#26 1989 · City of Curitiba · Municipal servicespair-two-problems
Curitiba bought garbage with bus tokens — the favelas trucks couldn't enter cleaned themselves
the problem
Garbage trucks couldn't fit into the favelas' alleys, and there was no money to rebuild them
background
By the late 1980s Curitiba's population had grown twentyfold in five decades and its favelas — narrow, unplanned, truck-proof — were drowning in uncollected garbage, with disease following. The customary fixes, widening roads or bulldozing, needed money the city simply did not have. Jaime Lerner's team worked under a standing rule: no money means more creativity, not less ambition.
Câmbio Verde inverted the problem: instead of sending trucks in, it paid residents to bring garbage out — a bus token for a bag of sorted trash, food parcels bought from surplus-crop farmers for recyclables, notebooks for school paper drives. Three unsolvable problems (garbage, transit access, farm surpluses) were paired into one trade.
the move
Jaime Lerner's city paid for pre-sorted trash bags with bus tokens, and paper with food chits — pairing the waste problem with the mobility and food problems instead of solving any of them head-on.
the payoff
The 62 poorest neighbourhoods traded 11,000 tonnes of garbage for nearly a million bus tokens; schools traded 200 tonnes for 1.9M notebooks; the Câmbio Verde runs to this day.
what came after
The 62 poorest neighbourhoods traded 11,000 tonnes of garbage for nearly a million bus tokens; over one three-year stretch schools swapped 200 tonnes for 1.9 million notebooks. The programme still runs, and 'align two problems until they solve each other' became the signature of Curitiba's whole planning school.
filed under
references
- [1]The story of CuritibaBernard Lietaer, 2010lietaer.com
- [2]Jaime Lerner on healing cities with urban acupunctureNext City, 2014nextcity.org