Localizing Urban Design Traditions: Gated and Edge Cities in Curitiba

Abstract

Gated communities and edge cities are new forms of space production and consumption that promote changes in the character of public space and citizens' participation in public life. This study unveils the phenomena of their creation as a paradoxical attempt to return to community. Curitiba's examples of gated communities and edge cities show that, despite being internationally showcased as a model of good planning and urban design, this metropolis has not been immune to the global capital pressures and urban design tendencies occurring in many urban areas throughout the world, thus signalling both the currency and trans-nationality of these issues.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to JUD editor Michael Southworth and the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and challenging comments.

Notes

 1. The German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies introduced these terms into the social sciences in 1887, in reference to idealized types of social organization and relationships, and the transition from one to the other as an outcome of industrialization.

 2. The French sociologist Emile Durkheim, in his work The Division of Social Labor (Durkheim, 1893), proposed a theory to explain the evolution from primitive to modern societies, respectively distinguished by a ‘mechanical’—based on similarity between individuals—versus an ‘organic’ solidarity—based on complementary differences between individuals.

 3. For recent theoretical and empirical studies, refer to Housing Studies' thematic issue on gated communities, Volume 20, Number 2(March), 2005. See also Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 2002, Volume 29 for articles with cases from the Middle East, Latin America (Argentina and Brazil), South Africa and Europe. See also Miao (2003), and Audirac (2003) for cases from Mexico and India.

 4. These results are not new in the modernist tradition, however. Ecoville is just a recent example of modernist development destroying street space and producing undefined public space.

 5. The municipal housing agency of Curitiba is a mixed-base company in which the municipality is the main action holder. It was created in 1965 to support housing construction for low-income groups, focusing on the population group of below three minimum salaries. This group makes up approximately 70% of the people registered on the Cohab waiting list.

 6. AlphaVille Graciosa is gradually becoming inhabited. By February 2004, there were 183 residential projects approved, and more than 20 were undergoing revisions. There were 51 resident families and 93 houses being built. There was a last cluster of lots still for sale, starting from 700 square metres at R$16 000 per square metre. Once the occupation is complete, it is expected that approximately 10 000 people will be living, working and studying in the complex. In AlphaVille Pinheiros, nearly 80% of the lots had been sold by February 2004, a few months after sales began. Pinheiros is an exclusive gated residential enclave, next to the already- consolidated AlphaVille Graciosa, occupying an area of 217 800 square metres, with 157 lots of an average area of 550 square metres each. The sub-division is the result of the great appreciation of land values and increased housing demand in the area since 2000, given the impact of AlphaVille Graciosa. Residents of AlphaVille Pinheiros will have privileged access to the large areas of recreation, retail, services and amenities in AlphaVille Graciosa, including the shopping mall Alpha Mall, the school Colégio Bom Jesus Internacional, the AlphaVille Graciosa Clube and the golf course, among other amenities (Figure 10). The price of a square metre was R$14 500 (as of February 2004). The building of basic infrastructure was still in its initial stages.

 7. CityAlpha had existed for at least four-and-a-half years (founded in November 1998), published by Parole Serviços Editoriais Ltda., and had consolidated as a news reference in AlphaVille and the west area of greater São Paulo. In February 2004, however, the site had vanished from the Internet. Representatives from AlphaVille Urbanismo told me they had never heard about CityAlpha, and the firm Parole did not respond to my inquiry about it.

 8. Most recently, the term community has been significantly contested in planning literature that deals with the challenges of multi-cultural cities. For references, see Young (1990), Harvey (1997) and Day (2003), among others.

 9. Comments offered by anonymous reviewer.

10. Comments offered by an anonymous reviewer.