How mid-sized cities can avoid strangulation.

• Author: O'Meara, Molly
• Position: Central planning of Curitiba, Brazil and Portland, Oregon

Contrary to popular impressions, the urbanizing of the world means a proliferation not only of giant "megacities" but also of a larger, faster-growing class of middle-sized cities. In their struggles to overcome the pervasive problems of traffic, pollution, chaotic development, and psychological stress, two of these mid-sized cities serve as encouraging models.

In the early 1970s, cities around the world were razing old neighborhoods to 'make way for new highways. But in at least two places - Curitiba, Brazil and Portland, Oregon - people were resisting.

Curitiba was the fastest growing city in the most rapidly urbanizing country in South America, and it was choking on fumes from stagnating traffic. The city's young new mayor, Jaime Lerner, who had been schooled as an architect, was loath to solve the problem by ripping apart the fabric of the city in order to accommodate more cars. In 1972, he took a highly controversial step, halting construction of an overpass that would have obliterated Curitiba's historic main street. On the eve before demolition was to begin, he organized engineers to block off the street to cars and create a pedestrian mall. Bulldozers showed up the next morning to find the street they were supposed to tear up lined with flowerpots and occupied by children painting murals.

Around the same time, another drama was unfolding in the Northwestern United States. Portland, Oregon, according to The New York Times, was "a city in the act of destroying itself." While Curitiba was collapsing under an influx of newcomers, Portland was losing vitality as residents and stores left for the suburbs. Citizen activists, banding together to block highways from knocking down their neighborhoods, found allies in both Portland's new mayor, Neil Goldschmidt, and the state's governor, Tom McCall. Rather than build off-ramps, the new political leadership actually tore down a riverfront freeway in the early 1970s and replaced it with a park for bicyclists and walkers.

The roads not taken in the 1970s have made a difference to Curitiba and Portland. Wresting streets from the automobile and returning them to people were perhaps the defining steps the charismatic Lerner and Goldschmidt took in reshaping their cities. In the following quarter century, as these officials and their successors continued to make such decisions, downtown Curitiba and Portland became vibrant, compact hubs. Public transit ridership increased faster than population growth, air pollution declined, and the amount of green space per person increased, even as urban populations swelled. These cities haven't escaped the problems of urbanization altogether, but their innovations in transportation and land use planning, have pointed the way to some real solutions.

The stories of Curitiba and Portland have been told before, but they warrant a harder look now because the world is entering its most urbanized century yet. Urban growth is outstripping rural three-toone, so that by 2006, half of the world's people will live in cities, compared to 30 percent in 1950. The metropolitan populations of Curitiba and Portland arc only between one and two-and-a-half million each. Cities of such size may seem of minor importance compared to the new class of burgeoning megacities of 10 million plus, such as Lagos, Mexico City,, or Tokyo. But in fact, mid-sized cities in the 500,000-to-5 million range are home to a much larger share of humanity (see box, page 13).

Urban Livability

City planners, urban researchers, and journalists flock to Curitiba and Portland from around the globe. Their visits attest to the fact that something about these two cities is not only different, but enviable. While both communities have made progress in such areas of critical concern as the provision of water and collection of wastes, what has really made their reputations is their decisions about land-use and transportation. Curitiba and Portland have managed to shape where and how their growth will occur. And in doing so, they have moved towards greater "livability" - that hard-to-define fusion of economic viability, social cohesiveness, and environmental health.

Each of these communities has been in some ways fairly typical of the cities in its region. Like other "New World" frontier towns, each reinvented itself in the latter part of this century. Curitiba, originally a settlement on the route of horse caravans across southern Brazil, became the capital of Parana state in the 1850s. In the past two decades, its traditional industries - processing coffee, tea, and other agricultural products - have declined while automobile manufacturing and service industries have taken root. Portland, which grew from a fur-trading outpost at the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette rivers, also attained city status in the mid-19th century. Since the 1970s, its economy has been shifting from logging to computers, telecommunications, and other high tech industries.

Today, part of what makes these two cities unique is their solutions to problems of social and economic inequities. Although the southern farm belt of Brazil is a bit wealthier than the rest of the country, Curitiba's average income is no higher than those of comparable state capitals. And as with most cities in the developing world, Curitiba is ringed by the makeshift squatter settlements of poor newcomers. Jonas Rabinovitch, an urban adviser at the United Nations Development Program and a former aide to Curitiba's Mayor Lerner, explains that the purchasing power of a poor Curitiban is equal to that of a poor person in Sao Paolo. What makes life more bearable for the poor in Curitiba, however, is the level of services offered by the city. For instance, the city offers a uniform fare for all bus trips regardless of length, which benefits the poor who live on the fringes and have longer commutes.

Portland too has a commitment to equity. For example, municipal regulations protect "view corridors" of Mount Hood, fifty miles to the east, by requiring the heights of buildings to step down as they approach the Willamette River. the shared view itself is an extraordinary asset. And perhaps in part because the downtown has such desirable vistas, the city has also managed to avert one of the most pervasive inequities of American cities - concentration of the poor in the central city. Throughout the country, even in cities that lack bitter race and class divides, the centers have declined as outlying areas have prospered. In large metropolitan areas, suburban population has grown more...