Abstract
Jamie Lerner’s book Urban Acupuncture: Celebrating Pinpricks of Change That Enrich City Life is an ode to the city and its regenerative capacity as a site for social and convivial life. Originally written in Portuguese, this English translation conveys the lyricism and enthusiasm in Lerner’s voice as he addresses the city as a living and breathing being. Lerner likens good urban planning to acupuncture, the ancient Chinese medicinal practice of using needles to prick the skin and correct imbalances in the human body. Comparing faltering cities to an ailing human body, Lerner argues that “successful urban planning involves triggering healthy responses within the city, probing here and there to stimulate improvements and positive chain reactions” (1). Good urban acupuncture is possible when communities and community leaders engage actively in energizing urban spaces that they use, love, and identify with. Lerner proposes that “sometimes, a simple, focused intervention can create new energy, demonstrating the possibilities of a space in a way that motivates others to engage with their community” (4). To make such interventions, Lerner asserts, people must first know and respect their city. Drawing on his work and experiences in cities across the world, the author describes planned and unplanned interventions or pinpricks that enliven cities and city life.
Urban Acupuncture is Lerner’s invitation to all city lovers to dream, visualize, and philosophize about the city. He takes the reader to cities like Seoul, New York, Curitiba, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Barcelona, Mexico City, Beijing, and Istanbul to view gestures of urbanism—planned, unplanned, individual or collective—that contribute to creating vibrant city spaces. This compact volume is organized as a collection of thirty-nine short chapters. Each chapter represents a different form of urban acupuncture. Photographs and other illustrations effectively complement the text in the chapters. Urban Acupuncture is not a theoretical work or a practitioner’s handbook of design guidelines, but can best be described as an inspiring collection of stories about pinpricks intended to have a positive impact on urban life. As architect and urbanist Jan Gehl observes in the book’s foreword, reading Urban Acupuncture “is like having a dinner with a good friend where the conversation just flows, one story after the other, good examples that will stick with you when you go home” (xvi).
As the book’s preface notes, Lerner’s Urban Acupuncture belongs with the writings of Jane Jacobs (1961) and William H. Whyte (1988) that emphasize people-centric urban planning and design interventions. The term “urban acupuncture” is also evocative of the Scottish planner Patrick Geddes’s concept of “conservative surgery” (Rao and Ponamma 2007) that anthropomorphizes the city and recommends curing only ailing organs (as opposed to also demolishing healthy parts in order to facilitate gridiron planning). What distinguishes Urban Acupuncture from these other writings is the author’s extensive experience as a politician from the 1970s to the 1990s in Brazil (first as the mayor of Curitiba and later, as the governor of the state of Paraná). Thus, Lerner speaks with the authoritative voice of a seasoned planner and politician who spent decades in the trenches, planning and implementing major projects in the city of Curitiba.
Urban acupuncture, according to Lerner, can be performed in myriad ways. It could be a local resident’s individual act of “urban kindness” (27) to restore and maintain a vandalized sculpture in a city park in Belo Horizonte. It could be a collective act of civic responsibility—for instance, Curitiba residents assisted the local authorities in their city-greening efforts by watering street trees. If the “presence of genius” in the creative works of Antonio Gaudi in Barcelona and Oscar Niemeyer in Rio represents good acupuncture, so does the humbler presence of the “Unknown 24-hour Shopkeeper” (6) and the numerous mom-and-pop stores in New York City “pumping oxygen into cities that must never be allowed to stop breathing” (7). Other pinpricks include the bustling La Boqueria market in Barcelona where the “meats, the fruits, and green vegetables all smell fresh, and the whole atmosphere affects the vendors, who are lively and cheerful” (126); old, dignified skyscrapers in American downtowns that “open on to the street with grandeur” (97); smart cars and smart buses that feed into an integrated multimodal transportation system; and urban trees as “acupuncture that ease the pain caused by the absence of shade, life, color and light” (84).
Lerner also discusses acupuncture that speaks directly to other human senses, such as the acupuncture of silence on the holy day of Yom Kippur in Jerusalem, which is “not an absolute silence, but the absence of the distortion of the natural urban sounds” (101). Musical acupuncture awakens the minds’ eye, where, on hearing a song about a particular city, “you instantly evoke a mental portrait of the city” (34). Eco-friendly acupuncture revives urban spaces where authorities and residents choose to build their city with nature and not over nature. The author also encourages every resident to build local knowledge and awareness by drawing maps of his or her neighborhood or city, for “how can we hope to generate respect for a city we don’t understand?” (59). Lerner uses these examples, along with many others, to illustrate the benefits of good urban acupuncture. These interventions differ in scale, scope, and context, but the end result is the revitalization or preservation of an urban space, practice, or tradition.
While each chapter presents an imaginative and inspiring illustration of urban acupuncture, Lerner’s voice is the clearest (and most helpful to those interested in understanding how planning processes unfold on the ground) when he discusses his own work. He adopts a pragmatic and context-specific approach to decision-making and implementation of projects. As he elucidates in a chapter, in his first term as Curitiba’s mayor, Lerner received a petition from a neighborhood association to stop a public works project of aligning unpaved streets that could endanger a small natural spring in their neighborhood. He directed the public works department to heed the petition, because “when a city faces decisions about public works that could do more harm than good, doing nothing is the most urgent priority” (21).
Whether it is to stop a detrimental project or expedite a beneficial one, Lerner observes that acupuncture “requires speed and precision” (109). He illustrates the need for expediency with his account of the first pedestrian zone project in Curitiba in 1972. Determined to complete the pedestrian zone project quickly, Lerner recounts negotiating with his public works secretary to finish the project in seventy-two hours instead of the few months that the secretary stipulated. Business owners around the zone were opposed to the project. Hence speed was needed because “work could be stopped by a court order in favor of a protest” (110). Lerner writes, “The speed of these acupunctures had a single goal: to prevent the inertia of complex vendors, of pettiness, of bad politics, from making these critical moments and fundamental projects unviable” (112). Once the project was completed, the opposing business owners appreciated the transformation of the space and requested for more such zones. He adds that the project could have been reversed if people did not like it, but it was first necessary for them to see the finished product. A pedestrian zone is a desirable urban gesture. However, this example also reveals the tenuousness of the line dividing visionary leadership and unilateral planning.
Social and economic inequality is an integral aspect of urban life, and Lerner also addresses these issues in Urban Acupuncture. As mayor, he introduced innovative pro-poor schemes in Curitiba such as food stamps and bus tokens in exchange for recycled trash. Referring to the urban poor and their living conditions, he asks, “Is it possible to practice sound urban acupuncture and still be committed to social solidarity?” (55). Addressing the difficult working conditions of street vendors, he observes that any solutions that governments have proposed so far “have been mostly fruitless if not outright unjust” (24). In Urban Acupuncture, he proposes social integration of the urban poor by taking essential services to the hillside favelas in Curitiba. Lerner also proposes that formal and informal economic sectors can resolve their clashes by agreeing to use the same space at different times of the day. The author does not, however, elaborate on whether these proposals were implemented and their effectiveness. Lerner raises important questions about the challenges of social and economic disparity, but the normative nature of his commentary suggests that these issues continue to elude equitable answers on the ground.
Lerner’s love for the city is infectious and Urban Acupuncture commendably conveys his message to the reader to love, learn, and contribute to transforming his or her own city. Acknowledging planning as a political (and slow) process, Lerner identifies assertive leadership, proactive public officials, engaged citizenry, and innovative management of available resources as key factors in jumpstarting positive urban transformations. The book is most engaging in the parts that the author discusses his innovative responses to challenging planning processes. It could have only benefited from a deeper involvement with questions of social and economic justice. In sum, Urban Acupuncture can be described as a poetic tribute to the city that is punctuated with small measures of pragmatic advice. In this approach to transforming the city, one pinprick at a time, no actor is irrelevant and no intervention too small to make a difference. The crucial issue, Lerner insists, is to get started.