Virginia Fund’s ‘Virtual Field Trip’ to a Progressive Brazilian City

The sights and sounds of Curitiba, Brazil — and information about the city’s innovative urban-planning policies — are featured on a new Web site.

Faced with increasing urban sprawl in the 1960’s, Curitiba adopted policies to encourage growth along public-transportation corridors. Today, 75 percent of the city’s commuters use the public-transportation system, and shopping, day care, and city services are located at transit transfer points.

Several weeks ago, the W. Alton Jones Foundation, in Charlottesville, Va., led a trip to Curitiba so that American foundation officials could learn about the city’s approach to planning.

During the trip, the foundation developed a Web site — or “virtual field trip” — to share the information they were learning with people who weren’t able to take the trip.

From their hotel rooms each night, foundation employees posted highlights of the day’s activities online, complete with photographs and some audio and video clips. In coming weeks, foundation employees plan to add material that they collected but weren’t able to put up on the site immediately.

Sean T. O’Brien, who provides technology assistance to the fund’s grantees and coordinated the site’s production, says the project was a valuable learning experience.

“One of the reasons that we did it was as a test of the technology,” he says, “so that when we have grantees who we think could benefit from doing this sort of thing, we can then advise them intelligently and from an educated position.”

To get there: Go to http://www.busways.org.