The August edition of the RoGBC Green Cafe ended with unanimous laughter as Jaime Lerner, a Brazilian mayor sang the “Sustainability song” during his presentation on reinventing the urban system in his native city, Curitiba. “The city is not the problem, the city is the solution”, said Lerner in his TED Conference presentation that the Green Cafe participants watched and discussed.   A provocative thought that would motivate the discussions around “urbanization and adaptive reuse”, which was the main topic of this month’s meeting.

“Every city in the world can be improved in less than three years” argued Jaime Lerner. “This is not a matter of scale, it is not a question of financial resources” he added, before expressing his strong belief that “every problem in a city has to have its own equation of co-responsibility.” To explain this position, Lerner listed some of the most significant factors in achieving success, by presenting his work for restructuring the city of Curitiba.

While selecting important experience tools from his presentation, the participants described some of the obstacles that Romania crosses whenever it faces a changing agent willing to take action in the urban space. The lack of education, the very high level of beaurocracy and the lack of measures that would be specifically adequate to the Romanian environment were only some of the arguments the participants presented.

The discussion had a solid optimistic foundation that was set by another short movie, called “Adaptive Reuse in the Netherlands”. The educational documentary presenting the successful transformation of the Borneo docks and Sporenburg of Amsterdam into residential neighborhoods set a striking positive example of intelligent adaptation of the city to the needs of its inhabitants. Discussing the possibilities for Romania, the participants agreed that there is a constant need to adapt innovation and creativity to the local environment specificity.