Urban Brazil: Visions, Afflictions, and Governance Lessons By Iva ...

Lefebvre’s central thesis offers a radical view of urban politics that argues for city control to be transferred from the national and state levels to urban inhabitants. Curitiba’s urban development process reflects a more modern and updated version of this belief: the implementation of public policies should promote the notion that all urban dwellers have a right to enjoy public spaces and access city services.⁴ In tangible terms, the results of the strategy in Curitiba can be seen in a state-of-the-art public transportation system and an innovative environmental management strategy based on a system of multiple urban parks, an incremental program of waste recycling, and an array of environmental education initiatives at the school and community levels. Simple as these public policies may be, they are truly pioneering in Brazil, where city governments find it difficult to establish programs to deal with these essential elements of the urban space.

My field research has led me to think in different ways about the lessons that the city of Curitiba may offer to policymakers and others concerned with the quality of urban life around the world. Rather than ask whether specific urban programs adopted in Curitiba are or would be feasible in other cities, my goal is to assess Curitiba’s policy environment to understand how the innovations in urban development emerged and why they flourished there. The lessons, therefore, should not be taken as a recipe for the emulation of policies but rather be seen as examples of how governments can act and what they can accomplish. In this sense, the examination of the urban experiment in Curitiba is one way to answer a perennial question in political science, one that was articulated more than a decade ago: How do we best govern?⁵