I slept in and had a slow breakfast because I would be taking a sleeper bus to Iguaçu that night. I debated with myself whether to attend the Take 6 (an a capella sextet) concert that evening. In the end I decided not to, because I knew only one song of theirs, as guests on a Joe Sample album. Besides I would have to leave the concert early to catch my bus.
I took myself to the Passeio Público (page in Portuguese), the oldest public park in Curitiba, just a few minutes from the centre. It was an island of quiet, something you don't usually expect in a Brazilian city. Couples walked hand in hand. There were pipoco (popcorn) sellers and pigeons. Some people were feeding birds. This was a good sign because it meant that people were kind to animals and hopefully also to each other.
There was a small zoo there with specimens such macaws and this toucan with its prominent coloured bill.
Let's go back to the mall and back 25 years too...
In 1972, Jaime Lerner was a newly elected mayor of Curitiba. A conversion of 6 blocks in the centre of the city to a pedestrian only precinct had been approved in a master plan 6 years earlier, but downtown merchants had blocked its implementation, fearing loss of customers. Lerner ordered his secretary of public works to implement the transformation in 48 hours. You're crazy, said the secretary. Yes, I'm crazy, but do it in 48 hours, replied Lerner. In the event installing paving, lighting, planters and street furniture took 72 hours, over a weekend. Lerner knew that he had to move fast, or the change would be mired in challenges. Within days when the merchants found that they actually had more customers than before, they were converted and petitioned for an extension of the precinct.
There was opposition from another quarter though. Recalcitrant motorists who were used to driving through downtown planned to protest by ignoring the prohibition on a Saturday. Lerner got wind of this, assembled teachers and children in the mall, gave them newsprint and paint, and set the kids to draw pictures. That saw off the last serious challenge to the pedestrianisation. The painting sessions on weekends is a commemoration of sorts of that critical skirmish won decades ago. The precinct has since been extended to cover more blocks.
Besides painting sessions, other activities I saw on offer included a climbing wall, and a chess workshop.
Other examples of unconventional solutions: The access ways in shanty towns were too narrow for garbage collection vehicles so rather than abandon the residents, the city rewarded residents who took garbage out with sacks of groceries and bus tickets. Similarly, fishermen were paid by weight for any garbage they dredged from a nearby bay, cleaning the bay and supplementing their income in the off-season in one stroke.
Instead of putting up expensive levees to protect the city from surrounding floodplains, the city purchased them and turned them into parks. Instead of fuel-guzzling mowers, municipal sheep trim the vegetation. The wool produced funds children's programs.
Curitiba promotes public access to knowledge through a network of public libraries and Internet access points called lighthouse of knowledge (farol de saber, page in Portuguese).
There are far more examples of innovative civic programs than will fit in a blog post. Curitiba did these things long before green became an admirable adjective. A search on the Web will find you many Jaime Lerner stories, for example here and here.
Not everything is perfect in Curitiba though, it's partly a victim of its own success. The higher living standards have drawn more people to live here and they have acquired cars and are straining the transport and sewerage systems of the city. Still Curitiba is a shining example of how enlightened urban planning makes real differences to lives.
Incidentally the state tree of Paraná is araucaria angustifolia. a specimen which you see here. A relative is araucaria araucana (monkey puzzle tree) which is the national tree of Chile. It's not actually sudoku for monkeys; it got its name from a casual remark by a viewer of a specimen raised in Cornwall. Since it didn't have a popular appellation at that time, the name stuck.
At Praça Garibaldi I found a lively market in progress. I found a vegetarian por quilo place nearby serving tasty food. Curitiba was green in that respect too, I mused.
The colourful T-shirts were tempting, but I decided to be satisfied with what I had bought in Rio.
I took a trip to Torre Panorâmica (page in Portuguese) in the suburb of Mercês. Also I wanted to actually ride an articulated bus; up to this time I had no need to leave the city centre, except for the railway/bus station. The torre is a telecommunications tower with a viewing platform. From there I could see the lay of the land. It was flat and unremarkable but the results of urban planning were plain to see—high rises in the centre, tapering down to single story housing further out.
In the evening, after a nap on the hotel's couch, I went to see Jules et Jim at the Luz cinema to kill time until departure. It was challenging to listen to French and read Portuguese subtitles simultaneously. Afterwards I had a hot dog (with a square bun) at an eatery. The waiter was Chinese. I had difficulty understanding his Portuguese. Later I discovered that he was Cantonese. Then a dessert of ice cream before heading to the bus station.
The seats in the bus reclined all the way but even so I could feel the bumps due to the poor road conditions. At 0240 the bus stopped for 20 minutes at a rodoviaria with a huge cafeteria, snack shops and a convenience store. There were spots for about 20 buses and the place was busy even at that hour.
We reached Curitiba about 0640. I remembered that my next destination, Iguaçu, was in the same state, Paraná, so I checked the price of an outward ticket at the intrastate counter. It was raining hard so I took a taxi to my hotel. It appeared to be owned by a Japanese or Chinese. My room was very narrow and faced the street, but seviceable. I found a lavanderia (laundromat) to have fresh clothes again, but I had less luck finding a place to change a traveller's cheque.
Curitiba is a busy city, but I felt no angst in its streets. The populace looked self-assured as they went about their lives. It felt more like a European city than a Latin American city. About 80% of Curitiba is Caucasian which contributes to this impression.
The city is fortunate to have an enlightened government that has made impressive reforms initially under Mayor Jaime Lerner, an architect and city planner. It was an article by him about urban planning in Scientific American that piqued my interest in Curitiba.
The crown jewel of the reforms is the Integrated Transport Network which uses buses. Light rail is expensive and heavy rail even more so, so Lerner turned to buses. Traditionally buses require a higher driver to passenger ratio, a disadvantage compared to light rail. Lerner got Volvo to build long, articulated buses that carry up to 300 passengers. To allow rapid boarding and alighting, he had tube shaped bus terminals built where passengers prepay the fare, wait in the weatherproof holding space and board the bus through extra wide doors. A surface metro system, in effect.
Buses have priority lanes and in the centre of the city, several routes converge so that riders can make transfers. I could see that buses arrived at short intervals and the traffic flowed smoothly. This and other unorthodox but effective solutions to urban issues have won Curitiba awards such as Globe Sustainable City. It has been declared the most livable Brazilian big city. Lerner's reforms also extended to housing, education and employment. More stories later.
I was still sleep deprived from the short night, so I walked around until my laundry was done. I bought socks to replace worn out ones. For lunch I found a por quilo place. Some offered a free cafezinho (expresso) or batida with the meal. Another Portuguese term encountered: cachorro quente (hot dog). Catupiry seems to be a kind of cheese spread.
But Curitba was frustrating in other ways. I didn't find a supermarket or convenience store for snacks and drinks. In a music store I looked in vain for a Jobim song book, though they had those of Gilberto Gil and Ary Barroso.
It seemed as if Curitiba wasn't expecting tourists. And why would it, it doesn't have spectacular scenery like Rio or Iguaçu. It's just a smoothly-run city going about its own business very well. If you only look at temperature averages, it appears to have a mild subtropical highland climate, but it is subject to extremes of weather, sometimes within a single day, due to its position on a plateau and other geographical factors. Evidently its residents feel that such climate is bearable for a better life in other dimensions. (But it seems that eco-tourism has increased in recent years.)
