Residents of Curitiba, Brazil, think they live in the best city in the world, and a lot of outsiders agree. Curibita has 17 new parks, 90 miles of bike paths, trees everywhere, and traffic and garbage systems that officials from other cities come to study. Curibita's mayor for twelve years, Jaime Lerner, has a 92 per cent approval rating. read the whole story here
The Global Ideas Bank is a digest of innovative and creative ideas for the betterment of cities, ecology, social empowerment, etc. as they describe it themselves:
- The Global Ideas Bank aims to promote and disseminate good creative ideas to improve society. It further aims to encourage the public to generate these ideas, to participate in the problem-solving process.
- These ideas we term social inventions: non-technological, non-product, non-gadget ideas for social change. These are a mix of existing projects, fledgling initiatives and new bright ideas.
- In this way, the Global Ideas Bank is part-suggestions box, part-ideas network and part-democratic think-tank, giving the "ordinary" person a chance to have their creativity recognised, rewarded and even put into practice.
- The Global Ideas Bank further aims to provide information and a community to help those individuals who wish to make their idea or project a reality in their own community. See the Practical Help and Success Stories sections for more on this.
2 comments:
Wow!
I want to believe that is true. I knew a girl from my university in Spain that was in Curitiba for an intership. She was actually helping in a planning office that is working with all those ideas that the major has.
She explained me that there are many architects there that dedicate part of their time (for free) to develop all those initiatives.....
Reading this makes me believe a little bit more in architecture.
Let's see if we learn something!!
As I have read, cities that have an initiative (that comes specially from citizens) spreads into all the inhabitants of that city. IT is like a good-virus. We just have to infect it in order to keep it working and it can all change within a few years. Curitiba started like that, Bogotá followed and now Caracas is starting to follow. All the other Latinamerican countries look with amazement at their success. But nobody has the guts to start it, to turn the wheel...
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