Posted on May 5, 2009 - by Vic Desotelle

Brazilian Sustainability Expert to Speak in Cape Town

The man who turned one of Brazil’s most spatially challenged and environmentally bereft cities into an internationally acclaimed model for sustainable urban planning, Jaime Lerner, will be in Cape Town early in November.

Lerner will be the keynote speaker at the inaugural conference of the newly-formed Green Building Council of South Africa (GBCSA) to be held at the Cape Town International Convention Centre from 2-4 November 2008.

Sustainable planning within spatial constraints

One of the biggest challenges in any developing country is to provide adequate housing and additional infrastructure at affordable prices within very real urban spatial constraints and Lerner, through his own experiences as mayor of Curitiba, has many of the answers.

Perhaps one of the watch words we can attribute to Lerner is ‘innovation’ and South Africans, if they have any hope of dealing with the growing influx of people into urban areas, will have to ‘think out of the box’.

Think out of the box

Lerner is a former president of the International Union of Architects and, during his tenure as mayor of Curitiba, he turned convention on its head by implementing several unorthodox measures to improve the area and at the same time empower the millions of poor.

His major achievement was the introduction of an integrated transit system but instead of relying on the expensive rail model, he approached a leading vehicle manufacturer and asked them to design 270-seater accordion buses. In this way he overcame one of the major stumbling blocks of bus travel – the limited passenger to driver ratio – while keeping costs to a minimum.

Creative solutions

He is a great believer in pure simplicity as is indicated by some of his other creative solutions to problems that affect all urban areas.

Curitiba is a city bordered by a floodplain, but instead of opting for expensive levees similar to the ones that failed New Orleans during the devastating hurricane Katrina, Lerner turned the plain into municipal parks. The city now leads the way in its per capita green belt area.

- This presented the city and Lerner with another problem – how would they keep the parks neatly trimmed when there was no money available for lawn mowers? Well, he brought in a herd of sheep and the results were threefold – the sheep were fattened up for free, the parks were kept in good nick and all the wool was used to raise funds for kid’s projects – simple!

The Brazilian ‘favelas’ are similar to our informal settlements and consequently share our problems. One of the major health hazards of any ‘slum’ area is the difficulty of removing waste, simply because the streets or distances between the shacks are just too small for municipal vehicles. Lerner came up with the idea of exchanging bags of food and bus transit passes for bags of garbage collected on the streets and, within a miraculously short period of time, the streets of Curitiba were clean and the inhabitants proud of the positive impact on their city.

Lerner has become a roving ambassador for sustainable planning and his motto “Creativity starts when you cut a zero from your budget” will certainly resonate with the vast majority of South Africans entrusted with the future planning of our cities.