There’s a story urban planners love to tell. A visionary architect-politician in a mid-sized Brazilian city looked at the chaos of modern urban life, the traffic, the pollution, the sprawl, and decided it didn’t have to be that way, and then he fixed it. The city was Curitiba, the man was Jaime Lerner, and the story, while basically true, leaves out the part that should bother us more than it does.
Lerner was born in Curitiba in 1937, the son of Polish Jewish immigrants who’d left Europe in the early 1930s. He studied architecture at the Federal University of Paraná, graduated in 1964, and almost immediately threw himself into reimagining his city. By 1971, at just 33, he was mayor.
What he did with that office was extraordinary. He built one of the world’s first Bus Rapid Transit systems: dedicated lanes, tube-shaped stations, pre-boarding fare payment, elegant and cheap enough that over 150 cities around the world eventually copied it. He pedestrianized the downtown, provoking such fury from local shopkeepers that it nearly became a genuine political crisis, until the foot traffic arrived and they went quiet. He built parks, launched recycling programs, tied land use directly to transit corridors so the densest neighborhoods grew up around the busiest bus routes. The United Nations eventually held Curitiba up as a global model of sustainable urban development.
All of this happened inside a military dictatorship, which is where the story gets harder to admire cleanly. Brazil’s armed forces seized power in 1964 and held it until 1985, torturing dissidents, disappearing political opponents, censoring the press, and massacring indigenous communities. The generals weren’t interested in debate or consensus. They wanted control, and occasionally they wanted to look modern, and Lerner’s urban renewal projects served both appetites well enough that the relationship proved mutually convenient.
The military government’s appetite for infrastructure, combined with its contempt for democratic process, meant that a mayor with ideas and connections could move at speeds impossible almost anywhere else. The pedestrian mall that enraged the shopkeepers was reportedly completed over a single weekend, done before organized opposition could get itself organized. That kind of pace isn’t purely a product of vision. It’s what becomes available when the machinery of repression has already dealt with the problem of dissent on your behalf.
The efficiency that made Curitiba famous wasn’t separable from the violence that made it possible. Every bold planning decision Lerner made, he made in a city where a citizen who objected too loudly could end up somewhere deeply unpleasant. The public wasn’t meaningfully consulted because meaningful consultation had been made structurally impossible. There’s no clean way to account for that, and attempts to do so tend to say more about the person making them than about Lerner himself.
The buses still run, and the parks still exist, and the improvements Lerner achieved landed on real people who needed them. Curitiba is a better city because of what he did, and that counts for something substantial. But there’s a version of this story where the outcomes quietly launder the process, where the parks and the efficient buses become reasons to treat the political context as mere backdrop. That’s less a moral shortcut than a factual error. The context isn’t backdrop; it’s structural.
Lerner talked about urban planning as a form of optimism, about cities as expressions of what humans could consciously choose to become, and there’s something almost aggressively cheerful in how he framed his own work, as though the dictatorship was weather you noted and moved through. He died in 2021, widely celebrated, and the obituaries mentioned the military government in a clause or two before returning warmly to the buses and the parks, which is roughly the proportion most people prefer.
That same pattern surfaces in California housing debates whenever someone reaches for Curitiba as an example, or just in general discussion. The argument tends to run like this: local opposition is obstruction, community process is a veto instrument wielded by the already comfortable, and the housing crisis justifies moving fast and breaking some democratic furniture along the way. Sacramento has acted on versions of this logic, overriding local zoning and narrowing what cities like Santa Monica can contest. What gets lost is that the people most affected aren’t primarily the homeowners the argument targets. They’re renters, working families, and longtime residents of lower-income neighborhoods who had limited power to begin with and now find themselves with less, their communities being reshaped in ways they had no meaningful say in. The housing affordability crisis is real, and so is the displacement that follows when development gets freed from the inconvenience of community input, and pretending those concerns sit on opposite sides of the debate mostly serves people with money in the game and personal ambition. Curitiba is instructive, but not quite in the way its California admirers suggest. The lesson isn’t that visionary planning requires bypassing the public. The lesson is what it costs when it does, and who ends up paying.
Daniel Jansenson, Architect, for S.M.a.r.t.: Santa Monica Architects for a Responsible Tomorrow
Dan Jansenson, Architect, (former Building & Fire-Life Safety Commissioner); Robert H. Taylor, Architect AIA; Mario Fonda-Bonardi, Architect AIA (former Planning Commissioner); Sam Tolkin, Architect, (former Planning Commissioner); Michael Jolly ARE-CRE; Jack Hillbrand AIA, Landmarks Commission Architect; Phil Brock (SM Mayor, ret.); Matt Hoefler, Architect NCARB; Heather Thomason, community organizer, Charles Andrews columnist. journalist.
