- Missing urban Turning Points    61 kb by    Ultramari, Clovis & Duarte, Fabio | ultramari@yahoo.com    Short Outline The paper will treat the following: Discussion on land use patterns to potentialise local resources; Urban marketing strategies to improve competitiveness; Technologies to implement desired changes. Study cases: Curitiba/Brazil;Montreal/Canada; N´Dalatando/Angola Abstract Paper discusses new kinds of positively transform cities. Based on the author’s professional and academic experience, it traces possible links between 1. New land use patterns to potentialise local resources; 2. Urban marketing strategies as a way to improve regional and global competitiveness; and 3. Technologies available to implement desired changes. Cases are based on three experiences: The city of Curitiba, Brazil; Montreal, Canada, and N´Dalatando, Angola. The apparently discrepancy between these three cities is justified by important possibilities they were offered in their search for transforming their economic, social and urbanistic assets towards not only a better standard of living but a novelty that eventually could be reproduced in other spaces, too. The ability to recognize, to deal with and to adopt opportunities is the urban management most valued characteristic adopted in this discussion. In fact, we rely on the assumption that opportunities tend not to repeat twice in a one generation urban period. Besides, the long time required to cities to adapt themselves to new forms of architecture and urban structures - just to mention two hard-to-change aspects of urban settlements – explain why decisions taken long ago in terms of the way city is built, used and destroyed demand long periods to be fully implemented. Thus, not only opportunities may not repeat twice but their implementation may demand years to be transformed in concrete implemented ideas. Regretful mistakes, inability to take the right decision at the right time, comfortable reproduction of well-known formulae, lack of desire to distinguish itself out of a competitive world or a degradation scenario constitute missed opportunities to establish turning points in the history of a city. Description of the three urban examples intend to update the importance of sudden changes in the history of cities, constituting decisions able to divide that very same history into two different periods. Keywords Urban Inflexions; Urban Opportunities; Curitiba; Montreal; N´Dalatando Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2007: Urban Trialogues   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper