Two water cities?

By Paulien Hartog 

strategic advisor in Waternet, the public water authority of the city of Amsterdam and the region

Recife is known as the Brazilian Venice, a water city. Its city centre is located on islands in the end of the delta of Capibaribe river, looking out over the ocean. This sounds impressive, and it is. But when you are walking in the city centre, you notice that the physics are there, but that Recife is not a real water city at this moment. In the streets you can always smell waste water, due to poor sanitation. The banks of canals and rivers are full of waste, and they also smell. Most waterfronts are private in bad shape. And due to sharks the beach is not for swimming. There are only a few boats on the impressive mangrove river: some crab fishermen, inhabitants of the "palafitos" and an educational boat tour for kids. Most local delegates in our workshop enjoyed the river for the first time of their life!

As the "water lady" in the Amsterdam delegation I was impressed by the enormous water challenges Recife has to deal with. Sanitation and problems with water quality are the most obvious, but at the same time the drinking water resources (70% river water upstream, 30% groundwater) are under stress and floods occur frequently during extreme storm water events or high tide. In a metropolitan area with 4 million people and in a growing economy the opportunities are good. But where to start? 

During the 2 day workshop with an enthusiast group of (mainly) architects we could only make a little step to a strategy. Our main observation in the last year of rXa contact via video conferences and email was that there seems to be little integration of challenges in urban planning in Recife. Dealing with water challenges is from our European perspective essential for cities of the future. But if Recifians are not aware of the value of this, the politicians won't empower this. 
In the results of the workshop the "Water Tree" concept was presented as long term strategy for more cohesion in the city. In the structure of the delta, with the main rivers and the smaller streams, solutions for a more liveable city could be integrated: places where people could meet, sanitation, social housing, parks, biking routes and transport over water. The main challenge the coming months will be to have dialogues with a broader group of inhabitants about their dreams for the city. And, based on this, start with realizing a first branch of the Water Tree as a pilot project.
I expect that the smart, highly educated young people that I met in Recife, will change this city the next decade, and maybe develop it to a real water city again. They are eager, involved and connected to worldwide knowledge. Operational experience in water management is low, thus knowledge exchange like the rXa will be worthwhile. I enjoyed my stay immensely and want to thank all of you again for your enormous hospitality.

Recife journal, May 2012

By Eric van der Kooij, Spatial Planning Department Amsterdam


General background
From the 23rd until  the 28th of April a Dutch multi disciplined delegation was invited to come to Recife (4,1 mio inhabitants in the metropolitan area) to enhance further collaboration on the city’s planning aspects in the field of urban planning, water management, traffic control and cultural heritage.
The collaboration started a year ago and was initiated by ARCAM. It was based on the historic relations Recife with the Dutch. Since Prince Maurits was the founder of Mauritsstad in 1630, making Recife not only the new capital of Dutch Brazil until 1654. During this period, Mauritsstad became one of the most cosmopolitan cities of the world. Being such different cities in the first place, the question was what both cities could learn from each other.
In 2011 the ‘project’ started around 4 videoconferences where professionals changed ideas about planning aspects of the city. In addition Recife initiated a project by the School of Architecture called the Via Mangue. The project addressed the lack of integral planning approach illustrated by a new highway cutting through the mangroves and vulnerable neighbourhoods. Students were challenged to review the project as a whole and focus on several areas around the highway.
During this process it was not exactly defined what could or would become the impact of our mutual exchange. However in november 2011 ARCAM made an exposition of the Amsterdam/Recife Exchange showing the historic background of both cities and also contemporary challenges. It also showed the difference in planning approach and the momentum of change that both cities are undergoing and search for the right tools. Amsterdam from a top down planning approach to a bottom up approach (Structural vision 2040, Free State) and integrated planning of (waste) water management, mobility and cultural heritage. And Recife from an almost uncontrolled anarchistic planning approach towards a common and mutual understanding that is shifting the mindsets of the cultural elite and public collectives addressing a more cohesive and integrated planning approach.


So far so good.

Impressions and experience
As a result of the exhibition and in order to enhance our collaboration the Dutch were invite to come to Recife. The program resulted in a 4 day workshop with field excursions to the old city centre and a boat trip on the Capibaribe River, lectures from the Dutch and openings of the exhibition of the students and the Amsterdam/Recife Exchange. And finally the inauguration of Roberto Montezuma as president of CAU, an new organization that controls, protects and promotes the title of planning and architecture in Brazil.
The workshop was attended by professionals from private offices (mostly architects), universities, the municipality, the state heritage foundation and students and focused on the livability of the old city centre and the several aspects of the water system of the city in general.
Within this context we experienced Recife as a city where the speeds of change have different  directions and slowly we became aware of our well organized and orchestrated position in the field of public debate and political agendas with a growing consciousness and urge to create a livable city (occupy, facebook, public alert). 
Impression 1: Recife – Speeds of Change in different directions
Over the last 30-40 years Recife, as other Brazilian metropoles alike, experienced rapid growth.
But it is not since the last decade that this growth turned from gradually into far more explosive. Over the last 10 years population of the city grew to 1.5 mio inhabitants (municipality). Economic growth is demonstrated by the purchase of  3000 (small) cars every month (state) leading to a direct traffic infarct in the city centre. Public transport (mainly bus) is insufficient and biking is not only dangerous but also facing the humidity and tropical temperatures.
Pollution caused by cars, waste management and uncontrolled real estate (housing in towers) are out of bounce, threatening ecosystems (rivers and mangroves) and increasing the gap between rich and poor. The city turned its back to the river, once the backbone of development and trade,  bringing all these aspects together, now a collector of the poor and dumpsite for garbage.

‘Planning behind’ and ‘planning to prevent worse’ seems to be the adagio. Cultural heritage does have a strong position in the inner city but seems too much occupied by mere protection and preservation than stimulate solutions for new functions integrated in old buildings. Public space is reduced to parking zones and buildings tend to withdraw themselves from public encounters to the streets by making fences and walls, creating islands of comfort and safety leaving the streetscape an uncomfortable no go area.
But in general it seems that the lack of planning culture is more eminent. Although Brazil has a strong tradition in historic and modern architecture, architectural interventions are preferred over integral solutions (90% of all planning is covered by architects). The planning system itself is organized in a vertical way and enforced by strong governmental and political powers making Amsterdam approaches and solutions not to be copy pasted to Recife.


Impression 2: Recife – Momentum of Change as orchestrated intervention
On the other hand Recife is also a young vibrant city with lots of creative and enthusiastic people. New cars and motor cycles show economic prosperity and growth. A city filled with places where people meet and gather with a strong sense of communities. Where students still live with their parents and student housing is a strange word.
Being in Recife we felt the sense of urgency, urged by a group a cultural leaders and young urban professionals. A force that made our visit just more than a regular visit.  We were part of a well organized and defined momentum to rise public attention to the problems of Recife. Our visit was covered by camera, our lectures attended by over more than 300 people, and even our presence at the inauguration was carefully chosen. And finally the results of the workshop were published in the local newspaper the day after the presentation.

Challenges
With the World Cup 2014 (Recife is hosting 6 matches) and the Olympics in Rio in 2016 ahead the city faces new challenges that offers opportunities to fill in the blanks and make a huge step forward.
However solutions defined by projects alone are simply not enough. And momentum can be lost. In order to handle the basic and fundamental issues of planning it seems that the organization and political focus is part of the solutions.
In the workshop the question was raised if Recife already is a Metropole or merely an exploded city? What makes a city become or behave metropolitan besides its vertical skyline? Is it cosmopolitan in a way that you experience encounters of different cultures and international exchange.
What kind of a city does Recife want to become? What defines quality of life in Recife? And what are the small steps towards a process of integrated planning? And will it be possible to use and combine the force of communities to inspire people to have a vision on the future of Recife, creating an invitation to participate and activate.

Dutch experiences in heritage development, Public seminar II

After the second day of the workshop about the future of Recife, a public seminar about heritage took place. Fernando Diniz (Cau, Ceci, UFPE) welcomed the public of monument experts, architects, developers, students and interested citizens.

Frank Altenburg of the Netherlands Cultural Heritage Agency started with his presentation on how the Dutch government works with heritage. He explains the decentralized system of the Netherlands with state and city monuments. There are over 50.000 state protected monuments. Most of them are private houses, but also religious objects, castles and estates, mills, industrial heritage and civil and military infrastructure.

Another, more spatial oriented ways of preserving heritage are the protected townscapes. The notion of living in a protected townscape creates a proud feeling and a mutual identity to the inhabitants. It gives stability in the area. If you invest, your neighbour will probably invest as well and you have a certain guarantee that for example – when you live in a low-rise area – no high-rise complexes will be build right next to you. There are 425 areas listed, like historic city and village centres, social housing areas and industrial heritage complexes. To get things done The Netherlands work with incentives like tax reduction, low interest loans and subsidies.

At this moment the Dutch government is modernising the national monuments policy. The main targets are: integrating heritage in spatial planning, deregulation and promoting re-use and transformation.

Trends:

- co-creation (of cultural, economic and social values)

- identity (people want to feel related)

- sustainability

- participation (experts versus citizens)

‘Heritage is not only about the object. It’s also a way of telling stories, and a search for meaning and significance. And thus a process.’

Karin Westerink from the Amsterdam Department of Monuments & Archeology took the floor and starts with a quick city tour of Amsterdam. 
Currently there are 7510 monuments in Amsterdam of which 1480 are municipal.
‘Heritage is who we were and are. Heritage is the cities mirror’.
‘Never waste a good crisis’: The lack of pressure from the market gives space to think about better solutions. And never forget that cultural heritage has economic value.
Amsterdam has a lot of nationalities: we hope heritage can unite. Each generation has the obligation to re-write the history. An important recent development is the acknowledgement of part of the Amsterdam canals as UNESCO heritage. 


Paul Meurs, architect and professor at TU Delft started his presentation with the statement that he actually learned a lot from the heritage practices in Brazil when he first came there back in the days. Modernism and heritage went hand in hand, a thing that was unthinkable in The Netherlands around that time.
A nice reference to describe the way we tend to work with heritage nowadays is the way Lina Bo Bardi was looking for ‘the soul of a place’. We always try to understand the stories of the area. The challenge is to make those stories understandable for architects.

We now have to deal with the heritage of the 20th century. Qualities are not so much in the materials, but in the areas as a whole. The question is how to transform these areas preserving some values and creating new value to the city. This challenge is also very valid for Recife.




Flora van Gaalen

The contemporary Dutch city and the future of Recife, Public seminar I

As part of the workshop rXa – Recife Exchange Amsterdam, CAU-Pe, the new installed board of architects, organizes together with Iphan and IAB a public seminar with the Dutch team as referents.

Zeca Brandao of the University of Pernambuco is leading the session and introduces the theme for today: how can the planning practice in Amsterdam inspire the developments in Recife?

“It’s great that so many people are here, it shows the great interest at the moment that citizens have in the future of their city. We feel like it’s the sixties again! More and more people feel responsible to contribute to a better future and stand up against the developments they don’t agree with.”

Eric van der Kooij from the Spatial Planning Department of Amsterdam takes the floor. He states that the realities in Amsterdam and Recife are very different: only now we are here we really feel the size of the problems that Recife faces. He hopes that the story of Amsterdam can be an inspiration.

Amsterdam has a long tradition in planning. With the recent structural vision we even think thirty years ahead. To make sure the plans can be carried out, it is key to agree with a broad range of stakeholders. This culture of discussion, the so-called ‘polderen’ was born from the need to collaborate to protect low-lying The Netherlands from the water.

In urban planning it is very important to have an integral approach from the start: architects and urban planners should work together with the water agency, the departments of infrastructure and heritage, developers and last but not least the citizens. What kind of city would you like to live in? It’s will not be about jobs only, it will be about quality of life. A good public space and diversification of functions are key.


Johannes Beuckens from the Amsterdam Department of Infrastructure and Mobility adds to this that to be able to work together, it is important to formulate mutual themes. The mobility plan in Amsterdam has the focus points that Amsterdam should be attractive, clean and safe. By differentiating areas and make them accessible for different types of transport it is possible to regulate the traffic in the city.

Paulien Hartog of the water company Waternet, tells in more detail how Amsterdam works with water. Water levels in the city are very different, with the lowest part being five meters below sea level. Due to the risks this brings about water management is the oldest democratic system in the Netherlands. To realize safe water management and enhance the quality of the water it is necessary to connect the water to other themes in the city like urban planning, city marketing , energy production and ways to have fun at the water.


Eric rounds up stating that city planning is for 80% about communication. How can you use the wisdom of crowds? How to connect bottom-up planning with top-down planning? How to affect people with ideas? It’s all about making a cohesive story and telling it to a small group of people that will be affected by it and spread the word further.

Discussion – questions and reaction from the public

Fernando Diniz, architect and professor at UFPE states it is interesting to see that Amsterdam is densifying and links the green spaces in between together. This is a big contrast with Recife where all the space in between buildings is being filled with more buildings.


Zeca is interested in what we could learn from the contradiction that Recife is growing very fast and Amsterdam is growing at a much slower pace. Is there a conceptual parallel?

Eric: being in Recife, the feeling that overwhelms us is: “where should we start?” Problems are so big and you have to start with small-scale solutions. Planning in Recife seems to be in the architectural realm only. Could more parties participate? In Amsterdam we are also looking for new ways to interact with the public. So, we could say that we are both struggling to discover how to use the wisdom of crowds. We’re both searching how the stakeholders can be activated. We should check in a few years where both cities are by then…

How did Amsterdam make the public aware that cleaning the canals was important?

Paulien: There were strict regulations in the seventies to clean the water. Only the last ten to twenty years people became more aware of the quality of the water. And awareness still is a challenge: The people that use the water in their daily life (people living and recreating on boats) are our ambassadors. To make citizens aware of the good quality of the Amsterdam tap water we organized a ‘Canal bar’ where people could taste purified canal water on the spot.

How do you reach out to the different stakeholders to think along in the planning process? And how does your own role as City Planning Department change by this?

Eric: You need agents of chance to stimulate change. We have to know what is happening outside our office, by using internet, and organize discussions and exhibitions. But you still you have a unique position as professional. Our skill is to visualize different ideas together in one plan. By combining data, trends and expectations we can inspire people by giving them a context. Our function maybe changed from directing into more listening, more visualizing. In this way we hope to work towards the city we all want to live in.

Did Recife contribute anything to you?

Eric: What we learn from the situation in Recife is that you can have big ideas of planning, but that whatever happens, the city will go on. The fascinating part is the question when you will notice that you went a different way. Learning about these crucial points of timing in Recife gives us inspiration in how to approach issues in Amsterdam.

Flora van Gaalen

DERBY BEACH

Workshop 'Recife pensando o futuro', part I

After more than a year of virtual contact in the framework of the rXa project, the Amsterdam team, finally gets to see Recife with it´s own eyes. The representatives of the Spatial Planning Department Amsterdam, the Monuments Department Amsterdam,  the Department of Infrastructure and Mobility, water company Waternet and the Cultural Heritage Agency are teaming up with the planning departments of the city of Recife, the State of Pernambuco, the University of Pernambuco, the heritage institutes Iphan and Fundaj, as well as architects connected to Cau and Iab, in a four-day workshop to discuss the future of Recife in more depth.

A few important questions rise, like: ´What is ´quality´ for the Recifians?´ Is it the ultimate wish for citizens to live in one of the spatious highrise apartments on Boa Viagem with a nice flatscreen TV or do people wish to live in the old city centre where you can easily get around by foot and visit all kinds of cultural activities and shops? ´Where is the energy of the city´, or to put in differently, where do water, heritage and infrastructure clash and therefore create the opportunity to tackle problems in an integral approach? 

After a intensive tour through the old city centre and a boat tour along the Capibaribe river, some observations are made that will shape further discussion.

The first thing which the Amsterdam team cannot deny is the warm climate in Recife. The second thing is the overall traffic conjunction. Beacuse of recent rise of the middle class more and more people can afford to have a car. 3.000 new cars are ´welcomed´ in Recife every month, which huge traffic jams as their consequence. The logical Amsterdam observation that promoting the use of bicycles could be a solution, is put into perspective by the temperture: it´s simply to hot to cycle during daytime (or every office should get a shower).

Another observation is that heritage policies seem to be firmly in place, but there is a huge gap between the available instruments and the will of society and politicians to implement them in a cohesive way. Only when citizens an politicians see the (economical) value of integrating heritage in the overall development of the city it can be meaningful.

The third important thing noted today is that, with all the challenges that Recife faces, it could be helpful to start with the basic layer of the city: the water. Although the city turned it´s back to the water and citizens do not really seem to care about the quality of the water, it only takes one boat trip along the Capibaribe river to immediately experience the beauty of it. If this value would be recognised by a broader range of Recifians, this water could be the tangible asset that makes clear why Recifians are so proud to live here.

Flora van Gaalen

Concebido originalmente pelo Arcam (Architecture Center Amsterdam) e desenvolvido em conjunto com o Departamento de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, o evento Recife Exchange Amsterdam (rXa), realizou em 2011 um ciclo de debates atrelado a uma exposição em Amsterdam, dentro da programação oficial do Ano do Brasil na Holanda.

A exposição apresentou visões sobre o futuro das duas cidades. Os principais parceiros nesse primeiro momento foram a Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, O instituto dos Arquitetos do Brasil, a Prefeitura da Cidade do Recife e o Governo de Pernambuco.

No segundo ato do intercâmbio todas as atenções se voltam para o Recife.
Recife Pensando o Futuro – uma programação extensa composta por exposição, acompanhada de um ciclo de palestras – envolvendo técnicos da área de planejamento urbano do Recife e de Amsterdam, na Holanda, promovendo o debate de idéias e o intercâmbio de experiências sobre a produção e gestão do espaço urbano contemporâneo nas duas cidades, motivados pelo seu passado compartilhado.

Programação Geral

Observações:

As palestras abertas ao público Recife pensando o futuro, promovidas pelo RECIFE EXCHANGE AMSTERDAM, serão ministradas em inglês e acontecerão de terça,  24 à quinta, 26 de abril, começando sempre às 18h30. Haverá um sistema de tradução simultânea limitado a 150 pessoas. Para assistir a essas palestras não é necessário inscrição prévia.

Para a oficina participativa, que será ministrada na sexta, 27 de abril a partir das 13h,  é necessário fazer inscrição, pois a oficina é limitada a 15 vagas. Para mais informações acesse o link: http://tinyurl.com/7j2py7t