Jaime Lerner

Urban acupuncture is the idea that a minimal intervention, applied at exactly the right point, triggers a chain reaction across the whole city. Lerner practised it before naming it, and his operating rule was speed: if something takes two years to become visible, the project dies on the way; if it is visible on Monday, the city defends it.

His founding case is from 1972. Curitiba pedestrianised Rua XV de Novembro over a single weekend, starting on Friday night and finishing the works by Monday, so that the shopkeepers opposing it could not obtain a court injunction. By Saturday morning the street was full. When a group of motorists announced they would invade it with their cars, Lerner had rolls of paper laid out and sat hundreds of children down to paint on the ground.

Born in Curitiba in 1937 and dead in 2021, Lerner was three times mayor of the city and twice governor of the state of Paraná. His major work is the Integrated Transport Network, begun in 1974: dedicated lanes, fares paid before boarding, tube stations with platforms level with the bus floor, and bi-articulated vehicles made a surface system move metro volumes at a fraction of the cost. That model, now called BRT, has been copied in Bogotá, Mexico City, Istanbul, Jakarta and dozens of other cities.

His other inventions were equally shrewd: the Cambio Verde programme, which exchanged recyclable rubbish for food in the districts where the truck could not get in, and the flood parks that solved drainage and the shortage of green space at once. The fair criticism of him is that Curitiba's prestige concealed for years the inequality of its metropolitan area, where growth moved to neighbouring municipalities without that planning.