Yesterday I went to an urban planning talk at UC Berkz. Apparently it was the 60th birthday of their urban planning school. I guess that was exciting for most of the people there, but for me all it meant was that before the talk started, I got to sit through a long series of people who ranged from old to really old tell inside jokes and stories of the good ol’ days. A woman introduced a man who introduced another man who introduced another man and that guy finally introduced our speaker, Allan Jacobs.

The talk was about Curitiba, Brazil, which is apparently some urban planning mecca. Now, I’m certainly no professional urban planner, but I did take a few classes at school, and if I still had a myspace page I would probably list it in my interests, and I like to think that if I was at a party full of urban planners I could probably make well-intentioned uninformed comments that would only annoy them about 70%. (My conversation starter at such a party would go like this: “Oh, you’re an urban planner too? Cool. I know an urban planner in Minneapolis.” That’s assuming the party wasn’t in Minneapolis and Aaron wasn’t the one that invited me.) Anyway, the point of all this is that I have somehow never heard of Curitiba, Brazil. It sounds like an amazing place. Maybe he was overselling it, but it sounds like the kind of place that must be in every Urban Planning 101 textbook. Maybe I should read more Urban Planning 101 textbooks.

The professor talked about the incredible transformation that occurred in the city from the late 70s until the early 90s. In those fifteen years the city grew from about 650,000 people to 1.7 million people. But rather than all that growth turning the city into a sprawling mess, the city became even more livable as more people moved there. For example, the mayor set up a few bus-only roads which encouraged more people to take the bus which allowed him to set up even more bus-only roads, etc. Then he built special bus shelters that allow people to pay before the bus arrives, letting the buses achieve near-subway speeds without the expense of a subway. Which encouraged more people to ride, paying for further improvements, and so on.

My favorite story was about the time they tried to close one of the major streets to automobiles on weekends. Apparently the retailers on that street were furious and declared that they would drive on the street regardless. So the mayor rolled out a long, long sheet of paper down the entire length of the street and promised free paint to any child who wanted to come sit in the street and make some art, a tradition which continues every Saturday to this day.

Oh, also, they had favelas in the city, but the mayor couldn’t really do anything about them because class warfare was so en vogue at the time, or something. (Did you hear that Obama is going to make class war illegal? Love that guy!) But what he did was go to the favela, pass out plastic bags, and offer free bus passes to everyone who brought a bag full of trash. The before-and-after pictures were stunning.

Oh! And he set up a special “24 hour” section of town. They built an “outdoor mall”-style building and would only rent to people who agreed to keep their shops open 23 hours a day. The mayor reportedly joked about how that’s become the main area of town where students gather to conspire against him.

After the talk we ate salads that Kelly claimed were the size of her head but which were actually the size of two of her heads, assuming she had two heads, which she doesn’t.