Unilivre

So today we went to Universidade Livre do Meio Ambiente, the Open University of the Environment, or Unilivre, which is in a city park. The building is an amazing structure, in style of Swiss Family Robinson, with separate rooms and a spiral ramp walkway to an observation deck where you can look down on the quarry lake or see a distant view of the city’s skyline. The decking is made of old power/phone line poles. It is a remarkable, if drafty, place.

We had a lecture from Reinaldo Piloto, a civil engineer, about the city of Curitiba’s parques e praças (parks and plazas). There are a lot of parks in Curitiba, so it lasted a while. The main goal of most of the parks is to help the environmental integrity of the rivers. Many informal settlements are near rivers and parks can help prevent these from popping back up after the people are moved to housing projects by putting things like soccer fields and basketball courts where the houses would be. I thought it interesting that the main point sources for water pollution that they worry about here is residential, when in America we worry about more industrial or commercial polluters. Others provide flood mitigation with detention ponds, with no water level controls; the floods here are all flash floods.

We took the Linha Turismo to the Torre Panorâmica. The 360° views of the city were amazing! You could really see the lines of transit-oriented development and how the zoning around the bus BRT lines is so distinct; there are not many mid-rise buildings.

Dinner was awesome. We were approached by a few drifting hippie types, one of whom we have spoken to a few times before. We ended up inviting them to sit with us as they had the drink that Calvin bought for them as payment for a necklace. We all talked in a mixture of Portuguese and Spanish for a while until they finished the drink and moved on.

It’s actually getting cold now. I like it, but our sliding glass window doesn’t really shut 100% so we have to leave it cracked or the wind will howl through it, so I guess we’ll be getting all bundled and cozy in our beds from now on. We’re heading to Ilha do Mel for the weekend, so I won’t be able to post again until Sunday. The train ride is supposed to be amazing and vertigo-inducing and the island is an ecological preserve that you need to take a ferry to. Should be awesome.






















A self-portrait on the spiral walkway up to the observation deck at Unilivre.















People participating in the program Lixo Que Não é Lixo, or trash that is not trash, in which 70% of the city's trash is recycled by its residents, who sort recyclables and exchange them for food.
















View from the observation tower. 110 meters up (360 feet) and about 100 meters below the flight paths of planes landing at CWB! You can see the high density development along the transit axis here. It is amazing how it just stops, as the ares between the BRT (bus rapid transit) and the fast car lanes are what is zoned for such height.