Chicago architect Carmen Vidal-Hallett and her photojournalist husband Mark Hallett recently released a multimedia study comparing Chicago with a fairly obscure city in South Brazil. Curitiba is a former backwater turned city of 1.5 million, which now rivals Chicago as a center of progressive urbanism. It was for this reason that the husband-and-wife team used their Graham Foundation grant to study the Brazilian city through Mark and Carmen’s photos and analysis.

Like Chicago, Curitiba is a city of diverse people, featuring large Italian-, Ukrainian- and Japanese-Brazilian populations. In fact, the city has the second largest Polish immigrant population in the world, next to Chicago. Another shared feature of the two cities is that they both value green space. Unlike Chicago, which relies heavily on its world-renowned park system and cutting-edge green roof programs, Curitiba uses a system of “tradeoffs” to expand its green space. The city government gives incentives to private developers to exchange undeveloped land in the neighborhoods and on the edge of the city for rights to build larger, higher-density buildings in more urbanized parts of the city.

Chicago can definitely take a cue from Curitiba’s outstanding transit system. The city utilizes a system of bus lines that range from neighborhood shuttles to high-speed transit lanes. The city’s whole transit system relies only on buses, which travel as fast as subways but cost about 1/40 as much as rail transit. It works, too-75% of residents use transit. Curitiba also features a “24 hour street”, a partially enclosed pedestrian-only walkway on which all businesses are open 24 hours. The street was created in response to residents’ concerns about downtown crime and safety, but has since developed into a thriving commercial marketplace.

Curitiba also outshines Chicago in terms of its architectural preservation. Both cities have many outstanding examples of historic architecture, but Chicago has a history of demolishing its old buildings, despite the many preservation efforts at work in the city. Curitiba’s government allows owners of historic buildings to develop next to them or to transfer building rights to another location, in exchange for the developer’s restoration of the historic building.

Despite its world-renowned breakthroughs in planning, Curitiba, like many Latin American cities, is ringed by slums and shantytowns filled with displaced people from the Brazilian countryside. The city is unable to house these people, as the funding for public housing in Curitiba collapsed in the mid-1980s. These slums, or favelas, are built largely by the residents themselves out of whatever materials are at hand. However, unlike most similar cities, including our own Chicago, Curitiba seems to have had some success in integrating the slums into the city. Most favelas receive transit stations shortly after being built, and the city runs a cleanup program for favelas, in which residents receive a bag of fresh produce in exchange for every bag of trash collected and turned over to the city.

The study shows that Chicago, the birthplace of urbanism, can learn a lot from Curitiba, which is rapidly becoming the model of sustainable urbanism for the 21st century. Mark Hallett and Carmen Vidal-Hallett conduct presentations on their research throughout Chicago and the rest of the country.

Look at the entire traveling exhibit-which makes its next stop at the School of the Art Institute Chicago-here. In addition to the two photos above, the exhibit includes beautiful shots of both Chicago and Curitiba, taken by Mark Hallett. And this Thursday, hear Mark and Carmen talk about the lessons they took away from one of the most environmental cities in the world, Curitiba, Brazil. Check out CNT’s events calendar for details.

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