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Last Thursday, Jaime Lerner spoke at Town Hall. For those who are not familiar with this big name in contemporary urban planning and theory, Lerner is the author of Urban Acupuncture and the man who, in the 1970s, transformed the largest city in Brazil's South Region, Curitiba, into a something like a paradise of public transportation, park systems, multiculturalism, and recycling. Today, no other major city on earth has a recycling rate that compares with Curitiba's, which is at 70 percent. When the city began its Bus Rapid Transit system (the meaning of BRT—dedicated lanes—has somehow not been grasped by Seattle's Metro) in the early parts of the '70s, it had it had 25,000 daily passengers. Now it does 36,000 passengers in an hour on average, and 2.3 million in a day. How was this achieved? By being serious about public transportation. "I made sure there was a bus every minute," said Lerner. What this basically means is an inhabitant of that city does not wait for a bus. He/she never really misses a bus. He/she moves as fast on a bus as with any other form of transportation.

After the talk, a group of Seattle inhabitants met at the bar in Town Hall to discuss Lerner's lecture. What I concluded from this section of the event: Young people are all about density, bikes, and micro-housing. "I want a city, not a house," said one young woman. Her values are consistent with those of her generation—the cheapest generation, as The Atlantic calls it.) As for those who are not so young anymore, those born in the 70s and 60s, they want Jane Jacobs' city—busy parks, busy streets, busy small businesses; but they also want their own yard ("a place of nature, for the birds") and are skeptical about density. Most of the old types brought nothing to the discussion but boredom. They hate the Rem Koolhaas's library, hate anything that is not the real Seattle, and worship everything that looks and smells like Pike Place Market. Victor Steinbrueck is the saint of their dated urbanism. As for me, I want to live in the city the young people desire.