Fábio Duarte

Making Public Transport and Housing Match: Accomplishments and Failures of Curitba's BRT

The success of the world-renowned bus rapid transit (BRT) in Curitiba, Brazil, is based on the interdependence of public transport, road system hierarchy, and land use regulation. Notwithstanding the consolidation of this triple approach, the transport system is overcrowded, and in 2009, the city made a bid for a technical analysis of the economic feasibility and the determination of environmental effects of a subway infrastructure to be implemented along one of its mass transport corridors, the north-south one. However, a recent survey indicates that most of people using BRT do not actually live along these corridors, but primarily in the densely occupied peripheral districts of the city and the immediate neighboring areas of a much more populated metropolitan region. This paper searches to confirm a contraction between real urban performance and an ideal city proposed by its somewhat innovative and now 45-year-old plan that was elaborated according to, among other paradigms, high-density linear occupation to make public transport at the same time cheap and attractive for dwellers. This paper also intends to provoke a discussion on the paradoxical municipal managerial decision of, at the same time, enforcing a master plan establishing priorities in terms of public transport and not being able to combine the offer of its main structures for mass public transportation and the public implementation of low-income housing programs along them. Data used to explore these discussions are basically that referring to the use of this modal in the city of Curitiba and the location of municipal social housing programs between 1980 and 2010.

Pervasive Technologies and Urban Planning in the Augmented City

AS information and communication technologies (ICT) become ubiquitous in cities, there is a growing interest in initiatives that integrate the virtual and the physical in a manner that recognizes that cities are complex spatial entities being constantly re-constructed and redefined according to social and political interactions between their objects, elements, and actors. These initiatives to create, improve, and deploy new technologies are most frequently accomplished by the private sector. The public sector, meanwhile does little to oversee the implementation of these initiatives, does not provide alternatives, and does not develop its own initiatives. The main point of this paper is to show, through a study of Brazilian cities, that the discipline of urban planning is absent in discussions about public actions on physical and electronic spheres. The intermingling of physical and electronic space, resulting in what some scholars call “augmented space,” has redefined the way we conceive, use, plan, and control physical space in cities. This kind of augmentation is directly related to the expansion of our ability to communicate and “be present” in multiple and non-contiguous spaces with the same intensity, an ability made possible by using increasingly sophisticated information and communication technologies (ICTs). These augmented spaces, where physical and electronic elements are intrinsically Aurigi Firmino 2005 Graham Graham and Dominy Graham and Marvin Manovich

Infiltrated city, augmented space: information and communication technologies, and representations of contemporary spatialities

Augmented reality and augmented spaces have recently been linked to the widespread use of sophisticated technologies. This can also be described as the intensification of our communication skills which have been related to apparent unlimited possibilities of experimenting with and perceiving space with our bodies and minds, when connected with technological tools. However, by contrast with expanded experiences of the past at a personal level (such as in religion, magic, metaphysics or the arts), contemporary technological augmentation is becoming embedded into our daily lives to such an extent that we are starting to take this mixture of digital technologies and the built environment for granted. In this essay, we argue that, because of this influence on our interactional capabilities, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) might act as catalysing forces transforming various experimental and spatial dimensions of cities and urban places. In order to capture, interpret and understand these transformations in urban spaces, places and territories, we tentatively articulate the experimental and epistemological works of two contemporary Brazilian thinkers about urban studies. Lucrécia Ferrara and Nelson Brissac Peixoto inspire our arguments with their critical views about how urban space can be understood through its various interpretations, and how perceptions of it can be stimulated through artistic provocations of disquieting feelings of strangeness.

A Conceptual Framework for Assessing Digital Cities and the Brazilian Index of Digital Cities: Analysis of Curitiba, the First-Ranked City

Abstract The concept of digital cities has gained prominence as the importance of ICTs is undoubtedly related to economic, social, and civic development. Brazil is following this trend, and the Ministry of Communications and CPqD created the Brazilian Digital Cities Index for evaluating national digital cities. Based on the concepts of connectivity, accessibility, and communicability that originated from the analysis of United Nations documents on the Information Society, we analyze the city of Curitiba, first-ranked in this Index. We provide a historical vision of the process that enabled the city to achieve this position, and scrutinize the questionnaire used by CPqD. We conclude that the Brazilian Index of Digital Cities does not take into account some key aspects for ranking the citys degree of inclusion in the information society, as proposed by the United Nations. Nevertheless, it is also possible to conclude that Curitibas position in the ranking represents a historical construction determined by the influence of various social actors.

Learning from Failures: Avoiding Asymmetrical Views of Public Transportation Initiatives in Curitiba

Curitiba, in Brazil, is known for the pioneering deployment of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) in the 1970s, and its system became a reference model worldwide. However, from its very beginning, Curitibas BRT competed with rail projects, from subway to light rail vehicles (VLT). These projects have been defended by many municipal technicians over the years as better solutions for urban transportation. From 1952, when the last tram ran in the city, up to 2009, when the municipality concluded a bid for a new subway project, eight projects were developed as attempts to resume rail transportation in town. In spite of the failure of all those projects, this article proposes that the major innovations in the BRT in Curitiba had their origins in those unimplemented rail projects, through technical and political advances that resulted from controversies, conflicts, and alliances among the main relevant social groups and artifacts involved during this period.

Policy to promote bicycle use or bicycle to promote politicians? Bicycles in the imagery of urban mobility in Brazil

During the last 15 years an increasing number of presidents, prime ministers, governors and mayors in developed and developing countries have been riding bicycles to promote a more sustainable and friendly form of urban mobility. We believe that these images also reveal and influence the image of contemporary urban mobility – the way in which people see what urban mobility is and how it should be. In this paper we discuss how the image of the bicycle has changed in Brazil and how this may influence an increase in its actual 1% bicycle modal share in big cities. We conclude that the importance of the bicycle in the image of urban mobility has been changing cyclically, and what seems to be a positive trend today might end up as being just an ephemeral positive image, with the risk of having no further practical consequences.

Monitour: Tracking global routes of electronic waste

Many nations seek to control or prevent the inflow of waste electronic and electrical equipment, but such flows are difficult to track due to undocumented, often illegal global trade in e-waste. We apply wireless GPS location trackers to this problem, detecting potential cases of non-compliant recycling operations in the United States as well as the global trajectories of exported e-waste. By planting hidden trackers inside discarded computer monitors and printers, we tracked dozens of devices being sent overseas to various ports in Asia, flows likely unreported in official trade data. We discuss how location tracking enables new ways to monitor, regulate, and enforce rules on the international movement of hazardous electronic waste materials, and the limitations of such methods.

Private video monitoring of public spaces: The construction of new invisible territories

The idea of smart cities is to a great extent based on the belief of planners and city managers that substantial (and instrumental) use of information and communication technologies in the management of urban functions can make cities work better. This is also part of the coordinated discourse adopted by planners, managers and politicians around the world in an attempt to position their cities in the fierce competition for revenue, jobs and people. In this paper we will concentrate on gaining an understanding of informational territories built to support surveillance and control of public spaces. We seek to question this relation by making reference to several specific uses of information and communication technologies for surveillance purposes and to discuss it from the point of view of definitions of territory. Our goal is to discuss the fact that, under the ‘mantra’ of smarter cities and on the grounds of public security, there is a scattering of micro and macro informational territorial elements that overlap to undermine the meaningfulness of urban public spaces.

Understanding continuity in sustainable transport planning in Curitiba

The Brazilian city of Curitiba has long been recognised as an exemplary success in urban planning, particularly its sustainable urban transport, with modal splits strongly favouring public transit. Its success was achieved principally through rigorous and detailed planning, beginning in the 1970s, using policy tools that have been described, and sometimes criticised, as technocratic. After 40 years of a quite successful experience in transport planning and implementation, Curitiba, like many world cities, faces new challenges, particularly in the form of metropolitanisation and increased aspirations for citizen participation. In this paper we investigate which policy tools are being used to face these emerging challenges in Curitiba, whether they are the same as those used in the past and which led the city to be a recognised urban transport success case, or different, more flexible and participative tools presumed to be more in tune with the emerging context of metropolitanisation and increased demands for participation. The answer, coming from interviews within Curitiba transport representatives, current literature review and limited comparisons with other successful transport cities of the Americas, suggests a continuation of Curitiba’s proactive format, one which has led to its past successes, with some modest overtures to more interactive and participatory policy tools.

Urban Phantasmagorias: Cinema and the Immanent Future of Cities

Cities experienced profound changes in the early 20th century, mainly as a result of industrialization. Along with architects and urban planners, fiction writers played a part in shedding light on some perverse or still unknown consequences of technology on society. Cinema is probably the first industrial art form and was from its beginning deeply involved in the creative portrayal of these changes. This ever-present urban imagery, rooted in concrete aspects of a changing reality and supported by existing and fictional technological systems, forms what we call urban phantasmagorias. This article develops this theoretical approach through a brief analytical review of some of the emblematic films that have anticipated shifts in our cities and lifestyle, influenced by the emerging technologies of their time, focusing on Metropolis (1927), Blade Runner (1982), Alphaville (1965), and The Matrix (1999).