The 4 commandments of cities

Eduardo Paes is the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, a sprawling, complicated, beautiful city of 6.5 million. He shares four big ideas about leading Rio -- and all cities -- into the future, including bold (and do-able) infrastructure upgrades and how to make a city "smarter."

It's a great honor to be here.

It's a great honor to be here talking about cities,

talking about the future of cities.

It's great to be here as a mayor.

I really do believe that mayors have the political position

to really change people's lives.

That's the place to be.

And it's great to be here as the mayor of Rio.

Rio's a beautiful city,

a vibrant place, special place.

Actually, you're looking at a guy

who has the best job in the world.

And I really wanted to share with you

a very special moment of my life

and the history of the city of Rio.

(Video) Announcer: And now, ladies and gentlemen,

the envelope containing the result.

Jacques Rogge: I have the honor to announce

that the games of the 31st Olympiad

are awarded to the city of Rio de Janeiro.

(Cheering)

EP: Okay, that's very touching, very emotional,

but it was not easy to get there.

Actually it was a very hard challenge.

We had to beat the European monarchy.

This is Juan Carlos, king of Spain.

We had to beat the powerful Japanese with all of their technology.

We had to beat the most powerful man in the world

defending his own city.

So it was not easy at all.

And actually this last guy here said a phrase a few years ago

that I think fits perfectly to the situation

of Rio winning the Olympic bid.

We really showed that, yes, we can.

And really, this is the reason I came here tonight.

I came here tonight to tell you

that things can be done,

that you don't have always to be rich or powerful

to get things on the way,

that cities are a great challenge.

It's a difficult task to deal with cities.

But with some original ways

of getting things done,

with some basic commandments,

you can really get cities

to be a great, great place to live.

I want you all to imagine Rio.

You probably think about a city full of energy,

a vibrant city full of green.

And nobody showed that better

than Carlos Saldanha in last year's "Rio."

(Music)

(Video) Bird: This is incredible.

(Music)

EP: Okay, some parts of Rio are pretty much like that,

but it's not like that everywhere.

We're like every big city in the world.

We've got lots of people,

pollution, cars, concrete, lots of concrete.

These pictures I'm showing here,

they are some pictures from Madureira.

It's like the heart of the suburb in Rio.

And I want to use an example of Rio

that we're doing in Madureira, in this region,

to see what we should think as our first commandment.

So every time you see a concrete jungle like that,

what you've got to do is find open spaces.

If you don't have open spaces,

you've got to go there and open spaces.

So go inside these open spaces

and make it that people can get inside

and use those spaces.

This is going to be the third largest park in Rio

by June this year.

It's going to be a place where people can meet,

where you can put nature.

The temperature's going to drop two, three degrees centigrade.

So the first commandment

I want to leave you tonight

is, a city of the future

has to be environmentally friendly.

Every time you think of a city,

you've got to think green.

You've got to think green and green.

So moving to our second commandment that I wanted to show you.

Let's think that cities are made of people,

lots of people together.

cities are packed with people.

So how do you move these people around?

When you have 3.5 billion people living in cities --

by 2050, it's going to be 6 billion people.

So every time you think about moving these people around,

you think about high-capacity transportation.

But there is a problem.

High-capacity transportation means

spending lots and lots of money.

So what I'm going to show here

is something that was already presented in TED

by the former mayor of Curitiba

who created that, a city in Brazil, Jaime Lerner.

And it's something that we're doing, again, lots in Rio.

It's the BRT, the Bus Rapid Transit.

So you get a bus. It's a simple bus that everybody knows.

You transform it inside as a train car.

You use separate lanes, dedicated lanes.

The contractors, they don't like that.

You don't have to dig deep down underground.

You can build nice stations.

This is actually a station that we're doing in Rio.

Again, you don't have to dig deep down underground

to make a station like that.

This station has the same comfort, the same features

as a subway station.

A kilometer of this costs a tenth of a subway.

So spending much less money and doing it much faster,

you can really change the way people move.

This is a map of Rio.

All the lines, the colored lines you see there,

it's our high-capacity transportation network.

In this present time today,

we only carry 18 percent of our population

in high-capacity transportation.

With the BRTs we're doing,

again, the cheapest and fastest way,

we're going to move to 63 percent of the population

being carried by high-capacity transportation.

So remember what I said:

You don't always have to be rich or powerful

to get things done.

You can find original ways to get things done.

So the second commandment I want to leave you tonight

is, a city of the future

has to deal with mobility and integration

of its people.

Moving to the third commandment.

And this is the most controversial one.

It has to do with the favelas, the slums --

whatever you call it, there are different names all over the world.

But the point we want to make here tonight

is, favelas are not always a problem.

I mean, favelas can sometimes

really be a solution,

if you deal with them,

if you put public policy inside the favelas.

Let me just show a map of Rio again.

Rio has 6.3 million inhabitants --

More than 20 percent, 1.4 million, live in the favelas.

All these red parts are favelas.

So you see, they are spread all over the city.

This is a typical view of a favela in Rio.

You see the contrast between the rich and poor.

So I want to make two points here tonight about favelas.

The first one is,

you can change from what I call a [vicious] circle

to a virtual circle.

But what you've got to do to get that

is you've got to go inside the favelas,

bring in the basic services --

mainly education and health -- with high quality.

I'm going to give a fast example here.

This was an old building in a favela in Rio --

[unclear favela name] --

that we just transformed into a primary school,

with high quality.

This is primary assistance in health

that we built inside a favela,

again, with high quality.

We call it a family clinic.

So the first point is bring basic services

inside the favelas

with high quality.

The second point I want to make about the favelas

is, you've got to open spaces in the favela.

Bring infrastructure

to the favelas, to the slums, wherever you are.

Rio has the aim, by 2020,

to have all its favelas completely urbanized.

Another example, this was completely packed with houses,

and then we built this, what we call, a knowledge square.

This is a place with high technology

where the kids that live in a poor house next to this place

can go inside and have access to all technology.

We even built a theater there -- 3D movie.

And this is the kind of change you can get for that.

And by the end of the day you get something better than a TED Prize,

which is this great laugh

from a kid that lives in the favela.

So the third commandment I want to leave here tonight

is, a city of the future

has to be socially integrated.

You cannot deal with a city

if it's not socially integrated.

But moving to our fourth commandment,

I really wouldn't be here tonight.

Between November and May, Rio's completely packed.

We just had last week Carnivale.

It was great. It was lots of fun.

We have New Year's Eve.

There's like two million people on Copacabana Beach.

We have problems.

We fight floods, tropical rains at this time of the year.

You can imagine how people get happy with me

watching these kinds of scenes.

We have problems with the tropical rains.

Almost every year

we have these landslides, which are terrible.

But the reason I could come here

is because of that.

This was something we did with IBM

that's a little bit more than a year old.

It's what we call the Operations Center of Rio.

And I wanted to show that I can govern my city, using technology,

from here, from Long Beach,

so I got here last night and I know everything.

We're going to speak now to the Operations Center.

This is Osorio,

he's our secretary of urban affairs.

So Osorio, good to be there with you.

I've already told the people

that we have tropical rain this time of year.

So how's the weather in Rio now?

Osorio: The weather is fine. We have fair weather today.

Let me get you our weather satellite radar.

You see just a little bit of moisture around the city.

Absolutely no problem in the city in terms of weather,

today and in the next few days.

EP: Okay, how's the traffic?

We, at this time of year, get lots of traffic jams.

People get mad at the mayor. So how's the traffic tonight?

Osario: Well traffic tonight is fine.

Let me get you one of our 8,000 buses.

A live transmission in downtown Rio for you, Mr. Mayor.

You see, the streets are clear.

Now it's 11:00 pm in Rio.

Nothing of concern in terms of traffic.

I'll get to you now the incidents of the day.

We had heavy traffic early in the morning

and in the rush hour in the afternoon,

but nothing of big concern.

We are below average

in terms of traffic incidents in the city.

EP: Okay, so you're showing now some public services.

These are the cars.

Osorio: Absolutely, Mr. Mayor.

Let me get you the fleet of our waste collection trucks.

This is live transmission.

We have GPS's in all of our trucks.

And you can see them working

in all parts of the city.

Waste collection on time.

Public services working well.

EP: Okay, Osorio, thank you very much.

It was great to have you here.

We're going to move so that I can make a conclusion.

(Applause)

Okay, so no files, this place, no paperwork,

no distance, 24/7 working.

So the fourth commandment I want to share with you here tonight

is, a city of the future

has to use technology to be present.

I don't need to be there anymore to know and to administrate the city.

But everything that I said here tonight, or the commandments,

are means, are ways,

for us to govern cities --

invest in infrastructure, invest in the green,

open parks, open spaces,

integrate socially, use technology.

But at the end of the day, when we talk about cities,

we talk about a gathering of people.

And we cannot see that as a problem.

That is fantastic.

If there's 3.5 billion now,

it's going to be six billion then it's going to be 10 billion.

That is great, that means we're going to have

10 billion minds working together,

10 billion talents together.

So a city of the future,

I really do believe

that it's a city that cares about its citizens,

integrates socially its citizens.

A city of the future is a city that can never let anyone out

of this great party, which are cities.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)