1937-2021

Member of a Jewish family of Polish immigrants, Jaime Lerner was born in Curitiba in 1937 and trained as an architect at the Federal University of Paraná. As so many Brazilian architects of his generation, he was marked by the social situation in his country, so he chose the most committed approach to the profession. He did so first as promoter of the IPPUC (Curitiba Research and Planning Institute) and as author of the city masterplan, a period of technical management that reassured him in the fact that urban planning could not be imposed from the top down, but through small interventions able to gradually transform the urban fabric. For Lerner the city was by no means a problem, but rather the bearer of solutions when it is conceived as an environmentally sustainable and socially fair system. This was the motto of the second and most important period of his career, during which he became mayor of Curitiba and governor of Paraná. Lerner spread his ideas in books which have had a huge impact, like Urban Acupuncture, published in 2003 and that summarizes his whole career as urbanist and politician.