Curitiba, Brazil: Urban Renewal, Municipal Revitalization

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Curitiba is the capital of the State of Paraná, a political jurisdiction carved out of the Province, now the State of São Paulo in the mid-nineteenth century. The city is more than three hundred years old. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Curitiba's existence was related to the search for gold. This involved a limited amount of local prospecting, supplanted increasingly by the supply of mules to transport the precious mineral from Minas Gerais to the coast.(1) Sparse settlement and subsistence agriculture characterized Paraná throughout much of the rest of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century when other activities were initiated, notably those servicing more developed states to the north and to the south. The earlier trade of supplying pack animals received a new and stronger impulse with the major expansion of coffee cultivation in São Paulo in the mid-nineteenth industry. In addition, there was the breeding and winter grazing of cattle, which continued to be of consequence into the twentieth century.

Paraná, still one of the leading agricultural states of Brazil, was preeminently agricultural and agroindustrial until the late 1970s, and by many standards, until the beginning of the 1990s, long known for Paraguay tea (yerba mate, an inexpensive green tea), lumber, woodworking, and to a lesser extent, cotton and other agroindustrial products. The cultivation and basic processing of Paraguay tea became important in the nineteenth century, and from 1890 through 1920, the green tea was the leading product of Paraná. Indeed, it was a major export of Brazil to Argentina, Chile and Uruguay until, in response to rising prices that resulted from a growing demand but only very limited increases in Brazilian and Paraguayan output, Argentina fostered domestic production of mate by offering substantial protection to local producers. With a declining export potential, Paraná mate industry stagnated in the 1920s and declined in the 1930s and 1940s.

Dense pine forests covered the eastern part of the state and with the improvement of transportation facilities in the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, local lumber and woodworking activities took on more importance, receiving a further boost during World War I. The industry attracted investment from Great Britain and the United States (with a major portion of the profits from those investments channeled abroad and much of the rest to São Paulo), but the sawmills and furniture factories that sprung up remained in local hands, as did all phases of mate production. By the outset of the World War II, lumber, woodworking and mate were the most important economic activities in Paraná, with those who industrialized the products were in more powerful economic positions than landowners, in contrast to the situation in most of the dominantly agricultural regions of Brazil. Nonetheless, the Federation of Industries of Paraná (FIEP) was then, and continued until the late 1990s, to be rather laid back and low key, more like a social organization than a typical industrial trade association, and less focused on industrial promotion than its counterpart in several other states with emerging manufacturing sectors.

Paraná first became an important coffee producer in the 1930s, and by the early 1960s, accounted for 60 percent of all Brazilian output and a third of world production. Some cafes in Paris and Buenos Aires posted plaques assuring their patrons that they served "Coffee from Paraná." In the early 1960s, a third of all income in the state was generated by the production of coffee, and between 1939 and the early 1960s, the state's share of Brazilian GDP doubled. Although this brought new prosperity to the north of Paraná and to the State generally, Brazil had levied export taxes on coffee from the 1930s, and in the 1950s introduced multiple foreign exchange rates that engendered a disguised tax on coffee exports. (This was mitigated to a degree by a price support program in the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s). The revenues collected from the disguised taxes on coffee ended up as part of the funds used to subsidize industrialization - almost all of which was taking place beyond Curitiba and the rest of Paraná. Frosts, initially in 1953-54, and then more seriously in 1962-63, 1966, and 1975 brought Paraná coffee boom to a close. The crop is now much less important for the state, replaced mainly by soybeans, which are internationally competitive, and wheat, corn, other beans, rice and sugar, which do not enjoy as favorable a position. The latter is also true of dairy products, the advancement of which has been largely attributable to the cooperatives that sprung up in the 1940s, and gained greater force in the 1960s and 1970s.

The production and processing of Paraguay tea and the woodworking activities were focused in the eastern part of the state, and Curitiba was long the dominant processing and commercialization center. The coffee boom shifted more of the agroindustrial activity north, to Londrina, a city established in the 1920s with strong financial and commercial ties to São Paulo. Maringá, to the west of Londrina, is currently the most important agroindustrial center in Paraná. That city, now the third largest in the state, was first founded in the 1950s. Curitiba's importance as an agroindustrial center has been declining relative to these two cities and to other smaller communities in western Paraná. All these locales owe their origin or major expansion to recent colonization. Indeed, while the population of Paraná totaled only 1.2 million in 1940, more than 2.7 million people immigrated into this then rapidly expanding agricultural frontier over the next twenty-five years, and they and their families accounted for two-thirds of the entire population of the state in 1965. This colonization, which was associated with an increase in the market orientation of Paraná agriculture, drew primarily on the nearby States of São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul, and relatively less on foreign countries than the inflows of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

In 1950, Curitiba was a pleasant, rather tranquil community, a city of 180,000 whose activities revolved to a considerable extent around the official business of the State of Paraná and the University of Paraná, the first public university in Brazil, established in 1913. The industrial sector, smaller than in two cities in neighboring Santa Catarina, not to mention the four leading centers of the country, was still based overwhelmingly on agricultural inputs. There were a number of notable historic buildings - public offices, churches and private homes - and many simple but attractive homes constructed of timbers from the once abundant, distinctive pine forests of the state. But the city also was characterized by a shortage of electricity, telephones, and paved streets. Indeed, there were but 350 miles of paved highways in the State of Paraná (only a tenth of which had been funded by the state itself), and as late as 1960, part of the distance between Curitiba and Londrina, the second largest city in the state, remained unpaved. Only a third of the families living in Curitiba had access to sewers. And traffic was beginning to become more of a problem in the downtown area.

Curitiba today is a much different city. It has achieved national renown in little more than a generation - as a rapidly growing industrial center, but also as an attractive, prosperous, ecologically conscious and highly successful example of urban planning, and a socioeconomic triumph among the larger Brazilian cities. Overall, Curitiba's reputation seems deserved, even if it is perhaps not quite one of the three most livable cities in the world, as an urban planning specialist from the University of California at Berkeley ventured a decade ago (which appreciation, the municipality then used in some of its promotional literature). Temperatures in the city often hover in the 40s, 50s, even reach freezing in winter (a serious matter, given the general lack of central heating in the city), and in one or two months of spring it sometimes rains for several hours during half to two-thirds of the days. Five rivers traverse the metropolitan area along with many small streams (there are nearly 2,000 miles of rivers and streams within the city's 270 square miles, some of which have become subterranean). The installation of concrete walls alongside a number of stretches of river (canalization) and the completion of major drainage/parkland improvements has reduced flooding, but until quite recently, it remained a problem in the southern part of the city. Few had lived there a generation before, and planners had hoped to keep the area relatively unoccupied, but more and more of those migrating to Curitiba set up residence there, legally or otherwise. (During the years 1997-2001, a major dredging, riverbed widening and drainage project substantially reduced the risk of flooding within the City of Curitiba itself, though problems remain just beyond the municipality's boundaries, due especially to illegal settlements in flood plains adjacent to rivers.) Living conditions in those areas remain precarious; Curitiba thus shares a number of the problems associated with other communities in the emerging world.

Curitiba’s population increased 7% a year in the 1950s and nearly 6% annually in the 1960s and 1970s. Even in the decade of economic slowdown in the country, the 1980s, population increased at an annual average of more than 2% within the city limits and more than 5% in the outlying part of the metropolitan area. Since the mid-1960s when the city’s development concerns began to be actively refocused, Curitiba’s population has increased three-fold, but the amount of space dedicated to parks and publicly maintained forests has risen from less than 30 square feet per inhabitant to more than 550 (with the increase by an even larger rate according to other measures referred to later). In a city once virtually without parks aside from the attractive Passeio Público on the edge of downtown, the area of green space per inhabitant has reached three times the level recommended by the United Nations.

From 1950 through 1980, Curitiba was the fastest growing of all the medium-to-large size cities in Brazil. Even in the 1980s, its lesser rate of increase was one of the highest of the country's major cities, and in the 1990s, too, the rate of growth within the city limits as well as in the overall metropolitan area was again among the highest in Brazil. This has put extraordinary pressures on existing infrastructure and created continuing demands for major additions. As a consequence, the index of some common amenities is not as high as one might expect for a successful modern city, but even the worst of those is much better than in the 1950s and 60s. Per capita income was just below the national average in 1950, began to rise with Paraná coffee boom, and increased to a much greater extent in the 1970s and thereafter. By the late 1990s, family income averaged above $4,000 (well above that figure by certain calculations) and per capita income was two-thirds higher than the mean for the country.

Much of downtown Curitiba is dedicated to the pedestrian. The city inaugurated Brazil's first major pedestrian mall in 1971, and there are now twenty blocks in the heart of the city paved with decorative tile in which vehicular traffic is restricted to delivery trucks at set hours. This area includes much of the historic district. If one seeks modern architecture, a mile away is the Brasilia-like complex of buildings that house the offices of the State Government of Paraná. Several of the city’s major transportation axes are lined with high rise apartment houses, many with that flair of color and design for which Brazil has become famous. High rise buildings have spread to other areas, too, indeed, with unusual features - there is even a condominium that rotates continuously (or did so when it was first constructed in the late 1990s, at any rate). Curitiba boasts a number of spectacular civic structures, some, such as the wire opera house and the Free University of the Environment, which have transformed abandoned quarries and other former eyesores into some of the most distinctive man-made visual attractions in the entire country.

Unlike city dwellers in other leading Brazilian communities (and most major cities in the Western Hemisphere), many curitibanos make a habit of congregating downtown after normal office hours. It's certainly not for the nightclubs, of which there are few, and it is not solely for theater and concerts, of which there are a growing number, including two in renovated buildings that had served much less artistic functions in the past. Special annual events include national music and theater festivals, a movie festival, the Christmas lighting display and pageants, and several seasonal fairs. Most significant, though, is the continuing activity along the now pedestrian thoroughfares, lined with coffee shops, restaurants and many other commercial establishments. Then, early most Friday evenings, many teenagers gather on the principal pedestrian mall. On Saturday morning their place is taken by pre-teenage painters, families out for a stroll, those who have come to listen to amateur musical groups near the park at one end of the mall, and others, on their way to the small food and flower fair in the Passeio Público, just past the other end of the mall.

On Sunday morning the center of attraction shifts a few blocks, to the extensive and colorful flea market in Garibaldi Square, featuring all varieties of wares, prepared foods, exhibits of local artists, and musical groups ranging from old-timers, strumming melodies of Paraná past, to itinerant groups from other Latin American nations. On Sunday afternoon, numerous residents take to the botanic garden and other city parks, several located adjacent to relatively low income areas, and more than a few, to the bicycle paths, now 105 miles long.

Lest one conclude that Curitiba is some sort of idyllic community, note that the inhabitants are not as warm and outgoing as in many other Brazilian cities. Long-established families receive new arrivals with reserve. This applies not only to blue collar workers and the unemployed from other Brazilian states, but also to professionals and others of middle class background, both foreign and domestic. As for the Poles, Germans, Ukrainians, Italians, Japanese and others who began arriving in the late nineteenth century, comments overheard suggest that their initial acceptance was about the same as immigrants from abroad in most other cities of the world. Curitiba has been changing but it has not been (or become) a homogeneous or an especially socially cohesive community. Disparaging remarks about those of different ethnic backgrounds, religions and races are as common as in most other cities of the Western Hemisphere, but this has not interfered with people working together. Whatever prejudices may exist have not prevented the formation of multi-ethnic business or political alliances. At the same time, those of competitive political or business groups sometimes include unwarranted stereotypes together with substantive criticism when speaking of opponents. Nonetheless, it should be noted that the current mayor is of Japanese ancestry, Paraná senators are of Italian and Portuguese background, and twice Governor and three-times Mayor of Curitiba, Jaime Lerner, is Jewish of Polish background. One of his closest unofficial advisors was of German ancestry, and among his cabinet appointees was someone whose parents came from Lebanon as well as others of a wide range of ethnic backgrounds.

Although Curitiba has somewhat more automobiles in proportion to population than the other large cities of Brazil (more as of the late 1990s than even Brasilia, the city virtually built for the automobile), the public transportation system is regarded as a model. Approximately three-quarters of weekday commuters use it. Moreover, the flat fare system provides a transportation subsidy for those less well-off, most of whom live towards the outskirts, to reach places of employment and to take advantage of the city’s parks and other attractions.

Walking in downtown Curitiba is safer than in the other large cities of the country, even in the evening, though problems have become more common at night during the last few years, and safety is questionable in some of the outlying areas. Streets in the central area are generally clean, reflecting both the attitude of municipal administrations towards appearances, and its efforts to deal with unemployment and underemployment. Both of the latter are serious problems in the city, in part because they are serious problems nationally and in part because of the continuing migration of many relatively less educated and unskilled workers to a city that has sought relatively skill-intensive investments and has been increasingly successful in attracting them. Several efforts to alleviate the situation are noted later, but at least employment as street cleaners on a day-to-day basis is available for a number of those without better alternatives.

Unemployment during the 1990s sometimes reached 10-12% in Curitiba, and was of the order of 15% for the metropolitan region outside the city limits.(2) Curitiba initiated a number of programs to deal with the problem, but people continued to arrive more rapidly than the growth of suitable new opportunities; the rate of unemployment was among the highest of the major cities in the country until 1999-2000. In the late 1970s, when larger slum areas first began to appear, Curitiba’s resettlement schemes and its program of constructing low income housing offset the worst manifestations of the problem, but from the 1980s on, the continuing migrations into ever-more-marginal lands have led to sizable favelas, though not as bad as those in other large cities of Brazil. While more than 99 percent of the inhabitants have electricity and running water, only 75-80 percent can claim access to the city’s sewer system. The lack of infrastructure is more serious in the surrounding municipalities of the metropolitan area, which now have a population two-thirds as great as Curitiba itself. The Metropolitan Curitiba Region Authority was established in 1973, but, until recently, political bickering between city and state governments of different party affiliations often thwarted cooperative efforts. Fortunately, there is now greater regional consciousness and coordination.

A note, which though positive for Curitiba, is disconcerting for the country - an indication of how the quality of life in the most comfortable areas of Curitiba compares with that of similar neighborhoods in São Paulo. More than a hundred, perhaps as many as several hundred São Paulo business people have chosen to reside with their families in Curitiba and to commute two-three times a week between the two cities. Given the travel time and expense involved, this is about as inconvenient as managing a plant on Route 128 outside Boston and traveling to a home in the suburbs of New York.

Footnotes

(1) The five paragraphs that follow draw heavily on Magalhães Filho, Francisco de Borja Baptista (1996); "Evolução histórica da economia paranaense," A Revista Paranaense de Desenvolvimento No. 86 (January/April): 131-48.

(2) Unemployment rates are understated in comparison with those in a country like the United States because of the lack of unemployment insurance and therefore a greater tendency of those who lose their regular jobs to seek alternative, even much lower paying positions.