The Grassroots Good News, November 2004 Edition
GGN November 2004 / Table of Contents:
1) Curitiba - an innovative green City
2) Reconciliation Work in Southern Africa
3) Children’s university for human rights
1) Curitiba - an innovative green City
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.
There is nothing special about Curitiba's history, location or population. Like all
Latin American cities, the city has grown enormously - from 150,000 people in the 1950s to 1.6 million now. It has its share of squatter settlements, where fewer than half the people are literate. Curibita's secret, insofar that it has one, seems to be simple willingness from the people at the top to get their kicks from solving problems.
Those people at the top started in the 1960s with a group of young architects who were not impressed by the urban fashion of borrowing money for big highways, massive buildings, shopping malls and other showy projects. They were thinking about the environment and about human needs. They approached Curibita's mayor, pointed to the rapid growth of the city and made a case for better planning.
The mayor sponsored a contest for a Curibita master plan. He circulated the best entries, debated them with the citizens, and then turned the people's comments over to the upstart architects, asking them to develop and implement a final plan.
Jaime Lerner was one of these architects. In 1971 he was appointed mayor by the then military government of Brazil.
Given Brazil's economic situation, Lerner had to think small, cheap and participatory - which was how he was thinking anyway. He provided 1.5 million tree seedlings to neighbourhoods for them to plant and care for. ('There is little in the architecture of a city that is more beautifully designed than a tree,' says Lerner.)
He solved the city's flood problems by diverting water from lowlands into lakes in the new parks. He hired teenagers to keep the parks clean.
He met resistance from shopkeepers when he proposed turning the downtown shopping district into a pedestrian zone, so he suggested a thirty-day trial. The zone was so popular that shopkeepers on the other streets asked to be included. Now one pedestrian street, the Rua das Flores, is lined with gardens tended by street children.
Orphaned or abandoned street children are a problem all over Brazil. Lerner got each industry, shop and institution to 'adopt' a few children, providing them with a daily meal and a small wage in exchange for simple maintenance gardening or office chores.
Another Lerner innovation was to organise the street vendors into a mobile, open-air fair that circulates through the city's neighbourhoods.
Concentric circles of local bus lines connect to five lines that radiate from the centre of the city in a spider web pattern. On the radial lines, triple-compartment buses in their own traffic lanes carry three hundred passengers each. They go as fast as subway cars, but at one-eightieth the construction cost.
The buses stop at Plexiglas tube stations designed by Lerner. Passengers pay their fares, enter through one end of the tube, and exit from the other end. This system eliminates paying on board, and allows faster loading and unloading, less idling and air pollution, and a sheltered place for waiting - though the system is so efficient that there isn't much waiting. There isn't much littering either. There isn't time.
Curitiba's citizens separate their trash into just two categories, organic and inorganic, for pick-up by two kinds of trucks. Poor families in squatter settlements that are unreachable by trucks bring their trash bags to neighbourhood centres, where they can exchange them for bus tickets or for eggs, milk, oranges and potatoes, all bought from outlying farms.
The trash goes to a plant (itself built of recycled materials) that employs people to separate bottles from cans from plastic. The workers are handicapped people, recent immigrants, alcoholics.
Recovered materials are sold to local industries. Styrofoam is shredded to stuff quilt for the poor. The recycling programme costs no more than the old landfill, but the city is cleaner, there are more jobs, farmers are supported and the poor get food and transportation. Curitiba recycles two-thirds of it garbage - one of the highest rates of any city, north or south.
Curitiba builders get a tax break if their projects include green areas.
Jaime Lerner says, 'There is no endeavour more noble than the attempt to achieve a collective dream. When a city accepts as a mandate its quality of life; when it respects he people who live in it; when it respects the environment; when it prepares for uture generations, the people share the responsibility for that mandate, and this shared cause is the only way to achieve that collective dream.'
Summarised from an article by Donella Meadows entitled 'The city of first priorities' in Whole Earth Review (Spring 1995). See also the article about Curitiba on page 183, The Book of Visions (Institute for Social Inventions, 1992).
2) Reconciliation Work in Southern Africa
Within the Bremen Peace Award 2003 the following proposal has been shortlisted:
Sinani has been committed to the victims and survivors of violence in South Africa for over 10 years. It combines trauma and peace work on the one hand and community development and small projects which ge-nerate income on the other, thereby creating new prospects for the lives of those left traumatised. To this end Sinani holds stress and trauma workshops which help young people develop their personality, for instance, through small community projects. Women are another of Sinani’s target groups: they receive help to over-come the consequences of violence in their families and to (re)gain dignity and respect in a society marked by ongoing violence.
Siegfried Schroeder (“Weltfriedensdienst“[World Peace Service] Berlin) wites:
“SINANI“ is the Zulu for “we are with you.“ And this is the agenda of the organisation which has been there for the victims/survivors of violence for over 10 years. The project was started at the beginning of the nineties in the province of KwaZulu-Natal. Following the first democratic elections of 1994, there was a significant decrease in politically motivated violence. However, the traumatic experience of violence remained with a large part of the population. Levels of intra-societal violence in the province are also still extremely high. The violence no longer occurs along political power lines, but rather it takes the form of “acts of revenge” and family feuds. In particular, however, personal experience of violence, humiliation and dehumanisation from the apartheid era and the civil war have led to a substantial increase in domestic violence, child abuse and rape.
It is in this environment that the NGO SINANI/PSV operates with two offices in Durban and Pietermaritzburg. The 23 members of staff work in many more than 20 partner communities in townships, informal and semi-rural settlements. SINANI only works at the concrete request of the individual communities. A “community intervention“ is intended to reach all three target groups children, young people and adults.
Every week contacts from the organisation meet up with different groups of men, women and young people who fought as child soldiers or in militias or who have been severely traumatised in other ways as a result of the civil war. Part of this involves talking about their own experience of violence. It is also a question, however, of helping the young people develop their personality, rebuild personal relationships in the community and develop prospects for themselves for instance. In this respect SINANI/PSV has learnt over the years that it is crucial to combine effective trauma work with “income-generating projects” and “community development.“ SINANI/PSV also works with groups of ex-combatants, who were integrated back into society following democratisation. Addressing their social plight and simple ways of restoring their dignity (a birthday cake, for example) are successful first steps towards breaking the cycle of violence.
Besides young people, women are SINANI/PSV’s primary target group. Many of them, wives and mothers, had to bury their closest relatives during apartheid and civil war. In the “reconciliation gestures” performed ritually by SINANI between two previously hostile communities, it is mostly the women who initiate and make these gestures.
Set against the background of increasing domestic violence, abuse and rape, it is the women’s groups supported by SINANI that are now trying to re-establish values such as dignity and respect in the communities, and make public the link between violence against women and HIV/Aids.
To conclude, SINANI/PSV organises an annual “leadership forum“, in which “traditional leaders“, councillors and community leaders come together for two weeks to discuss democratic and participating community structures.
Contact: www.survivors.org.z
3) Children’s university for human rights
In 1991 a peace school was established in Novorossiysk offering subjects that are not offered at regular schools, for example, philosophy, management and alternative history lessons. Following on from this experience, a new "Children’s University for Human Rights" was founded in 2002. This is not an official educational establishment. The children stay at home, receive their materials and assignments by email, communicate with each other on the Internet and sit a final exam by email. The pupils meet up twice a year, exchange ideas and talk to adult human rights activists. The peace school and the human rights university are supported by the "Peace School" foundation in Novorossiysk (http://sp.nvrsk.ru). In addition to the two educational institutions, the foundation also offers legal and psychological help to children and young people, working in particular with children from socially deprived families. It is also developing a project to promote tolerance education. Since 1999 young volunteers, who are trained by the foundation, have also been operating a helpline for young people in he city. Where necessary, callers are offered an appointment with a psychologist or lawyer. The foundation also holds lessons for minors in a local remand centre once a week. Finally, the foundation has launched the "Tolerance Football" project in the city’s secondary schools. The teams are deliberately made up of pupils from different schools, classes and ethnic backgrounds. Girls and boys play together in mixed teams, but only goals scored by girls count. Based on a report in: Deutsches Institut für Menschenrechte (hg): Russland auf dem Weg zum Rechtsstaat? [German Institute for Human Rights (hg):
Russia on the way to becoming a constitutional state?], 2003, see 202-204 (www.institutfuer-menschenrechte.de)
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