On the fifth anniversary of the death of Jaime Lerner, the Brazilian architect and former three-time mayor of Curitiba, the article looks at how he helped transform a growing, congested and poor city into an international model for sustainability and quality of life. Dr. Orly Ronen, head of the urban sustainability master's track at Tel Aviv University’s new school for environmental studies, says Lerner left behind “simple and direct” urban sustainability, built on three basics, reducing private car use, separating waste, and staying close to nature.
Lerner’s key idea was to reverse the usual priorities of city planning. Instead of putting the private car first, he placed pedestrians at the top, public transport next, and cars last. Ronen says the goal was to make urban areas comfortable, pleasant and safe for walking, and to focus not only on movement, but on the quality of the street itself and “what you are in the street for.”
To make that vision practical, Lerner developed the Bus Rapid Transit system, known as BRT, with dedicated bus lanes, tube-like stations, prepaid fares and fast boarding at platform height. In Curitiba, the system reached about 2 million passengers a day and was later copied in cities including Bogotá and Rio de Janeiro. He also created an innovative waste program in low-income neighborhoods where garbage trucks could not enter, exchanging sorted trash for public transport tokens or bags of fresh food and vegetables. That helped push recycling to 70 percent and preserved 50 square meters of green space per resident.
The article says Lerner’s ideas also shaped Israeli urban thinking. Ronen met him as part of the Israeli delegation to the UN Rio+20 summit in Rio de Janeiro in summer 2012. In Israel, his influence became public through Nir Horowitz’s 2008 documentary series “Urban Legend” on Channel 10, which devoted an episode to Curitiba. The series helped inspire local planners and politicians, including Dov Hanin’s 2008 Tel Aviv-Yafo mayoral campaign for the “City for All” movement and the visit of Colombian-Canadian urban expert Gil Penalosa in 2014. The article says present-day bus-lane projects in Gush Dan are a delayed implementation of what Lerner began decades ago.
