How Brazilian cities are innovating, learning and inspiring other cities globally

An optimistic view of how Brazilian cities are innovating and learning to face its major urban challenges is necessary to shed light on groundbreaking solutions and learning practices that can be scaled worldwide.

When most people think of Brazilian cities, generally they think about lack of planning, security, infrastructure and other challenges that affect most emerging cities. Unfortunately, there is indeed a constant struggle to overcome those and many other social, economic and political problems currently faced by Brazil′s urban agglomerations.

It is true that Brazilian cities suffer from air pollution! According to the World Health Organization latest report published in 2018, indicates that over 50.000 people die country-wide each year due to the low quality of air, but some researchers believe the number may be higher.

It is also true that our cities are congested! Brazil has made an economic and political bet on urban development led by cars and roads. The economy and, most importantly, citizens are now literally paying the bill from decades of that model. A recent study shows that Brazil′s major cities are losing nearly 70 billion (around 4% of the country′s GDP) in worked hours due to traffic jams. Not to mention the decrease in the quality of life and increase of health problems in the population.

Traffic jams are mainly caused by the exponential increase in the fleet, lack of planning and investment in public transportation. The public demonstrations in 2013, the so-called Brazilian Spring, burst exactly because of a rise of bus fares. It revealed an extreme dissatisfaction of citizens towards the high prices and the bad quality service provided by the system.

Needless to mention that violence is another threat to Brazilian cities′ development. There are 17 cities ranked amongst the top 50 most violent cities, alerts the Mexican Citizen Council for Public Security and Justice in its 2018 annual report. And violence is hitting most cruelly youngsters in the suburbs.

Nonetheless, Brazilian cities are innovating and learning to overcome these major urban challenges

Fortaleza Road Safety Program

Fortaleza, in the northeast of the country, is a good example of how cities can learn from each other with the support of international organizations. Inspired mainly by New York, the Road Safety Program was possible with the investment of Bloomberg Philanthropies Road Safety Network and the technical support of the World Resources Institute (WRI), the Global Designing Cities Initiative and other partners.

The city has improved its urban mobility and road safety policies with the implementation of new mass public transportation, cycling network, and bike sharing schemes. All of that, combined with low-cost tactical urbanism interventions, has led the city to reduce 35% its road-related fatalities in less than 5 years. The project is also changing the paradigm of urban mobility and the people′s mindset towards the public space. That initiative led Fortaleza to engage in several other international collaborations, for example with the World Bank and OECD.

This successful program is turning Fortaleza a reference itself in road safety and urban mobility in Latin America. It demonstrates that cities not necessarily need multi-million dollar budgets to drive real impact.

BrazilLab

Brazilian cities are also learning from the civil society and the innovation ecosystem. With the digital transformation and citizens′ increasing demands for more efficient public services, governments need to build new collaborative arrangements, bringing innovative and scalable solutions to the administration and to people. In the other hand, a whole ecosystem of startups with solutions to urban and governmental challenges are looking for market opportunities. But there are still obstacles of various kinds that prevent an effective collaboration with the government.

Several initiatives are popping up to fill this gap. From hackathons organized by the private sector to partnerships between accelerators and municipal governments, urban labs, amongst other types of collaboration schemes.

Probably one of the most consistent programs is BrazilLab, an innovation hub that connects startups with the public sector, led by the civil society. It works as a startup accelerator with specific mentoring on how to deal with the challenges of with municipalities, while matchmaking with cities. It is also advocating the govtech agenda into the public sector in order to create a new procurement and engagement models that can promote greater uptake of startups delivering public services.

Brazilian cities are not only learning, but they are also inspiring cities worldwide

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) Curitiba

Probably the most representative example on how Brazilian cities are inspiring others is Curitiba (south of Brazil), with its Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). The BRT, also called a busway or transitway, is a bus-based public transport system designed to improve capacity and reliability relative to a conventional bus system.

This revolutionary system was first conceived and implemented in Curitiba in the 1970s and has rapidly spread globally, not only in developing countries but also in the developed world. To date, there are approximately 170 cities worldwide using the system, with over 5.100 km and counting over 33 million passengers transported daily in a similar system, according to Global BRT Data.

Again, the role of city networks and international organizations like World Resources Institute (WRI), The Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) and Metropolis were instrumental to help cities plan and implement those systems. 

Rio Operation′s Center – a test bed for new urban solutions

A more recent example is Rio′s Operations Center. It was the first deliverable from the city related to the Rio 2016 Olympic Games and one of the most modern operations centers in the world focused on urban operations, mobility and disaster risk reduction. Its innovative approach not only relies on the cutting-edge technology embarked but mainly, on an organizational change: for the first time all municipal departments are gathered transversally in the same place 24/7.

Also important to highlight how Rio City Hall is using it as a test bed for new applications and solutions. For example, Rio was the pilot city for Waze′s Connected Citizens Program (CCP) which allows the notifications of thousands of users to feed the center′s dashboards and, at the same time, the city feeds the app with information regarding special transit operations such as big events. Taking this partnership as a starting point, Waze has created a city network of its own. CCP has over 600 municipalities collaborating to exchange data and experience on urban mobility monitoring.

Another great partnership that is helping Rio boost its efforts on resilience is with NASA. Both institutions are co-developing software that will support the forecast of landslides during storms. The software leverages NASA′s global models using local data to monitor regions that can be most affected. It is the first time NASA is partnering with a city and it will eventually help them scale the programs to other cities, just like Waze′s CCP.

Decentralized Cooperation Brazil – Mozambique

One additional trend to consider on decentralized cooperation is the emergence of south-south peer learning initiatives. That is the case of the multi-stakeholder cooperation project between 6 Brazilian (Canoas, Porto Alegre, Belo Horizonte, Guarulhos, Maringá e Vitória) and 8 Mozambican municipalities (Matola, Maputo, Dondo, Inhambane, Manhi?a, Lichinga, Nampula, Xai Xai).

The whole concept revolves around the fact that southern cities share similar challenges, in that case, urban poverty, and social inequality. The project aimed to improve the development and management capacities of municipalities involved as well of the two National Local Government associations (the Mozambican National Association of Municipalities (ANAMM) and the Brazilian National Front of Mayors (FNP), through initiatives involving the exchange of good practices, institutional training and networking, in areas such as Urban Planning, Land Policy and Participatory Budgeting.

Once more, international city networks have played a major part in making things work. In that case, United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) has supported the mobilization of cities, coordinated the many activities organized and provided the learning methodology.

 Initiatives like this are shifting the paradigm of the decentralized cooperation, demonstrating that emerging countries have a lot to teach and that learning between cities may require an innovative multi-stakeholder ecosystem approach to be effective.  

 Insights

 Below there are some key takeaways from the research undertaken to develop this article:

• Cities are demanding bundled learning services in order to drive real impact in the territory. It is not only about knowledge exchange, but also networking, technical assistance, project implementation support.
• Multi-city, multi-stakeholder initiatives, including civil society, are proving to be very effective to boost learning.
• The ¨Global South¨ is an immense source of learning. Developing cities cannot only transmit knowledge among peers but also for developed cities.
• It is necessary to build a shared vision with the local government and stakeholders and stick to it
• Political and technical willingness is key to effective learning processes

Gabriel Bello Barros - International Innovation Consultant / [email protected]

* This article is based on a presentation I delivered at the first networking event “use. learn. share” held on March, 6th at Berlin City Hall. The event counted on the participation of 300 people and was hosted by Mr. Michel Muller, Governing Mayor of Berlin, Mrs. Barbara Berninger, Head of the division EU and International Affairs at the Berlin Senate Department for the Environment, Mr. Octavi de la Varga, Metropolis, and their amazing teams. The use.urban sustainability exchange is an online platform led by the City of Berlin and the Metropolis association dedicated to promoting sustainable urban development. It showcases successful programmes, projects, and policies and connects citymakers who work in this field.