Las Urbanistas

Simon Norfolk for The New York Times; The Wire Opera House (1992), completed in about two months under the guidance of Curitiba’s visionary architect-mayor, Jaime Lerner.

On Saturday mornings, children gather to paint and draw in the main downtown shopping street of Curitiba, in southern Brazil. More than just a charming tradition, the child’s play commemorates a key victory in a hard-fought, ongoing war. Back in 1972, the new mayor of the city, an architect and urban planner named Jaime Lerner, ordered a lightning transformation of six blocks of the street into a pedestrian zone. The change was recommended in a master plan for the city that was approved six years earlier, but fierce objections from the downtown merchants blocked its implementation. Lerner instructed his secretary of public works to institute the change quickly and asked how long it would take. “He said he needed four months,” Lerner recalled recently. “I said, ‘Forty-eight hours.’ He said, ‘You’re crazy.’ I said, ‘Yes, I’m crazy, but do it in 48 hours.’ ” The municipal authorities were able to accomplish it in three days, beginning on a Friday night and installing paving, lighting, planters and furniture by the end of the day on Monday. “Being a very weak mayor, if I start to do it and take too long, everyone could stop it through a juridical demand,” Lerner went on to explain. “If they stop the work, it’s finished. I had to do it very fast, at least in part. Because we had discussed it a great deal. Sometimes they have to have a demonstration effect.”

Simon Norfolk for The New York Times; A station on Curitiba’s rapid-transit-bus system.

Simon Norfolk for The New York Times; Curitiba’s rapid-transit buses can move 36,000 passengers an hour, a cheap alternative to a subway system.

Simon Norfolk for The New York Times

Despite its development as a city for public transportation, Curitiba is said to have more cars per capita than any other city in Brazil.

The demonstration worked. Within days, impressed by the increase in their business, the once-recalcitrant shop owners were demanding an extension of the traffic-free district. Some diehard motorists, however, sulked. Lerner heard that a group of them were planning to disregard the prohibition and drive their cars into the street on a Saturday morning. So he contrived an unbreachable defense. With the cooperation of the city’s teachers and a donation of rolls of newsprint and boxes of paint, on that morning he assembled several hundred children in the street, where they sat and drew pictures. “It was to say, ‘This is being done for children and their parents — don’t even think of putting cars there,’ ” he told me. The sputtered-out protest was the last resistance to the pedestrianization of the shopping area, which has since expanded from the original 6 blocks to encompass about 15 today. “Of course, this was very emblematic,” Lerner recounted. “We were trying to say, ‘This city is not for cars.’ When many mayors at the time were planning for individual cars, we were countervailing.” He observed that it was emblematic in another way also: “From that point, they said, ‘If he could do this in 72 hours, he can do anything.’ It was a good strategy.”

An opening salvo, the creation of the pedestrian zone inaugurated a series of programs by Lerner and his colleagues that made Curitiba a famous model of late-20th-century urban planning. In the early 1970s, when Brazil was welcoming any industry, no matter how toxic its byproducts, Curitiba decided to admit only nonpolluters; to accommodate them, it constructed an industrial district that reserved so much land for green space that it was derided as a “golf course” until it succeeded in filling up with major businesses while its counterparts in other Latin American cities were flagging. Through the creation of two dozen recreational parks, many with lakes to catch runoff in low-lying areas that flood periodically, Curitiba managed, at a time of explosive population growth, to increase its green areas from 5 square feet per inhabitant to an astounding 560 square feet. The city promoted “green” policies before they were fashionable and called itself “the ecological capital of Brazil” in the 1980s, when there were no rivals for such a title. Today, Curitiba remains a pilgrimage destination for urbanists fascinated by its bus system, garbage-recycling program and network of parks. It is the answer to what might otherwise be a hypothetical question: How would cities look if urban planners, not politicians, took control?

Although the children who paint on Saturday mornings are no longer needed to protect the downtown shopping street from cars, the battle to keep Curitiba green is never-ending. Indeed, some say it is going badly these days. The rivers, once crystalline, reek of untreated sewage. The bus system that has won admirers throughout the world appears to be nearing capacity; what’s more, Curitiba, by some measures, has a higher per capita ownership of private cars than any city in Brazil — even exceeding BrasÃlia, a city that was designed for cars. Curitiba’s garbage-recycling rate has been declining over the last six or seven years, and the only landfill in the municipal region will be full by the end of 2008. Jorge Wilheim, the São Paulo architect who drafted Curitiba’s master plan in 1965, says: “When we made the plan, the population was 350,000. We thought in a few years it would reach 500,000. But it has grown much bigger.” The municipality of Curitiba today has 1.8 million people, and the population of the metropolitan region is 3.2 million. “I know the plan of Curitiba is very famous, and I am the first to enjoy it, but that was in ‘65,” Wilheim continues. “The metropolitan region must have a new vision.”

It is often said of Curitiba that it doesn’t feel like Brazil. Depending on who’s speaking, that can be intended as a compliment or a criticism. Populated by European immigrants in the 19th century, Curitiba has a demographic makeup that is largely more fair-skinned and well educated than that of Brazil’s tropical north. It is also unusually affluent. Unlike São Paulo, with its startling extremes of wealth and poverty, much of Curitiba to an American eye looks familiarly middle class. Even the scruffy used-car lots have a seediness reminiscent of Los Angeles, not the Rio de Janeiro of “City of God.” The city, especially the large downtown, is very clean, thanks to municipal sanitation trucks and the freelance carrinheiros, or cart people, who pick up trash to sell at recycling centers.

During my visit to Curitiba in March, the city was the host of an international biodiversity conference. While I hadn’t known of it when I scheduled my trip, the coincidence was about as remarkable as finding a design show to greet you in Milan or a wine festival under way in Bordeaux. Environmentalism is the heart of Curitiba’s self-identity, and the municipal government is always devising new schemes that showcase the brand. The rest of the world has caught on, if not yet caught up. Ecological awareness is architecturally trendy. This year’s winner of the prestigious Pritzker Prize is Richard Rogers, a longtime proponent of mass transit, lower energy consumption and ecologically sensitive buildings. Commercially, real-estate developers from Beijing to Santa Monica are brandishing their LEED certificates (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) as they market condominiums and office suites to green-minded consumers. While it is unusually ambitious, the 25-year plan that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg proposed last month for New York is part of an international wave of recognition that cities must live more responsibly, especially when it comes to their effusions of climate-warming gases and their excretions of mountains of solid waste. Bloomberg’s most contentious idea — a “congestion tax” on cars entering traffic-clogged districts during peak hours — has been working for more than four years in London (and more than 30 years in Singapore) to increase the numbers of people using public transportation. Interestingly, Curitiba adopted an opposite approach, brandishing a carrot instead of a stick. The city planners suspected that public transportation would attract more users if it was more attractive. And that reasonable assumption turned out to be correct.

The efficient buses that zip across the Curitiba metropolitan region are the most conspicuously un-Brazilian feature of the city. Instead of descending into subway stations, Curitibanos file into ribbed glass tubes that are boarding platforms for the rapid-transit buses. (The glass tubes resemble the “fosteritos” that Norman Foster later designed for the metro in Bilbao, Spain.) Curitiba has five express-bus avenues, with a sixth in development, to allow you to traverse the city with speedy dispatch. In the early 1970s, most cities investing in public transportation were building subways or light-rail networks. Curitiba lacked the resources and the time to install a train system. Lerner says that compared with the Curitiba bus network, a light rail system would have required 20 times the financial investment; a subway would have cost 100 times as much. “We tried to understand, what is a subway?” he recalls. “It has to have speed, comfort, reliability and good frequency. But why does it have to be underground? Underground is very expensive. With dedicated lanes and not stopping on every corner, we could do it with buses.” Because widening the avenues would have required a lengthy and costly expropriation process, the planners came up with a “trinary” system that embraced three parallel thoroughfares: a large central avenue dedicated to two-way rapid-bus traffic (flanked by slow lanes for cars making short local trips) and, a block over on each side, an avenue for fast one-way automobile traffic.

When the bus system was inaugurated, it transported 54,000 passengers daily. That number has ballooned to 2.3 million, in large part because of innovations that permit passengers to board and exit rapidly. In 1992, Lerner and his team established the tubular boarding platforms with fare clerks and turnstiles, so that the mechanisms for paying and boarding are separated, as in a subway. To carry more people at a time, the city introduced flexible-hinged articulated buses that open their doors wide for rapid entry and egress; then, when the buses couldn’t cope with the demand, the Lerner team called for bi-articulated buses of 88 feet with two hinges (and a 270-passenger capacity), which Volvo manufactured at Curitiba’s request. Comparing the capacities of bus and subway systems, Lerner reels off numbers with a promoter’s panache. “A normal bus in a normal street conducts x passengers a day,” he told me. “With a dedicated lane, it can transport 2x a day. If you have an articulated bus in a dedicated lane, 2.7x passengers. If you add a boarding tube, you can achieve 3.4x passengers, and if you add double articulated buses, you can have four times as many passengers as a normal bus in a normal street.” He says that with an arrival frequency of 30 seconds, you can transport 36,000 passengers every hour — which is about the same load he would have achieved with a subway.

Unfortunately, the trends of bus usage are down. While the system has expanded to cover 13 of the cities in the metropolitan region, charging a flat fare that in practice subsidizes the trips of the mostly poorer workers who live in outlying areas, bus ridership within the Curitiba municipality has been declining. “We are losing bus passengers and gaining cars,” says Luis Fragomeni, a Curitiba urban planner. He observes that, like potential users of public transport everywhere, many Curitibanos view it as noisy, crowded and unsafe. Undermining the thinking behind the master plan, even those who live alongside the high-density rapid-bus corridors are buying cars. “The licensing of cars in Curitiba is 2.5 times higher than babies being born in Curitiba,” he says. “Trouble.” Because cars are status symbols, attempts to discourage people from buying them are probably futile. “We say, ‘Have your own car, but keep it in the garage and use it only on weekends,’ ” Fragomeni remarks. And the public-transport system must be upgraded continuously to remain an appealing alternative to private vehicles. “That competition is very hard,” says Paulo Schmidt, the president of URBS, the rapid-bus system. During peak hours, buses on the main routes are already arriving at almost 30-second intervals; any more buses, and they would back up. While acknowledging his iconoclasm in questioning the sufficiency of Curitiba’s trademark bus network, Schmidt nevertheless says a light-rail system is needed to complement it.

When it comes to modifying human behavior, persuading urban dwellers to sort their garbage can be harder than coaxing them to garage their cars. Lerner and his allies have claimed that they have succeeded beyond the dreams of environmentalists in far more eco-friendly countries, including Japan and Sweden. Curitiba was a pioneer in separating recyclable materials, with its “Garbage That Is Not Garbage” program, inaugurated in 1989. (The city leaders have a flair for slogans.) Recycling has assumed a new urgency, because the entire metropolitan area contains only one landfill, and it will be exhausted by the end of next year. José Antonio Andreguetto, Curitiba’s secretary for the environment, told me that 22 percent of the city’s garbage is being separated for recycling, a rate that has been declining over the last half-dozen years; he says he hopes to bring the number up to 34 percent by the end of the current mayor’s term in 2008. Lerner says the numbers have been eroding until recently because some recent mayors haven’t emphasized the issue, but he maintains that the recycling rate in Curitiba is still the highest in the world.

It is very hard to determine how accurate the estimates are for garbage separation. “Curitiba began early to look at recycling garbage — that is true, and it is good,” says Teresa Urban, a local journalist and environmental activist. “But the separation of recycled garbage is a little part of all the garbage we have here. There is no tradition of participation here. The mayor sold to the people the idea that this is a wonderful city. And the people think, This is wonderful, I don’t have to do anything.”

Like other left-wing critics, Urban traces the lack of participation to an original sin. The progressive urban planning of Curitiba was not initiated by a democratic process; it was set in motion by the military dictatorship that seized power in 1964 and ruled Brazil until the mid-’80s. Its environmentalism is rooted in authoritarianism. “They didn’t have to confront the public through public participation, and the decisions could be made by urban planners — architects acting as politicians,” says Clara Irazábal, who has written a book comparing the urban planning experiences of Curitiba and Portland, Ore. The city that has been called the most forward-looking in the Western Hemisphere is an outgrowth of an era that many Brazilians prefer not to look back on. Jaime Lerner, the archangel of the Curitiba green movement, was anointed by the dragons of war.

Always an anomaly, Curitiba became a model for our day by defying the spirit of the time. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, urban developers throughout the world, influenced by Le Corbusier and his followers, were remodeling cities to facilitate the easy circulation of people in automobiles. But in Curitiba, an informal group of young architects, urban planners and civil engineers at the city’s Federal University of Paraná, which is the oldest university in Brazil, objected more effectively to the mayor’s widening of streets and a proposed highway bypass that threatened the historic city center. As luck would have it, one of these outraged civil engineers, Fanchette Rischbieter, was married to the chairman of the government-controlled investment company that was financing the construction of roads in Paraná, the largely agricultural state of which Curitiba is the capital. “I said, ‘It doesn’t make sense, my wife and her friends are against these people — why don’t we make a plan?’ ” Karlos Rischbieter recalls. Selected by the city, Jorge Wilheim came up with a master plan that concentrated high-density construction along two long rapid-transit axes that skirted the center. At least as important as his transportation and zoning recommendations was Wilheim’s request for an urban-planning institute to implement them. In retrospect, the enthusiastic and talented staff of the Institute of Urban Research and Planning of Curitiba, which is known by its Portuguese acronym, Ippuc, ensured the success of Curitiba’s redevelopment.

Still, there was a lag of five years from the formal adoption of the master plan in 1966 until its implementation, which began with the governor’s selection of Lerner, who was president of Ippuc, to be mayor in 1971. Wilheim the planner needed Lerner the doer to turn abstract ideas into inventive reality. Curitiba has been studied more than copied (one notable exception is a Curitiba-style bus system in Bogotá, Colombia) because unlike Lerner, most mayors stumble over political obstacles. “I always tell a story of the ’80s,” Rischbieter says. “A friend from São Paulo came with his wife and son to visit Curitiba. He did not know this city. I took my car and showed him Curitiba for three hours. When I left him at the hotel, he said, ‘What did you show people before Jaime Lerner?’ “

A spark plug of ideas, Lerner, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, combines salesmanship and pragmatism. Following his mayoral terms, he won election twice as governor of Paraná State, retiring in 2002 at the age of 65 to devote himself to his architecture firm and to worldwide speaking engagements espousing green urban planning. He has a large head that seems to rest directly on wide shoulders; knowing his passion for recycling, you might almost believe that his thick-set body has been through a compactor. He radiates a highly compressed and infectious energy, with a can-do assertiveness that borders on arrogance. “He never asked if something was good or not,” Rischbieter remarks. “He would say, ‘I’ll go do it.’ I would say, ‘You have to go ask people and get their opinions.’ He would say, ‘No, they won’t agree with me, and it has to be done.’ He is not a political animal, he is a dictator.” Rischbieter admires Lerner; others, however, using the same descriptive terminology, do not. In the rough-and-tumble of Brazilian politics, it has become customary for supporters of populist parties to disparage Lerner (who personifies his talented team to allies and foes alike) as a creature of the dictatorship. According to this argument, the generals detested politicians; they admired technical experts. In Curitiba, they found a showplace to display their accomplishments to the world. “The military are addicted to planning,” says Fragomeni, who has an ambivalent attitude toward Lerner. “If they don’t plan, they don’t go forward. They invested in Curitiba. Mr. Lerner may like it or not. His continuity was ensured by the military government.” For his part, Lerner says that he had a far harder time with the military dictatorship than he did later, as an elected official. Under the military regime, he served at the pleasure of the governor and the state assembly. “I could be fired the next day,” he says. “Being an elected mayor, I was stronger. Nobody could fire me.”

In two terms (1971-75 and 1979-83) under the military regime, and then in an elected third term (1989-92) after the restoration of democracy, Lerner translated the master plan into concrete and leafy reality. Like an impatient muralist, he worked on a wide scope at high speed. “I know cities that plant 10,000 trees, and they make a whole festival,” he told me. “We planted a million trees. I am obsessed with scale.” He sought to make a livable city; over time that segued smoothly into an ecological city. Parks initially intended as recreational areas would also absorb floodwaters and extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Lerner used tax breaks to wheedle landowners into turning over portions of their property, which typically had little value at the time. In the rocky northern district, he converted one flooded quarry into the Wire Opera House, which has become a city icon, and another into the Free University of the Environment, a non-degree-granting institution that educates people on ecological issues. He transformed land that was serving as a refuse dump into a botanical garden; named for Fanchette Rischbieter, who died in 1989, it features a duck pond, French parterres and a classic Victorian greenhouse. The architecture in all three of these parks is less noteworthy for its formal design than for its building materials — salvaged telephone poles, mesh grating, metal tubing — and the speed of construction. From blueprint drafts to opening night, the Wire Opera House took about two months to complete. Lerner refers to such projects as “urban acupuncture” that energizes the development process.

When I would ask people if they thought Lerner could have accomplished his reforms under a democracy, people sympathetic to both Lerner and the military (like Rischbieter) or critical of both (like Urban) would say no; but most, professing admiration for Lerner but distaste for the military, said the dictatorship was not a precondition for his success. Lerner and Wilheim were emphatic on this point. “Not being a traditional politician helped me a lot,” Lerner told me. Nonetheless, by entering public life, even a self-professed apolitical man becomes a political actor. What struck me was the way in which the return of democracy changed Lerner’s core constituency. Under the generals, he was vulnerable mainly to the business community. That is why, for instance, he had to implement the pedestrian mall so quickly: if the business class lost confidence in him, the state assembly would have insisted that he be replaced. In a democratic Brazil, Lerner and his successors are threatened not just by the rich, but perhaps even more acutely by the poor — politically, by populist parties, and demographically, by the inexorable population growth. In politics, the pendulum has swung, as it always does. For the first time in 15 years, the winning candidate in Curitiba’s last mayoral election, in 2004, was not directly associated with the Lerner Group, the firm of 10 architects and planners that Lerner runs. Still, the new administration is continuing on the path that Lerner blazed. More worrisome for Curitiba’s future is the demographic trend. Over the past half-century, the state of Paraná underwent a radical change, from a labor-intensive coffee economy to a mechanized agriculture of soybeans. Hundreds of thousands lost their jobs. Many of the dispossessed have relocated to the Curitiba metropolitan region, which in Brazil is famously livable. Every day, more keep coming.

The “invasions” of homeless people onto unoccupied land spill like ink stains over the neatly outlined development maps of the urban planners, not only in Curitiba but across Brazil. One Saturday morning, I visited the neighborhood of Nossa Senhora da Luz, where a small group of people waited with sacks or improvised carts of garbage. The hardscrabble community dates from an early invasion of the 1970s. Today the streets are paved and the houses are solid cinder block, but unlike downtown Curitiba, here it is immediately apparent from the bleak, scrubby streetscape and the dark skins of the populace that you are in a third-world setting. I was there to observe one of 79 exchange centers that the municipality of Curitiba has established in communities where the streets are too narrow or too bumpy for large garbage trucks to circulate. Instead, people can carry their trash to biweekly collection sites and trade four pounds of garbage for one pound of vegetables. Mostly they bring plastic, paper and cardboard. At another site, run by the community council, more valuable aluminum cans are collected in return for money, and at yet another, organic material is traded for bus tokens. Compared with middle-class people, the residents of this neighborhood do not generate so much recyclable material; much of what they trade they prospect for around the city. Curitiba may be more successful in enlisting poor citizens to function as part-time carrinheiros than in enlightening better-off residents on their civic responsibilities.

The largest working-class housing development within Curitiba is called Bairro Novo, or “new neighborhood.” It was developed hurriedly, you might say frantically, after a band of 3,000 people, at the start of a three-day holiday weekend in September 1992, invaded a nearby parcel of vacant land where a disused railroad line once operated. This was the same sort of stealth tactic that Lerner employed two decades earlier to pedestrianize the shopping street, but now it was being used against him — coordinated, he maintains, by his political opponents, who controlled the governorship then as they do now. Since the security forces are directed by the state of Paraná and not the city, there was no way Lerner could stop the so-called Ferrovila (or railroad town) invasion. He says that he was especially infuriated because his administration had been researching the creation of a much larger development on the same land, housing 10 times as many people, as well as establishing schools and other social services. Instead, his team began planning the Bairro Novo on a parcel of land that was slated for development a decade or two later. There are 80,000 people living in Bairro Novo today. For a while, the illegal squats died off. “If you have a good alternative, you can prevent the invasions,” Lerner says.

Recently, invasions have started up again. “There is a feeling that it may be politically motivated,” says Fragomeni, the urban planner, who served until March as president of Ippuc. He reports that in Curitiba today, there are 13,000 households in invasion settlements, 6,000 of them in ecologically fragile areas. Squatters often occupy land by rivers, both to obtain a water source and because, by law, the riverbanks can’t be developed. “The land is forbidden, and it is free at the same time,” says Urban, the environmental activist. Raw sewage from these settlements flows directly into the rivers. Fragomeni says that fewer than 70 percent of Curitiba households have sewer connections. The current administration, led by Mayor Beto Richa (who was endorsed by Lerner but is not professionally associated with him), is trying to alleviate the problem with a new program to clean up the water basin of the sadly polluted Bariguà River: relocating people to housing that is a little farther from the river, replanting vegetation on the banks and linking houses to the sewage system.

The program to reclaim the Bariguà basin was galvanized by the most recent invasion in February, when 1,500 people seized land near Ferrovila in Bariguà Park and hit a sensitive nerve. Their encampment is provocatively close to Ecoville, a controversial upper-middle-class development that arose in the mid-’90s along one of the rapid-bus corridors. As Lerner acidly observes of Ecoville, “I don’t like this project, because it is not ‘eco’ and it is not ‘ville.’ ” Ecoville is a self-contained development in which tall buildings loom over patches of vegetation and looping roads. It’s an unconvincing version of the discredited Corbusian model of “the city in the park,” an idea that the developers self-consciously reference by naming one of these buildings “Le Corbusier.” Many buildings have been labeled for works by Picasso — the Arlequin, the Pierrot, even the Guernica. One noteworthy Picasso-christened tower, the Suite Vollard, features 11 full-floor residences, each of which is supposed to be able to rotate independently. The Suite Vollard is 10 years overdue for occupancy. Its engineering is still unproved.

Ferrovila and Ecoville: in close proximity, you can see the politicized landless and the profit-minded land developers who threaten Curitiba’s status as an ecological city. A reputation can be as hard to uphold as to establish. Unlike his three immediate predecessors, Mayor Richa — a boyish, blow-dried 41-year-old civil engineer from a prominent political family — is not an urban planner. And Ippuc, while still powerful, no longer directs the show. Richa has discontinued the longstanding mayoral custom, established by Lerner, of attending a weekly meeting at Ippuc. Under Lerner and his successors, “the mayor sat in Ippuc, and you felt what he wanted,” Fragomeni says. “It was a very verticalized government. Ippuc also planned the budget for the city. There’s democracy now, which is good. But it is no longer a pyramid; it’s a network. The mayor now expects you to propose what Curitiba should look like. He’s not a town planner.”

Nor is Curitiba a single town any longer. It’s a conurbation. Planning must be for the metropolitan region, not just for the municipality. Does it matter that Curitiba bans polluting industries if the neighboring town of Araucária has an oil refinery belching smoke on the city line? Similarly, if the new immigrants to the poor surrounding communities don’t recycle, then Curitiba’s landfill, the only such facility in the metropolitan region, will fill up even sooner. Like garbage, water does not respect city limits: Curitiba’s water supply depends on reservoirs controlled by municipalities outside its borders. What was never simple has become even more complex. For a long time, the citizens of Curitiba were so proud of the city’s reputation as an urban showplace that they kept re-electing urban planners — self-styled technical experts who seemed to be above politics and who vaunted their expertise in running the buses, building the parks and recycling the garbage. But a mayor today must be able to negotiate successfully with other mayors if reform is to work. Mayors need to be politicians, even in Curitiba.

J. Emilio Flores For The New York Times

William A. Witte of Related California, whose parent, Related Companies, is overseeing a development on Grand Avenue in Los Angeles.

LOS ANGELES — The influx of thousands of new residents has reinvigorated this city’s downtown in recent years, but most of the development has been clustered on its southern end, near the Staples Center, the sports and entertainment arena.

Frank Gehry Architects
The Grand Avenue development in downtown Los Angeles.

For more than a decade, however, Eli Broad, a billionaire and civic leader, has envisioned a vibrant focal point for the city — “a place where people from all communities want to gather,” as he put it — on the opposite edge of downtown. That section, known as Bunker Hill, is home to some of the city’s leading cultural institutions and architecturally significant structures, but they are scattered amid a hodgepodge of unsightly parking lots and drab government buildings.

Now Related Urban, the division of the Related Companies that developed the massive Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle in Manhattan, is poised to try to fulfill Mr. Broad’s ambitions. By the end of the year, the company expects to begin demolition for the first phase of a $2.05 billion mixed-use project along Grand Avenue, opposite the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Designed by the concert hall’s architect, Frank Gehry, the Grand Avenue development will echo the Time Warner Center in some respects — the plans call for a five-star 275-room Mandarin Oriental Hotel, luxury condominiums, restaurants run by celebrity chefs and an upscale food market. But it is also expected to feature terraces and rooftop gardens to take advantage of the mild climate, the developers say.

Included in the $750 million first phase, which extends from First to Second Streets and reaches 35 feet from Grand Avenue to Olive Street, are 400 condominiums in two towers, 48 and 24 stories respectively, to be priced at around $1,000 a square foot or higher; 100 apartments devoted to families earning less than $35,000 a year; 284,000 square feet of retail space; and a 16-acre park linking the Music Center and City Hall to replace an unused swath of sloping green space near the government buildings.

As part of an agreement with community groups and public officials, Related Companies is to advance $50 million of its ground-lease rent toward the cost of the park. The agreement also requires Related and its tenants to meet specified hiring and wage goals and to set aside one-fifth of the units for low- and moderate-income residents. In exchange, officials have agreed to just under $100 million in subsidies, principally from hotel tax revenues, said William A. Witte, the president of Related California.

The City Council and County Board of Supervisors recently gave their blessing to the project, and Mr. Gehry said he expects to complete the design in June.

Rather than compete with his concert hall, with its billowing stainless-steel walls, the glassy Grand Avenue development should play a “supporting role,” Mr. Gehry said, adding that “you don’t put a bunch of iconic buildings one next to the other.” With construction costs rising, the architect said he has had to “adjust the project to that reality” by, for example, searching for less-expensive materials.

Unlike the planned Atlantic Yards development near downtown Brooklyn, which is Mr. Gehry’s other major urban project, Grand Avenue has engendered few fireworks. But some opponents maintain that subsidies are not justified for a project intended primarily for wealthy residents. They say the developer is already getting a break on the land.

Joel Kotkin, a Los Angeles resident and author of “The City: A Global History,” also argues that Los Angeles is a decentralized place with a number of lively downtowns, including Santa Monica, Pasadena and West Hollywood. In his view, the city would do better to nurture organic downtown neighborhoods, like its fashion district, “instead of replicating experiences you can get anywhere.”

But Mr. Broad said that piecemeal development of the city- and county-owned sites would have been a mistake. “I was fearful we would have unplanned development there that would create a mess,” he said. He also said that allowing the developer to define the project ensured that it would be economically workable. “You’ve got to find a developer that’s got the experience to make it work from a commercial point of view,” he said. “Without understanding what is going to work financially, you end up with no project.”

Since 1999, when the local zoning ordinance was changed to allow residential conversion of older office buildings, more than 15,000 units of housing have been built or are under construction downtown, said Carol E. Schatz, the president of the Los Angeles Downtown Center Business Improvement District.

About 29,000 people live downtown, many of them young, well-paid single people who walk to work, according to a recent survey. They are also urban pioneers who are undaunted by the many homeless people who camp out downtown. The new residents are also willing to drive five miles or more to shop for groceries. In July, however, a long-awaited 50,500-square-foot Ralph’s Fresh Fare supermarket is to open at Ninth and Flower Streets, said Terry O’Neill, a spokesman for the chain.

For the first time in memory, a number of office tenants, including Perkins Coie, a law firm, and Psomas, an engineering firm, have been migrating from the West Side to downtown, where rents are cheaper, said H. Carl Muhlstein, an executive vice president at Cushman & Wakefield.

These rents are rising, yet vacancies also increased last year, from 11.9 percent to 15.2 percent. Mr. Muhlstein attributed the rise in vacancies to the consolidation of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s headquarters and the merger of Sanwa Bank and Tokai Bank.

In addition to Grand Avenue, another megadevelopment is planned for downtown Los Angeles — a $2.5 billion entertainment and retail complex known as L.A. Live, which is under construction next to the Staples Center. Developed by the arena’s owner, AEG, it is expected to cater to sports and pop music fans and offer some of the flash of Times Square.

The Related project, by contrast, is designed to appeal to older, more affluent residents, including international buyers and others seeking a downtown pied-à-terre offering hotel services and restaurants. “That’s something that L.A. hasn’t seen,” Mr. Witte said.

Related Companies has not announced any retail leases yet, although Kenneth A. Himmel, the chief executive of Related Urban, said two potential anchor tenants for the freestanding retail structures were talking with Mr. Gehry.

Rick J. Caruso, the developer of the Grove, the popular open-air retail and entertainment center near the Farmers Market at Third Street and Fairfax Avenue, said Related was unlikely to have a problem attracting a supermarket and other stores to serve its residents. But he said downtown might not be ready for larger retailers that need to draw from a large base of customers. “The jury is still out on the retail,” Mr. Caruso said.

The Grand Avenue project is getting started at a time when the market for high-end condos appears to be softening. In December, KB Homes withdrew from its partnership with AEG to build a 54-story hotel and condominium project at L.A. Live. A planned condominium tower designed by Thom Mayne at Broadway and 11th Street was shelved after it was unable to attract financing. And Standard Pacific Corporation abandoned plans to buy a new building near Union Station and sell its 272 units as condominiums. But Mr. Witte said projects that faltered were not in desirable locations. “The best-located projects are doing very well,” he said.

Victor B. MacFarlane, a managing principal of MacFarlane Partners, one of Related’s investment partners in Grand Avenue, said he was not worried about the market’s long-term prospects.

“There’s no question that the condo market right now is softer,” he said. “But we believe that in two or three years it will be different. We believe that downtown L.A. is for real and not just a flash-in-the-pan trend.”

Correction: April 20, 2007

An article in the Square Feet pages of Business Day on Wednesday about plans for a large mixed-used real estate development in downtown Los Angeles misstated the number of housing units that have either been built downtown since 1999 or are under construction. It is more than 15,000, not 1,500.

NEW URBAN CENTERS TAKE ON A STAGE-SET FEEL IN BAY AREA

John King, Chronicle Urban Design Writer; Monday, April 9, 2007; Part 2

This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

The construction cranes that are roosting all over downtown these days are one thing. But the real hints that the neighborhood is changing come in more subtle forms — such as the tours Derrick Moore has been giving around downtown recently.

What has changed, downtown backers say, is how the burgeoning neighborhood is being perceived. After years of being not quite there, retailers seem to think that the area has reached — or is near reaching — a tipping point.

Residents have moved in, with the population now at 30,000. Some of downtown’s long-anticipated, large-scale projects — including a supermarket and a movie theater — are only months from opening.

It’s this trend that is behind much of the debate over the city’s proposal to sell the air rights above the Los Angeles Convention Center, allowing developers to build larger and denser residential buildings downtown.

Because the Convention Center was originally zoned for towers, the city wants to sell the unused airspace as a way of boosting development elsewhere in downtown beyond what current zoning laws allow.

Backers argue that selling air rights would boost downtown’s residential population even more. The more residents downtown can lure, the thinking goes, the larger the market for upscale retail. Until now, retail development has lagged behind residential development, with some merchants waiting to see whether the downtown boom is for real.

Questions about downtown’s future have heightened with the recent cooling of Southern California’s real estate market. But downtown so far doesn’t appear to be suffering much, and there are growing signs that retail is actually strengthening.

Bars and restaurants are opening at a fast clip in the area, and big-name chefs are signing leases on spaces downtown — especially along a stretch of 7th Street that has been the symbol of downtown’s tangled history as a retail destination.

Retail sales in downtown ZIP Codes have been rising steadily since the late 1990s, according to the California Board of Equalization. In fiscal year 2005-06, the last year for which statistics are available, retail sales totaled $1.7 billion — up 7% from the year before.

Still, there are concerns about how the downtown area will do on weekends and evenings, the make-or-break time for many of the new businesses. Parking and transportation around the urban center also could become concerns, because many of the lots used by businesses are unavailable or could be too pricey for evening and weekend use.

And many say the area cannot reach its full potential until certain neighborhood amenities are in place.

“You are at a point where there’s a critical mass down here now, in terms of the residential component,” said Andrew Myron, owner of the Edison club and lounge. “You are going to reach a point where more people won’t move downtown unless you have the amenities downtown.”

In the decades before World War II, downtown was a retail destination. But after World War II, the rise of the suburbs — and the shopping malls that came with them — began the steep decline of downtown’s retail core.

Though downtown continued to be a destination for office workers, the area had little success as a retail center. And even after the passage several years ago of an ordinance that enabled developers to convert long-vacant historic buildings into residential loft spaces, retail continued to falter.

Downtown leaders at the time decided to concentrate on bringing housing to the area first, figuring that retail might follow the new residents. And it did, to a point. Bars and art galleries began to dot the neighborhood.

Those businesses, developer and entrepreneur Cedd Moses said, “were the first people willing to take a chance. I think restaurants have a much tougher business model. It’s harder for them to survive than a bar or art gallery; the overhead is substantially higher.”

The historical conversions, along with the construction of several residential high-rises, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Walt Disney Concert Hall and two mega-projects in the works — L.A. Live near Staples Center and Grand Avenue on Bunker Hill — have meant that “the world has changed,” said Hal Bastian, senior vice president and director of economic development for the Downtown L.A. Business Improvement District.

According to Bastian’s group, there are nearly 30,000 people living downtown — up sharply from just a few years ago. With 7,500 units under construction, the downtown population could rise to more than 40,000 by the end of next year.

Many new downtown residents are young with a lot of disposable income, according to the recent survey. And many are college students — a particularly desirable demographic for retailers, several analysts said.

Bastian said he can barely keep up with the interest in downtown. Much of his work centers around efforts to create an active nightlife along 7th Street, modeled after the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, Old Pasadena and Memphis’ Beale Street.

Several prominent L.A. restaurants, including Chaya Brasserie, have signed on to open eateries along 7th Street. Peet’s Coffee & Tea and Caffe Primo also have scouted the area.

Moses, who opened the Golden Gopher and Broadway Bar, two popular downtown nightspots, is involved in several new projects downtown, including a bar and a French brasserie along 7th.

The 7th Street effort represents just one part of what’s going on downtown, said Bert Green, a downtown resident and the owner of Bert Green Fine Art at 5th and Main streets. “Downtown is no longer one concept,” he said. “It has changed; it has become a series of mini- or micro-neighborhoods.”

What that means, Green said, is that the kind of retail that is appropriate in, say, South Park, near the Staples Center, differs from what might be found in Little Tokyo or the Fashion District.

But Green said the Historic District, where his gallery is located, remains a “tough nut” for retail. “It’s still not seeing the kind of interest from outside that all of those areas are seeing,” he said.

One key test for downtown will be the role that parking plays in its evolution. Several observers said it is hard to find inexpensive, easy parking in the district — and that could harm the push for an active street life in downtown.

“First and foremost,” Moore said, “we have to figure out the parking issue in downtown. We have to make parking easy for all the folks we are expecting to attract … for a reasonable amount of money.”

But also, they say, downtown is still waiting for what Jack Kyser, senior vice president and chief economist of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp., calls an “aha store: a store that everybody says, ‘Oh my God, they are going there.’ “

One possibility for that store, Kyser said, is the Ralphs Fresh Fare that will open downtown in June.

The area has long been without a supermarket, and the arrival of Ralphs — which started downtown at 6th and Spring in the late 1800s but abandoned the district in 1950 — is seen by many as a sign that the district’s fortunes have returned.

“I think that the Ralphs opening is going to be the adhesive to hold it all together,” Moore said of the retail renaissance. “That’s what’s missing.”

*

Will Carson/Michael Maltzan Architecture

A model of the New Carver Apartments.

LOS ANGELES — It’s a short trip from the excesses of Beverly Hills to the despair of skid row. Few architects bother to make it.

Michael Maltzan Architecture
A walkway overlooking the courtyard at the Rainbow Apartments.

Michael Maltzan is an exception. Long a darling of wealthy art world patrons, he is now laboring on the most extravagant project of his career: a 28,000-square-foot glass house for the former Hollywood powerbroker Michael Ovitz. But since opening his office here in 1995, Mr. Maltzan has also devoted part of his creative energy to a string of projects in a derelict section of downtown Los Angeles that has become one of the nation’s most notorious homeless encampments.

His first solo project there, Inner-City Arts, completed in 1995 and expanded in 2002, was an entrancing enclave of sculptured stucco-clad buildings — a theater, library, teaching spaces and ceramics studios — for after-school arts programs at the edge of skid row. Now, he has returned with two new housing complexes for the area: a recently completed 89-unit project for the chronically homeless and mentally ill and a 100-unit apartment complex for the homeless elderly and physically disabled that is scheduled to break ground this summer.

In an age when so much architectural talent seems to serve the aspirations of a wealthy, cultured elite or to deliver a wow factor for arts tourists, the project is a refreshing rarity. Bold and communally minded, with flashes of genuine elegance, the two housing complexes reassure you that a keen architectural intelligence and a social conscience are not necessarily at odds. In a better world, the projects would emerge as a model for a far-reaching architectural and social agenda.

The projects, known as the Rainbow Apartments and the New Carver Apartments and run by the nonprofit Skid Row Housing Trust, reflect changing thinking about how best to reintegrate the homeless into society. Small in scale, the complexes have a prominent visual relationship to the community. On-site providers of support services, from social workers to health care professionals, are situated where they are most needed: in the building where these people live.

Given the tight budget requirements — a deplorable constant for almost any housing project intended for the poor — there was little room for subtle touches. Instead Mr. Maltzan strove to enliven the $10 million Rainbow Apartments with a series of bold, straightforward design moves. The windows along the simple stucco exterior are arranged in a rhythmic, asymmetrical pattern and framed by bright red galvanized metal light shades. Inside, the first floor is mostly devoted to the social and medical services, the project’s literal and metaphorical base.

Tenants ascend a bright red staircase to reach the apartment level. The staircase narrows as it rises, giving you a sense of acceleration. From the top of the stair, tenants pass beneath the bridgelike form of the community room before entering a small courtyard framed by five stories of apartments on three sides.

Because of the pressure to limit costs, many of the details that Mr. Maltzan had first hoped to include in the design were eliminated. Perhaps most important, he had to drop a series of metal scrims that would have shaded the walkways overlooking the courtyard, lending the space a more ethereal, filtered aura. The big plate-glass windows he sought for the community kitchen and laundry room to forge a strong visual connection with the courtyard were also rejected as too expensive.

Yet the architecture was strong enough to resist defeat. The building’s general layout is a loose interpretation of the Spanish-style courtyard apartment buildings that have been a staple of Los Angeles architecture since the late 19th century. Mr. Maltzan’s emphasis is on communal spaces: the main entry staircase is conceived as an informal hangout for tenants; the open-air walkways that overlook the courtyard connect to a communal kitchen and common room, further breaking down the sense of isolation.

Mr. Maltzan reinforces all this by visually weaving the protective inner world of the housing complex into the rough-and-tumble fabric of the city outside. At each level, the walkways that line the interior court wind around to the outside of the building, offering views over downtown rooftops. From one upper-level staircase, tenants can gaze upon their own past: the lost souls and makeshift cardboard shelters that litter skid row. Just beyond are the twinkling, crystalline towers of downtown Los Angeles, a juxtaposition that conjures the sly social subtext (walking dead versus corporate suits) of a George A. Romero zombie movie.

Mr. Maltzan will have a chance to refine his ideas in his design for the $15 million Carver Apartments, a circular six-story building planned for a site along the elevated 110 Freeway, a mile or so to the southwest.

Like Rainbow, Carver is set around a central court, but its form promises to offer more formal drama. Nestled against the freeway, the cylindrical exterior is broken up into a series of vertical bands, creating a sawtooth pattern on the facade that is a subtle play on the relationship between the individual and the collective. It will also be visible to commuters driving by on the freeway, underscoring the idea that this is not about keeping the poor out of sight.

Mr. Maltzan hopes to anchor the Carver design firmly in the outside world without losing the sense of a sanctuary. The ground-floor social services offices will be more open to the street, with big shop windows. And as tenants climb to the upper stories, the communal spaces will offer carefully framed views of the surrounding city.

The wedge-shaped laundry and community room on the third floor is set at the exact level of the freeway, so that tenants can virtually make eye contact with drivers inching by in their cars at rush hour. Farther up, a terrace opens onto a sweeping view of the city’s downtown towers — this one more distant and romantic than the view from Rainbow.

Both complexes prove that even as the government turns to underfinanced private institutions to help care for the poor, it is possible to push for innovative and humane design. Here architecture is used as a tool not only for aesthetic upliftment, but also to forge both a strong sense of community and a visual presence for the poor in a city that often seems to have forgotten them.

Shocking, isn’t it? Imagine if this became a commonplace.

Construction has begun on the 30-story Fifth on Park, shown in a rendering at left, which will be one of the tallest buildings in Harlem.

GENTRIFICATION in Harlem has taken many forms, as the neighborhood has revived and celebrated its past, and last week it reached a new milestone: its first Upper East Side-style high-rise condominium tower, to rise 30 stories above the low-rise brownstones for which the nearby Mount Morris Park Historic District is known.

353 Central Park West

The site is now a large hole in the ground. But the glass-and-brick tower will soon rise 310 feet on the edge of central Harlem, with 147 condos, 47 rental apartments, a 55-foot lap pool and a four-story church sanctuary with seating for more than 1,800 worshipers — and a very tall reminder that Harlem is becoming more like the rest of Manhattan .

The building, at Fifth Avenue and East 120th Street, facing the 20-acre Marcus Garvey Park, is to be known as Fifth on Park.

It has been greeted with some consternation and surprise by local preservationists, because it was built “as of right” with no required public review. But the developers say it will be a beacon to bring back the black middle class to the cultural heart of black New York.

Joseph Holland, a former state housing commissioner who is developing the site with a partner, Lew Futterman, said he wanted to make a statement with the design of the building, about the resurgence of Harlem and its welcome to middle-class black New Yorkers, after its decades of decline. “I believe it is important for middle-class blacks to take a stake in the community,” he said.

At a reception last week at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where details of the project were unveiled, Mr. Holland said, he pressed black professionals to consider Harlem and offered his guests a 5 percent rebate if they bought before the formal marketing campaign begins in April.

The building will tower over most of central Harlem, including the 19-story Harlem State Office Building on West 125th Street, and will be by far the tallest unsubsidized building in the area. It will be rivaled in height by only a handful of city housing projects and state-subsidized projects in Harlem and East Harlem.

“The scale of such a thing is absolutely appalling,” said Michael Henry Adams, an architectural historian and co-author of “Harlem: Lost and Found” (Monacelli, 2001). “The irony is that what makes Harlem attractive to so many people is that unlike most other parts of the city you can look up and see the sky.” To reach 30 stories, the developers bought development rights to a full square block of land owned by the church next door, the Bethel Gospel Assembly Church. That gave the developers the right to build a far taller building than would otherwise have been allowed.

In 1983, the church, in what must be considered in retrospect a brilliant real estate move, bought the block between Fifth and Madison Avenues and extending down to 119th Street, including a fairly modern surplus school building, for only $300,000, and conducted services in the school auditorium.

The church had once housed the James Fenimore Cooper Junior High School, and the building is still adorned with a large relief sculpture of Cooper and has the Board of Education seal and the city and state seals carved into the green marble entrance. The building was opened in 1936 at a cost of $12 million (about 40 times what the church paid for it) but was closed in the 1970s.

Over the last few years, the church, at the urging of its pastor, Carlton T. Brown, decided to raise money for a new sanctuary and for the church’s missions abroad, by selling what had been the school’s playground to the developers along with all of the air rights to the entire lot, in exchange for $12 million, according to city records, and space for the auditorium and 47 rental units, which would provide income for the church.

Vincent Williams, a church trustee who heads the building committee, said that the church was exploring the option of offering a mix of market rate and affordable rental units but that a final decision had not been reached.

THE zoning in the area was created to encourage medium-density construction, similar to that used in a number of recent condo developments, including the Lenox, a 12-story building put up by Mr. Holland and Mr. Futterman on Lenox Avenue and 129th Street.

But the code allows higher density for churches and doctors’ offices, and makes an exception to encourage tall towers on large plots with open space. The developers were also able to use the open space around the church in their calculations of open space.

The developers said they planned to offer apartments for about two-thirds the going rate in the rest of Manhattan, with many of the same amenities, including valet services, communal roof terraces and high ceilings. Prices range from $346,000 for smaller studios to $2.67 million for three-bedroom duplexes with terraces. (The developers list the top story at 28, but their construction documents show 30 stories, including some space for mechanical systems atop the building.)

There is some evidence, brokers say, that new condominium construction raises market values in older condominiums, even where the neighbors rally to try to stop a project.

But in the new project’s surrounding neighborhood, feelings are frayed. Valerie Jo Bradley, a longtime resident who is active in the Marcus Garvey Park Alliance, said she was worried that the building would block the southern exposure of the park and cast long shadows over basketball courts and a playground. “There is nothing that tall on Fifth Avenue,” she said.

Buying the Next-Best Thing

ONE interesting quirk of the residential real estate construction boom may be the fact that architects, who often portray themselves as creative but underpaid artists, have begun competing with bankers, lawyers, hedge-fund executives and real estate developers for apartments on Fifth Avenue and Central Park West.

City records show that last month, Ismael Leyva, the Mexican-born architect who designed the residential interiors at the Time Warner Center, and worked on more than a dozen other major residential projects over the last few years, paid $5.6 million for a full-floor condominium on the 15th floor of 353 Central Park West at West 95th Street. The unit has sweeping park views from its floor-to-ceiling windows.

Mr. Leyva said he didn’t consider buying at the Time Warner Center, because “I couldn’t afford it then and I can’t afford it now.”

But mimicking his sleek modern interiors at Time Warner, Mr. Leyva is planning to update his new apartment to make it less traditional. The apartment has three bedrooms, a living room, dining room and library, a private entrance to the elevator, and four bathrooms, according to the floor plan. It totals 2,733 square feet.

Walls are being removed, and the kitchen is being opened up to create a more loftlike feel, he said. “It is a good 12-year-old building,” he said. “I wanted to do some changes to fit my taste.”

Mr. Leyva bought the apartment from its first owner, Nadine Gill, the records show. Ms. Gill bought it for $1.8 million in 1997, when at the age of 64 she decided to downsize from a 3,500-square-foot, nine-room apartment in the Eldorado, a prewar building at 90th Street and Central Park West.

Buying in a postwar condominium has its advantages, too. While many high-end prewar co-ops require all-cash deals, Mr. Leyva, the architect, was able to buy with a $3.6 million mortgage, according to city records.