Curridabat Sweet City
🌐The city follows a distinctive "Sweet City" framework that treats pollinators and other non-human life as citizens– vital members of the urban community. This approach reimagines urban governance by recognizing biodiversity—and even emotion—as essential infrastructure.
Bioregional Context
Curridabat is an urban area in Costa Rica that has pioneered an innovative approach to city management and biodiversity integration. The region faces typical urban challenges including resource consumption exceeding planetary boundaries and disconnection from natural systems.
Background
Curridabat’s “Sweet City” experiment began from a stubborn urban fact: cities cover only about 3% of Earth’s surface yet draw far more than their share of planetary resources. Leaders framed the problem as a design question: how can we grow a city and a way of living that adds value to the planet instead of extracting value from it?
That question cannot be settled by human systems alone. Curridabat therefore took seriously two dimensions often sidelined in conventional politics: feelings and biodiversity as infrastructure of place—what makes a city livable and what makes it ecologically viable.
Origins and Network
The initiative took shape under 12 years of mayoral leadership by Edgar Mora. What began as familiar urban administration gradually became a different framework—one that reimagines development and ties city health to planetary health.
As that shift deepened, Curridabat rebranded as “Sweet City” (Ciudad Dulce), signaling that pollinators and biodiversity were central to its identity, not decorative extras.
Activities
Pollinator Citizenship Program
The city treated the pollination system as an active partner—an alliance that fed information back into governance. The relationship moved through three recognitions: pollinators as mediators between people and ecosystems, pollinators as agents of prosperity in both ecological and economic terms, and finally pollinators as citizens with standing in the city’s political imagination. The Pollinator Citizenship Program mapped the city from a “bee’s eye view,” cutting across ordinary public–private boundaries. Supporting pollinators required seeing the territory as one system—an archipelago of places where nectar and pollen exist—so that corridors for pollinators could run across parcels and land-tenure lines. In practice, that meant governance that recognizes non-human residents, design and regulation attentive to pollinator needs, continuous corridor-building across ownership types, and a view of the city as several overlapping systems working at once.
Governance Platform Methodology
Strong pilots often stall because they lack governance that can carry them. Curridabat’s answer was a methodological bet on platforms—shared systems many projects can join. The move is from supply-side planning (predetermined projects pushed outward) to demand-side work: use data and stories to open conversation, let communities name needs through informed dialogue, let projects emerge as responses, and learn when outcomes diverge from expectations. The city contrasts low-value governance (short horizons, scarce resources, agendas set elsewhere) with high-value governance: local decision-making power, capabilities treated as a system, strategy guiding choices over time, and culture treated as an asset rather than an obstacle. Scaling regenerative work depends less on any single project’s brilliance than on governance for the project—designed alongside the project. Four moves anchor the platform: clarify demand, reshape governance, open new conversations, and strengthen capability systems.
Archetype-Based Planning
Curridabat used archetypes—stand-in beings whose needs and experiences shape the story of a place—to surface gaps between today and a desired future and to support backcasting and sequencing of change. In Curridabat, archetypes ranged from pollinators, air, and water to children, very old residents, and wheelchair users—each illuminating different facets of justice, access, and ecology. The same approach was applied in Nosara, a coastal community in Guanacaste, where people chose archetypes suited to shoreline life—among them young people, species such as marine turtles that link land and sea, and everyday coastal livelihood roles—showing how the method travels beyond the city.
Vision and Legacy
Curridabat’s Sweet City work has drawn wide recognition and helped put the municipality on the map internationally. It illustrates how urban governance can shift from extractive to regenerative logics—adding value to planetary systems rather than only drawing them down.
By treating emotion and biodiversity as infrastructure, Curridabat widened what counts as a legitimate public concern and made room for more holistic development. Cities are many systems at once; engaging non-human systems such as pollination yields information that can reshape how people govern.
Sources
| Type | Name | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Video | The Bioregional Conversations - Conversation 7 | ↗ |