Saturday, March 14, 2009

let the informal rule the night

Jaime Lerner, former Mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, which has been hailed as one of the world's greenest and most forward-thinking cities, gives The Hindu a sensible suggestion to improve the urban environment in the evenings: "Allow the informal sector to take over downtown areas after 6 p.m. That will inject life into the city, with a formal-informal equation."

I've been thinking the same thing about Michael Bloomberg's proposal to turn Times Square into a pedestrian area: only if he allows hawkers and other informal merchants to operate on the streets.

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