Former Curitiba Mayor Jaime Lerner on Healing Cities
With “Urban Acupuncture”
There’s a park in New York City that
Jaime Lerner loves. “Paley Park,” he says, on East 53rd Street. “It’s very
small, and that’s what makes it great.”
The park is indeed tiny — 4,200
square feet flanked by ivy-covered walls, with a gentle waterfall at its back
that’s both subtle and arresting at the same time. It’s exactly the kind of
public space Lerner has become an evangelist for: a pinprick of high-quality
urbanism whose effect on the surrounding area exceeds its diminutive
dimensions.
Lerner’s book, Urban Acupuncture:
Celebrating Pinpricks of Change That Enrich City Life, champions such
spaces. As the three-term mayor of Curitiba, Brazil in the 1970s and ’80s, he
pioneered a low-cost, low-impact approach to solving the city’s problems, from
implementing the world’s first bus rapid transit system to giving different
parts of the city their own unique public lighting schemes.
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