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Phil Jenkins Ottawa's More Successful Twin Ottawa Citizen June 29, 2009

Former mayor of curitiba, brazil, says we can learn a lot from the city. Phil Jenkins: Ottawa has a lot of things on its to-do list right now. He says the city's solutions to problems that all cities face are efficient and green.

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Phil Jenkins Ottawa's More Successful Twin Ottawa Citizen June 29, 2009

Former mayor of curitiba, brazil, says we can learn a lot from the city. Phil Jenkins: Ottawa has a lot of things on its to-do list right now. He says the city's solutions to problems that all cities face are efficient and green.

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Phil Jenkins

Ottawa’s More Successful Twin


Ottawa Citizen June 29, 2009

There are many similarities between our town and Curitiba, Brazil.

And we can learn a lot from this efficient and green city

There is no endeavour more noble than the attempt to achieve a collective dream.
When a city accepts as its mandate its quality of life; when it respects the people who
live in it; when it respects the environment; when it prepares for future generations,
the people share responsibility for that mandate, and this shared cause is the only
way to achieve that collective dream.

Jaime Lerner, former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil

Ottawa certainly has a lot of things on its to-do list just now. Dig a tunnel under
downtown; ruin Lansdowne Park; build a Native Heritage Centre by 2013; put another
bridge across the river; ruin Le Breton Flats; build a new central library; for mercy's
sake put in more bike lanes; ruin the rural/urban interface; go greener; replace the
broken convention centre.

Did I miss anything?

I recall when I was at Vincent Massey elementary school there was a boy, and his
name was Kenny. Kenny was a model child, and we were told we could do a lot worse
than be more like Kenny. (No doubt Kenny was in turn modelled on his parents, and
they on theirs, and so on. Kenny had gene power.)

I tried hard to Kennify myself, and probably failed.

Later, when I wanted to become a writer, I read the better, successful ones, in the
belief that they were clearly ahead of me in the game and had something to teach
me. That worked a little better.

Well, getting back to Ottawa's to-do list, there is a city in Brazil, in the southernmost
state of Paraná, by the name of Curitiba.

If you are an urban planner, you will have heard of Curitiba, and you may even have
been there to visit it. A lot of urban planners make the trip, because the Brazilian city
is a model one, particularly with regards to its rapid transit system, its downtown
historic preservation, its greenspace, its recycling programs and its civic
management.

Curitiba's solutions to the problems that all cities face -- how to get people to where
they work, how to break the addiction to cars, how to give people spaces where they
can think subjectively about life and get away from the clock, what to do with the
garbage -- are all innovative, and most importantly they work. The root of the
solution, actually, is that for 40 years their mayors have all been town planners.

Imagine that.
As they have progressed (or not) from village to town to city, Ottawa and Curitiba
have shared some similarities in their chronology.

Both became capitals in the mid-1800s, we of our country and they of their state.

As far as their transport histories go, they experienced the same escalation; trains,
bicycles and cars. (Potted history for Ottawa: The Bytown and Prescott railway sent
the first steam engine into Ottawa, precariously, in 1854. In 1882, 10 men on bicycles
called Premiers, which had 60-inch front wheels with no gears, chains or brakes, took
a short ride down Bank Street. The first car with a combustion engine under the hood
putt-putted around Ottawa in 1901.)

Then, in the 1940s or thereabouts, both cities, experiencing growth pains particularly
to do with traffic, called in a French planner to sort things out. Ours was called
Jacques Gréber, theirs Alfred Agache. Where things diverge is in the 1960s.

In 1964, when Charlotte Whitton was in her last year as mayor in the big office in
Ottawa, mayor Ivo Arzua of Curitiba asked for proposals as to how to manage the
city's growth, most especially in regard to what to do with all those once and future
cars. Both Ottawa and Curitiba then boasted a population of around half a million and
rapidly counting.

The best answer Arzua got came from a pack of young planners at the local
university, headed by a man with an appropriate surname called Jaime Lerner. Lerner
et al's proposal was adopted as the Curitiba master plan in 1968.

As job one, Lerner set up an urban planning department, which they didn't have, and
his team pinned a wish list to the planning board which included: keeping urban
sprawl to a minimum, getting cars out of downtown, fending off the developers
itching to condo-ize and strip mall Curitiba's historic district, and most of all give the
Curitibans an offer of accessible and affordable public transit that they could not
refuse.

They also proposed fashioning main linear transit arteries from the existing road grid,
thus making direct, high-speed routes in and out of the city.

The team then did something that, when we reflect on Ottawa's municipal talent for
procrastination and deferral and gentility in dealing with developers, makes one tip
one's hard hat to them. They not only talked the talk, they drove the drive.

As a symbolic first gesture, and there were more to follow, they created Brazil's first
pedestrian-only street in 1970. (Ottawa had opened Canada's first no-car street four
years earlier). The next move was to create a road design, the Sistema Trinário,
which sandwiched a two-lane street restricted to buses and local car traffic between
wide, fast-flowing one-way throughways.

So, while Ottawa was using a piecemeal approach, a Queensway here, a train station
way out there, Curitiba got busy lassoing the mustang cars and taming them. In its
place they put a donkey, in fact a herd of donkeys, in a rapid transit system centred
on the bus, and it is that system, probably the most efficient in the world, that we'll
look at next week.

Phil Jenkins is an Ottawa writer.


© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen

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