Curitiba: Design for Pedestrians

Faced with auto traffic challenges, Jaime Lerner decided that the City could never (affordably and sustainably) continue to change to serve traffic. Instead he decided the City should be for people (see the TED Video about Lerner, in an earlier post, where he explains how the car is like a mother-in-law) and the solution to the problems of cars was to limit them to where they were appropriate rather than transform the entire City to accommodate them. In the 1970s, Curitiba turned the downtown Rua de los Flores into a pedestrian street over the course of a weekend: open to traffic friday, closed for construction over the weekend, and complete by Monday morning commute hour. To ensure cars wouldn't drive there Monday, hundreds of school kids were brought to the street to chalk and make art in the public space throughout the day, showing how seriously the City believed that it had transformed the street into a place for people. To this day, it remains a success, as a destination for tourists and locals, and a great location for any business.