Common sense and the city: Jaime Lerner, Brazil's green revolutionary

The ex-mayor of Curitiba used massive creativity and tiny budgets to create the world's greenest city
There are times in life – admittedly very few indeed – when you really wish Boris Johnson was in the same room as you. Last night was one of them as the revolutionary Brazilian ex-mayor, Jaime Lerner, spoke at London's British Film Institute as part of its Of Dreams and Cities season.
"You have to keep things simple, and just start working ... You have a lot of complexity-sellers in this life. We should beat them, beat them with a slipper," said the 70-year-old former mayor of Curitiba, the world's most environmentally friendly city. He has the look of an ex-boxer and a military bearing, softened by a ready and guttural laugh. Lerner was there to see A Convenient Truth, an inspiring film by Giovanni Baz del Bello showing how Lerner and successive mayors have over the past 40 years made Curitiba, a city of 3 million in southern Brazil, one of the world's most livable urban spaces – using only massive creativity and tiny budgets.
"You get creative when you take a zero from your budget," says Lerner. "But sustainability starts when you take two zeros from your budget. Many other mayors tell me their budget is small. For many things, we had no budget."
His first major coup was pedestrianising the main central shopping street in 1972 – in a weekend.
"We started one Friday night, and finished on Monday morning. If we'd had to stop and do things regularly, I wouldn't have made it, and I could have been fired. So we took the risk. By the Monday night, business was so good, the head of the local businessmen came to me and he gave me a petition and said: 'We want the whole street pedestrianised.'"
Lerner heard about a possible protest by drivers who planned to drive through the newly pedestrianised thoroughfare. So, he enlisted hundreds of children, armed them with paintbrushes and paper, and set them to play in the street. The protest never materialised.
Using three-section bendy buses in dedicated bus lanes, the city's transport system carries passenger numbers comparable to an underground – 2 million a day – but at a cost of $1m per kilometre rather than $100m. Fares are flat, and the city was encouraged to grow along the bus routes, so any Curitiba resident is never more than 400m from a bus stop. Only the cars get stuck in traffic jams.
Soon, Lerner hopes to launch the Dock-Dock, a 60cm-wide and 130cm-long car – the smallest in the world. "I can fit inside it," he says. "It will run at less than 25kmh with a range of 50km. But you won't own it." It will act as publicly owned feeder vehicles for public transport. Lernert says he'll test drive it in Rio next week.
Recycling in Curitiba is perhaps the most radical reform of all. In 1989, residents in a nearby favela were dumping their trash in surrounding rivers and fields, as there were no collections from their narrow streets. Lerner arranged for a truck to visit the favela at fixed times each week, and residents' rubbish was exchanged for bus tickets, football tickets and shows. Soon, the locals were cleaning the rivers and fields of old rubbish to sell. Schoolchildren were given new plastic toys for old bottles and bags in a scheme called "Garbage that's not garbage".
Separation of organic and non-organic waste improved efficiencies further. Local homeless people and alcoholics were employed at the recycling plant, where they also retrained on computers they rescued from the city's bins. Curitiba's fishermen were paid to fish for rubbish.
Floodplains surrounding the city were bought up and converted to parks with boating lakes acting as overspill areas. This solution, far cheaper and more effective than culvetting rivers with concrete, increased the green space available for residents from 0.5 square metres each in the 1960s to over 50 square metres per resident today.
Housing was tackled in a similarly simple, revolutionary way. Land next to the electricity company's lot was converted into housing estates, and residents were encouraged to redesign their interiors, so they felt more pride and ownership over their properties.
Lerners' reforms have been widely popular and they appear to have improved the peoples' lot. GDP per capita in Curitiba is 60% higher than the average in Brazil. "Those that were most against us transformed into our greatest supporters – they just needed to see the results. Now they are proud of their city."