is why Curitiba,’ he notes, ‘is different. It involved the renovation and evolution of the existing system.’
The BRT has resulted in an estimated reduction of about 27 million car trips annually. Given such efficiencies, Curitiba’s growth has been above 7 per cent over the last three decades, while per capita income is 30 per cent higher than the national average. Ironically, Curitiba is now the second largest producer of cars in Brazil, and also has a lively services and high-tech sector.
Curitiba has been able to make dramatic inroads into the perennial and similar challenges facing Brazil’s cities: transport, governance, infrastructure and security. Yet remarkably few other Brazilian cities have sought to emulate its success. The reason, says Lerner, is very simple: politics. The problem, he believes, is that ‘decisions today are closely tied to having consensus, but democracy is not consensus, rather conflict wisely managed’. Rather than attempting a perfect solution, which will take time, if not for ever, to be implemented, there is a need for pragmatism: ‘Improvement needs a start. You need to have a demonstration effect sometimes to get things moving.’
A key reason for Curitiba’s comparative success has been consistency in planning and implementation.
Daniele Moraes is an architect at the IPPUC. She reminds us that the 1965 master plan was not the first in Curitiba’s history. The first city plan was produced in 1853, which was followed 90 years later by the Agache Plan, which laid out a high-density city centre with suburbs radiating outwards – the design trend of the time – for the population of 180 000. The winning bid for the 1965 plan, by which time the city had 500 000 inhabitants, built on the Agache scheme but focused on a combination of land use, roads and public transport to deliver a better environment, and social and economic development. Since then there have been two further revisions, in 2004 and 2014.
It has not just been about plans, but continuity in terms of people as well, explains Moraes. She points out that ‘Curitiba has enjoyed six mayoral terms – 24 years – of mayors from IPPUC. Jaime Lerner, who served for three terms, Rafael Greca, who still works at IPPUC, and Cassio Taniguchi, who served two terms. They were all also from the same political group which ran the municipality for 40 years.’ She adds, ‘Jaime Lerner was a shrewd politician and diplomat. He taught children about recycling, for example, and in so doing created a whole generation concerned about urban planning and the environment. He created a lot of support for change.’
Critical mass is important too. A municipal-funded institution, the IPPUC has a staff of 160, of whom half are architects and engineers.
Of course, there are challenges. Noted local economist Carlos Guimaraes of FESP (the São Paulo School of Engineering), a private Brazilian university with a focus on commerce, observes that there is a difference between the IPPUC team and the ‘professors now in City Hall who are very theoretical about things, but they don’t know how to make them happen’. And there are always funding shortages, reminds his colleague Luis Fernando Ferreira da Costa because Brazil remains a very centralised country. ‘Taxes go from the cities to the states to the federal centre, but the amount that comes back depends partly on politics. It also reflects the size of the federal government: everyone in Brazil wants to work for the government. We need greater decentralisation and greater autonomy, like the United States, so that the states can raise and spend their own taxes.’ Cape Town is not alone.
‘Solving problems,’ Lerner notes, ‘is not related to scale, or the size of the city, or financial resources. The challenge is in organisation, and in creating shared responsibility between citizens and government, and the public and private sectors. Otherwise you won’t get the outcome you need.’
Curitiba’s success has been exported worldwide, including to towns in Nigeria, Tanzania, South Africa and Morocco. Oscar Edmundo Diaz worked to implement the TransMilenio BRT system in Bogotá, Colombia’s capital, together with Mayor Enrique Peñalosa. The system started in 2000 with two corridors, 400 000 passengers and four private operators. By 2016 it had expanded to 12 routes, 2.5 million passengers and 10 operators. Some routes were carrying 52 000 passengers per hour in each direction, equivalent to the most efficient metros in the world. But this is still deemed insufficient for a city of 9 million, and reflects challenges, too, in opening up more routes.
Peñalosa returned to office after a 14-year absence in 2015. One of his challenges was to meet the 2015 target of 366 kilometres of corridors on the network and to ensure that 85 per cent of the population live within 1 kilometre of a mass transport system by 2030. Diaz also returned as a special adviser to the mayor, having spent time in the interim assisting African countries with their own BRT plans. He highlights, with the benefit of reflection, the importance of managing the politics of routes, providing security on buses and adequate ticketing facilities, and the need for density as prerequisites for the success of mass transportation systems. ‘Build up’, he says, ‘or these systems cannot deliver.’21
Managing the challenges that allow full exploitation of the advantages of urbanisation is, however, not just a planning problem. Development solutions hinge on having appropriate skills and investing in creating such skills. They also require improving security and ensuring the rule of law. Poor security works directly against the advantages of urbanisation, since the answer to poor security in the cities is to keep people apart, behind high walls or on separate transport systems.
As noted in the Preface, Africa is the most violent continent in the world, experiencing two-thirds of non-state fatalities worldwide.22 The Ibrahim Index of African Governance for 2016 notes that weaknesses in the provision of safety and the rule of law on the continent have ‘held back further governance progress’. Some 33 countries ‘have experienced a decline in safety and rule of law since 2006, 15 of them quite substantially’. As the index notes, all four subcategories within the safety and rule of law category show negative trends, with personal safety and national security showing the largest deteriorations at the subcategory level. Moreover, almost half of the countries on the continent recorded their worst ever score in this category within the last three years. The index concludes there is a ‘strong link between Safety & Rule of Law and governance performance’.23
The on-the-ground reality of such statistics can be seen in parts of Cape Town.
The security dimension
Father Craven Engel has the stocky physique of a rugby player. Just like his famous namesake, Doctor Danie Craven, he represented South Africa at scrumhalf.
For 27 years he has worked in the once coloured-only township of Hanover Park, Cape Town, one of the most violent neighbourhoods in the world. The annual murder rate in and around its cinder-block two-storey flats has been as high as 100 deaths per 100 000 residents. Due to high rates of violence in other townships, including Nyanga, Langa, Khayelitsha, Kraaifontein, Delft, Bishop Lavis and Philippi, Cape Town is the most violent city in South Africa as well as Africa.24 In the reporting year from 1 April 2015 to 31 March 2016, the Philippi East police precinct recorded the highest murder rate in the country at 203.1 per 100 000 residents, followed by Gugulethu at 140.1 per 100 000, and Nyanga at 130.6 per 100 000 people.25 Indeed, at 52 murders per 100 000, eight times higher than the global rate, Cape Town is among the world’s most dangerous cities, in the company of Caracas in Venezuela, San Pedro Sula in Honduras, and San Salvador in El Salvador.
Hanover Park, at just two square kilometres, is formally divided by the police into two sectors. In reality, though, as the Google Earth map displayed in Engel’s conference room illustrates, it is fragmented into several gang-run communities: Cowboy Town, Back Streets, The States, The Taliban Area, The Valley of the Plenty and The Jungle. Each is controlled by a grouping that is essentially an affiliate of two predominant major gangs, the Mongrels (under the ‘British flag’) and the Americans. The Americans have recently spawned another affiliate – labelled ISIS – though the pastor is understandably keen to downplay the religious dimension in an already fraught and
