In this week’s lecture, we watched a short movie talking about the successful urbanization of Curitiba, the capital city of the Brazilian state of Paraná. As many cities in Brazil, Curitiba faced a lot of problems of globalization and urbanization. People began to flock into Curitiba while there were not so many jobs provided in the city. From 1950 till now, the population of the city has increased by upwards of 1.4 million. Those unemployed people then moved into the peripheral areas of the city. Slums were formed.
Under the reign of Jaime Lerner, ex-mayor of Curitiba, this capital city started its makeover and its transformation. New transportation and bus system were built; the city is covered by more and more parks; new educational system was established, etc. Curitiba is one of the most livable cities in the world now.
Besides the successful transformation of Curitiba, what also caught my attention was the statement made by a man in the last scene of the movie. In his point of view, one of the reasons which made the city such a livable place was dictatorship. Jaime Lerner was appointed by the military dictator in 1960s, and Jaime Lerner seized the power for about 12 years. Consequently, the decision of transformation of the city was actually lack of citizens’ participation. However, since leaders of the city didn’t need to concern about the slow democratic process, they carried out their transformation plan not only efficiently but also immediately. A very good example was the accomplishment of making the blocks into pedestrian zone in three days under the command of Jaime Lerner.
If we compare Curitiba with Singapore, we can find some similarities. The most prominent one is that Singapore started to implement its urban planning without the democratic process, just like the situation in Curitiba. And if we analyze the urbanized process in other countries, we would probably find a lot of problems relating to urbanization. For instance, the slums, pollution, sanitary problems, high crime rate, etc. In democratic countries, governments are not able to solve these problems, because if the government wants to implement a bill concerning the development of a city, this bill has to get the approval of legislative body, and if its people are not satisfied with this plan, they protest. Thus this made me think about the relation between urbanization and democracy.
We can’t deny that urbanization brings more opportunities. Rural places evolved into cities, so civilization was produced, and this made a big leap in human history. While urbanization brings hopes to many people, it also brings desperations; it can be positive experiences to some people like the urbanization process in Curitiba, but it can also be negative ones like Lagos where there are a lot of slums. In my view, a visionary dictator might help the city or the country to develop and to be in order, but after that, the people have to educated and socialized, so they will realize the truth of urbanization, so they will not care about their own profits only. Finally, Urbanization will bring advantages to all human beings.
Su, Tzu-Jung
Venus
