Curitiba

Curitiba became the world's most famous urban planning case study by doing something that sounds simple: it put buses in dedicated lanes. The Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system, launched in 1974 under Mayor Jaime Lerner, moved passengers at metro speeds for a fraction of metro costs. Tube-shaped bus stations with pre-paid boarding eliminated delays. Dedicated lanes eliminated traffic interference. The concept was so effective that over 300 cities worldwide copied it, from Bogotá's TransMilenio to Istanbul's Metrobus. Curitiba proved that a middle-income city could solve transit without building a subway.

Founded in 1693 by Portuguese gold miners in the highlands of Paraná state, Curitiba remained a small colonial town until nineteenth-century immigration waves transformed it. Italians, Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, and Japanese arrived between 1850 and 1950, creating an unusually diverse ethnic mix for a Brazilian city. The coffee boom that enriched São Paulo also passed through Paraná, making Curitiba a transport hub. But the city's defining moment came from politics, not economics: Jaime Lerner, an architect elected mayor in 1971, transformed Curitiba into a laboratory for urban innovation.

Beyond BRT, Lerner introduced pedestrianized streets (Rua XV de Novembro was closed to cars in 72 hours, before opposition could organize), flood-control parks that doubled as green space (instead of expensive concrete channels, the city created lakes in low-lying areas), and a recycling program where residents in favelas exchanged sorted waste for bus tokens and food—incentive design that achieved higher recycling rates than wealthy European cities. The approach was characterized by speed, pragmatism, and doing the cheap thing brilliantly rather than the expensive thing adequately.

Curitiba's population of approximately 1.96 million (3.7 million metro) makes it southern Brazil's largest city. The economy runs on automotive manufacturing (Renault, Volkswagen, Volvo have plants nearby), technology, and services. GDP per capita exceeds the Brazilian average by over 40%. But the planning legacy faces strain: population growth has outpaced infrastructure, the BRT system is congested, and car ownership has risen faster than alternative transit capacity. The city that showed the world how to move people cheaply is now learning that innovation requires constant reinvention—the original insight degrades if it becomes the only trick.