Cape Town International Convention Centre
Brazilian Sustainability Expert to Speak in Cape
Town
Brazilian Sustainability Expert to Speak in Cape
Town
Author: Lavana
James
The man who turned one of Brazil's most spatially
challenged and environmentally bereft cities into an internationally acclaimed
model for sustainable urban planning, Jaime Lerner, will be in Cape Town early
in November.
Lerner will be the keynote speaker at the inaugural
conference of the newly-formed Green Building Council of South Africa (GBCSA)
to be held at the Cape Town International Convention Centre from 2-4 November
2008.
Sustainable planning within spatial
constraints
One of the biggest challenges in any developing
country is to provide adequate housing and additional infrastructure at
affordable prices within very real urban spatial constraints and Lerner,
through his own experiences as mayor of Curitiba, has many of the
answers.
Perhaps one of the watch words we can attribute to
Lerner is ‘innovation' and South Africans, if they have any hope of dealing
with the growing influx of people into urban areas, will have to ‘think out of
the box'.
Think out of the
box
Lerner is a former president of the International
Union of Architects and, during his tenure as mayor of Curitiba, he turned
convention on its head by implementing several unorthodox measures to improve
the area and at the same time empower the millions of poor.
His major achievement was the introduction of an
integrated transit system but instead of relying on the expensive rail model,
he approached a leading vehicle manufacturer and asked them to design
270-seater accordion buses. In this way he overcame one of the major stumbling
blocks of bus travel - the limited passenger to driver ratio - while keeping
costs to a minimum.
Creative
solutions
He is a great believer in pure simplicity as is
indicated by some of his other creative solutions to problems that affect all
urban areas.
- Curitiba is a city bordered by a floodplain, but instead of
opting for expensive levees similar to the ones that failed New Orleans during
the devastating hurricane Katrina, Lerner turned the plain into municipal
parks. The city now leads the way in its per capita green belt area.
- This presented the city and Lerner with another
problem - how would they keep the parks neatly trimmed when there was no money
available for lawn mowers? Well, he brought in a herd of sheep and the results
were threefold - the sheep were fattened up for free, the parks were kept in
good nick and all the wool was used to raise funds for kid's projects -
simple!
- The
Brazilian ‘favelas' are similar to our informal settlements and consequently
share our problems. One of the major health hazards of any ‘slum' area is the
difficulty of removing waste, simply because the streets or distances between
the shacks are just too small for municipal vehicles. Lerner came up with the
idea of exchanging bags of food and bus transit passes for bags of garbage
collected on the streets and, within a miraculously short period of time, the
streets of Curitiba were clean and the inhabitants proud of the positive impact
on their city.
Lerner has become a roving ambassador for sustainable
planning and his motto "Creativity starts when you cut a zero from your
budget" will certainly resonate with the vast majority of South Africans
entrusted with the future planning of our cities.
Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/ask-an-expert-articles/brazilian-sustainability-expert-to-speak-in-cape-town-610059.html
About the Author:
www.capewaterfrontestates.co.za
30.10.2008. 09:12
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