| Chapter 1: | Studying Urban Governance |
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Urban environments in less-developed countries are marked by great inequalities, and urban development programs are often evaluated by how they deal with this issue. Academics from different schools of thought, and often with different political agendas, have assessed the Curitiba experiment and delivered everything from rosy assessments to staunch rebukes. Others have focused on the idea of replicability or policy diffusion, and have sought to identify ways by which the successes of the Curitiba experiment can be applied elsewhere. Whereas this latter concern has great promise, it can also be misleading. Cities are different organisms whose sometimes similar pathologies require distinct remedies. Curitiba does not offer a “one-size-fits-all” solution to the problems of urban development.
Yet there are surely lessons to be learnt from different urban development processes. Barbara Czarniawska, in her study of three European capitals, compared cities to laboratories in being the birthplaces of invention, innovation, and imitation.2 At the dawn of the 21st century, Curitiba, the capital of the Paraná state, located in the south of Brazil, is arguably one of very few cities in the developing world that stands as a positive reference for urban planning. The urban experiment in Curitiba has been guided in part by the goal of mitigating hardships caused by urbanization. This focus has helped to advance the notion of citizenship rights—that all city residents, rich and poor, should have access to the public spaces and services provided by the municipality. In this sense, the urban planning model that has accompanied Curitiba’s growth for the last 40 years can be seen as a response to the preoccupations of Henri Lefebvre in his seminal work on “the right to the city.”3