Many, including the United Nations, have lauded the city of Curitiba, Brazil as being a leading model for ecological urban development and planning.  In addition, a multitude of Curitban civic planning policies are now being replicated in different cities around the world. What has received less attention in Curitiba’s storied success, however, is the unique place‐based visioning process that their civic leaders developed.

Every morning, the mayor and his core team of planners would meet in a log cabin retreat in the middle of a forested city park. There, according to one of the planners, they worked only “on what (was) fundamental, on what would affect a large number of people and could create change for the better.” Then, in the afternoons, they would return to city hall to meet with their constituents and to deal with the city’s day‐to‐day needs.

By structuring their workdays in this way, these planners put a much greater daily emphasis on large scale, visionary planning than most city governments do. Yet, at the same time, they sought to temper this deeper, visioning work with continual interaction and exchange with the needs of the people. In other words, the mornings helped them continue to see and work on the bigger picture of the city and its evolution, while the afternoons helped them to stay grounded in the needs and pressing issues that the people of their city faced on a day‐to‐day basis.

By turning their morning meetings into a continual visioning process as opposed to a solitary event, these city planners were able to generate the creative space in which to continually delve deeper into their understanding of how the city worked as an integral system and how to refine solutions that would enable its continuing improvement and evolution through time.

By working in this way, the city planners helped to create a shared sense of commitment in their morning meetings toward continually working to improve the critical systems in their city.  And depending on what they were working to improve, they would call in the critical leaders from that system to join their meetings.

What this example lifts up is the importance of balancing realizing and actualizing processes in planning.  Realization work can be defined as the process of envisioning and conceptualizing new potential whereas actualization work involves the process of manifesting that potential into existence.  These two modalities of work are highly interrelated. In a sense, people can only actualize potential to the extent that they first realize it.

In Curitiba, the leaders dedicated every morning to this work of continually realizing the greater potential of their city and what it could become. This gave them the basis from which to actualize higher order solutions.

These leaders understood that without this space and ability to think, dream, and plan at a larger systemic level, their ability to accomplish anything great, let alone regenerative, was highly diminished.  And without this deeper insight into Curitiba’s success story, cities will continue to try and adopt Curitiba’s solutions without developing their capacity to generate processes for creating their own integrative, place‐based solutions.

*This is a revised excerpt from a larger case study on Curitiba, Brazil, which is obtainable at

http://www.regenesisgroup.com/articles.php