wanted to pay tribute to all the ethnicities, so they built centers and monuments for them. They were doing well, but then the Soviet Union split up into different countries, so they couldn't keep up. :] Turned a quarry into an opera house. He said: let's build it transparent, like a wireframe. Built it in two months, built it with one material, metal tubes. (ed: I've heard that he had a stake in a metal tubing company.) One bid for materials, one for labor. Built a planetarium for $8000. Indians could read the stars 200-300 years ago, we can't read our cities with all our technology. Biggest hydroelectric project in the world. Every turbine needs to be lifted once a year for maintenance, so turned the open space that's required for that into a sculpture gallery. Urban acupuncture. You can make small interventions in urban spaces. It's not necessary to build big museums. You can build small things that bring joy to a place, like distinctive subway entrances or small distinctive parks. Recovery of degraded areas. There was an oil spill from a refinery into a river. They used the river's sand pits to clean the water. The 24-hour city Proposed transporting NY's freight by subway at night. London actually did this during the war. How about bringing in urbanity (shops, etc.) at night/weekend in shipping containers, and then removing it for the work week? What is the secret of Curitiba? Commitment to simplicity, commitment to imperfection. Creativity means cut a zero from your budget, cut a zero from your time. Working in a city, you can always correct your mistakes, the people will help you. Q&A What functions does transit serve? Induce urban growth. If you want to live in less dense areas, you can. If you want high-frequency transit, you can live in the core. The alternatives shouldn't compete in the same space. Taxis should take you to the closest high-frequency transit. What were the biggest obstacles in introducing bus rapid transit (BRT)? Democracy isn't consensus, it's a fighting process. Sometimes you have to teach by example. Do things quickly to avoid bureaucracy and political fights. Don't make things mandatory, convince people. Don't have fines for not separating garbage, give people encouragement and incentives. He proposed that Honolulu build a park in 24 hours. We have the technology to plant 20-meter tall trees, after all.