Recife, stolen city by Mariana Pedrosa

Written and researched by Mariana Melo Pedrosa as part of the Critical & Historical Studies Dissertation. Supervised by Barry Curtis. London, 2015.

Motivations

This project is motivade by...

People. I design for them and they are, ultimately, the font of my inspiration. I believe people are the most valuable aspect of the world we live in. I design in order to help them thrive and flourish; to give them power to interact with, adapt and improve the world around them.

Cities. I believe people should fulfil their dreams, needs and desires in the place they live. When seeking a topic for my dissertation, I read the following observation from Henrique Penalosa1:

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Most things that people buy in store give them a lot of satisfaction at the moment they buy them. But after a few days that satisfaction decreases, and, months later, it completely melts away. But greater public space is a kind of magical good. It never ceases to yield happiness. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s almost happiness itself.â&#x20AC;? This motivated me to explore how all the hidden potential of cities could potentially be unleashed.

01 Henrique Penalosa quoted in Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (United Kingdom: Penguin Books, 2013) p.14

Recife. Recife is my home town and, needless to say, I want the best for my city and believe in its potential. I have the opportunity to potentially contribute to a future in which Recife is a great place to live. I envision the city progressing towards a mutually beneficial relationship between the development of the community and the local environment.

Introduction

Every End Has a Beginning

‘Do not all men desire happiness? Or is this just a ridiculous question?’

Socrates famously asked one interlocutor. This was my starting point, the question I asked myself as an individual and as a designer. My first thoughts on the dissertation were about happiness, and what elements of the city provide feelings of joy and sociability. Why? At my first term at RCA, I learned about something called ‘experience economy’. This is the concept that we are moving towards a future where people don’t want to buy products, but experiences. But, why buy? Why can’t our everyday lives in the city be experiences in themselves? At that point in time, I was engaged in a love affair with London. I had just moved to the city and I was finding all of its hidden pleasures. Life here was completely different to in my home town, seemingly so much easier and more accessible. I was going to parks, food markets, public events. I was experiencing things that my city couldn’t offer. I was experiencing a certain kind of freedom that I didn’t have at home.

First day of research. February, (sunny) Sunday.I sat in the park for a couple of hours and watched the crowds...kids, parents, pets. Fig 01. (left) & Fig 02. (below) Mile End Park

Fig 03. (right) Street Symphony ,Columbia Road Fig 04. (below) Food & Love, Valetines Day , Borough Market

.Fig 05. A scent of colour Colombia

In going to those places and seeing people socialising with each other, smiling and interacting with their environment, I wanted to understand which elements were creating those feelings of joy and sociability. Upon reflection, I realised that the city itself held the answers to my questions. As Italo Calvino2 said in Invisible Cities:

‘Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffice to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.’ I see myself not as specialist, but as a generalist, seeking to make connections between various academic disciplines and experiences in order to discern a larger purpose to our human endeavours. Between these connections and my own experiences, I was able to use my findings to design a greater city, a greater Recife. What started as a project about what makes people happy, about public spaces, markets and London, became, in the process of writing, about a place I’m much more familiar with. Home. 2 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1st edn (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), p. 44 3 Elide Rugai Bastos, ‘Gilberto Freyre: A Cidade Como Personagem’, Revista Sociologia E Antropologia, 02 (2012), 135–59.

There is a sociologist from Recife, Gilberto Freyre, who sees the city as a character3, a way of expressing the curious and uneasy spirit of the traveller. In my own work, too, I found that Recife also became my character. This essay was my connection with the city.

Another writer4 once said Recifenses suffer from a congenital saudade5. This feeling has been converted by many into a literary theme. So it has been in my writing. These pages are nourished with thoughts about my own city, combined with some of my current ideas about how it could be improved. I see Recife partly through the eyes of someone who has left it behind. I have experiences and knowledge that I did not have before, and so not only view it as someone who was born there, but through the eyes of a designer who needed to leave before he could identify the city’s issues, value its diversity and see the potential for change. The aims of this essay are to understand what constitutes the natural function of cities and what has changed throughout the years, and to set out a manifesto as to how an ‘ideal’ city can be created. In the first chapter, I present my reflections upon the city as a meeting place. As humans are social animals, I wanted to understand how they use the urban realm to socialise. I also analyse how the city started to change due the modernisation of ideas and the problems that came with this change. 4 Arraias quoted in Lúcia Maria de Siqueira Cavalcanti Veras, ‘Paisagem Postal, a Imagem E a Palavra Na Compreensão de Um Recife Urbano’, 2014, p. 33. 5 ‘Saudade’ is one of those words that there is not a specific translation. It is often translated as an melancholic longing or yearning.

Next, I present my home town as a case study, a real example of a city that has all the potential problems listed in the first chapter. I also relate how the city began to change, and how its citizens are beginning to demand the sort of city they want to live in. The third chapter draws upon this in identifying and outlining some of the elements that are necessary to create a better city to live in.

p.s: yellow is the colour Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m using for my comments on photographs and to highlight words that stood out.

Note

For the purposes of this essay, I will not ignore the complexity of the question of what makes a city. A city is too complex to define or describe; a city is not only one thing, but many factors in constant negotiation. Cities are complex, contradictory and in a continual state of increasingly rapid flux. But, for this essay (and from my point of view), I take a city to be, as Lewis Mumford6 describes it, a ‘theatre of social action and an aesthetic symbol of collective unity, looking beyond a mere cityscape of buildings and streets to the vibrant network of human relationships.’ A city, as described in this essay, is both social and collective. As such, I apply myself to the discussion of the role of the city in developing the human personality and the emphasis on community values.

6 Lewis Mumford, ‘What Is a City?’, in Architectural Record, 1937, p. 93.

Act 01

City :a theatre of social action

“The city in its complete sense is a geographic plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a theater of social action, and an aesthetic symbol of collective unity.”7

As the Brazilian architect Raquel Rolnik8 explains, the magic of city happens when an individual, in addition to the private life they live as a ‘natural being’, starts a ‘second life’ as a social being who becomes real when living among others. For Jane Jacobs9, the city can be compared to a stage where we, as individuals who compose the action and scenes, are actors and dancers:

7 Lewis Mumford, ‘What Is a City?’, in Architectural Record, 1937, p. 93. 8 Raquel Rolnik, ‘O Lazer Humaniza O Espaço Urbano’ <https://raquelrolnik.files. wordpress.com/2009/08/ lazerhumanizaespacourbano. pdf> [accessed 20 May 2015]. 9 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library Series) (New York: Random House Publishing Group, 1993), p. 50.

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvellous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order (…) This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city side walk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations.

Fig 06. A young woman walks down a sidewalk in Greenwich Village, carrying an acoustic guitar on April 25, 1961.

Public spaces: an unpredictable and unplanned arrangement With all this constant movement and interaction between people, it becomes easy to see that the city is a social institution. There is evidence for this as early as the agora10 in ancient Greece, when the majority of urban functions took place in connection with public spaces. However, these public spaces are very often unpredictable and unplanned. Spontaneous actions are very much part of what makes moving and staying in city space such a special attraction. We are on our way to other places, watching people and events, inspired to stop to look more closely or even to stay or join in. People exchange greetings and talk to acquaintances they meet. There are chance meetings and small-talk at market booths, on benches and wherever people wait. People ask for directions and exchange brief remarks about the weather or when the next bus is due. More extensive contact can sometimes grow from these short greetings. New topics and common interests can be discussed. Acquaintanceship can sprout. Unpredictability and spontaneity are key words. The city as a meeting place

10 Greek public space, whose openness was an invitation to participate in the life of the city. 11 Lewis Mumford quoted by Cristiana Lacerda and others, ‘Proposta de Diretrizes Para O Cais José Estelita’, 2014.

Throughout history, a city’s public domain has functioned as a meeting place on many levels for city dwellers. It is here that meetings occur that produce the art of living in cities. People meet, exchange news and ideas, make deals, relax, and even arrange marriages. Street artists entertain us and goods are offered for sale. The city has always been the meeting place, fulfilling its function according to Lewis Mumford11:

â&#x20AC;&#x153;The major function of the city is to actually encourage and incite the greatest possible number of meetings, challenges of all people, classes and groups, providing, as it turns out, a stage in which it enacts the drama of life urbanâ&#x20AC;?

Lewis Mumford

The enduring strength of cities reflects the profoundly social nature of humanity. Our ability to connect with one another is the defining characteristic of our species. Psychologist Steven Pinker12 argues that group living, the primitive version of city life, set the stage for the evolution of human-like intelligence. We built civilisations and culture together, constantly learning from one another and from the past. We have a fundamentally social nature. City space continued to function as an important social meeting place in the 20th century, until the planning ideals of modernism prevailed and coincided with the car invasion. The discussion of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;death and lifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; in cities, raised defiantly by Jane Jacobsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s book13 in 1961, dealt in large part with the gradual breakdown of the opportunities of city space to function as a meeting place. Even though the discussion has continued since then, city life has in many places continued to be squeezed out of city space. 12 Steven Pinker quoted in Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Urban Spaces Make Us Human (London: Pan Books, 2012). 13 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library Series) (New York: Random House Publishing Group, 1993) 14 The modernist ideas applied to city planning and architecture are very similar to the graphic design movement. Very minimalist, very ordered, very rational, everything is separated.

Modernism: a new concept of the city After the Second World War, modern ideas14 were applied to rebuilding the city. Dominant planning ideologies rejected city space and city life as untimely and unnecessary. A low priority was placed on public space, pedestrianism and the role of city space as a meeting place for urban dwellers. Market forces and related architectural trends have gradually shifted focus from the interrelations and common spaces of the city to individual buildings, which in the process become increasingly more isolated, introverted and dismissive.

These pictures demonstrate how modernist ideas applied to city planning and architecture were very similar to the modernist graphic design movement: very minimalist, very ordered, very rational, everything is separated. Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, is considered a symbol of modernist architecture.

Fig 07. (left) Poster for the 1923 Bauhaus Exhibition in Weimar by Joost Schmidt (original in colours) Fig 08.(below) Brasilia, Brasil. (original in colours)

As David Harvey15 summarises, this was ‘a new urban movement that touts the sale of community and a boutique lifestyle as a developer product to fulfil urban dreams. A world in which the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive individualism can become the template for human personality socialization.’ The dystopian ideal of modern metropolises The urban chaos, the speeds of the cars and the busy life of modern metropolises, combined with lack of security in the streets, created a new and very unfavourable environment for urban community life in public places. Especially after the growth of automobile use, these functions were failing to occur in public spaces, creating a vicious circle of degradation of the urban environment and increased activity in private settings. Shopping centres, museums and supermarkets are the new spaces of interaction. These are climate-controlled and protected areas that represent artificial versions of public places, making them less and less part of the city.

15 David Harvey, Rebel Cities (New York: Verso, 2012), p. 14. 16 Marc Augé, Non-Places, 2nd edn (New York: Verso, 2008).

These places, called ‘non-places’, by the French anthropologist Marc Auge16, are everywhere but feel like they’re nowhere in particular, devoid of local culture and history and the distinctiveness that brings. Instead they try very hard to impart their own culture and vitality, but it doesn’t work, resulting in fake, themed environments where everything is controlled and far from unplanned and spontaneous. Our lives became increasingly mediated, we were less likely to interact, to bump into each other, and as a result the

city was losing its most fertile function: the place where people meet. The modernist ideas contribute to the loss of the city’s multifunctionality. They disaggregate the functions of the city, defining for each of them a place and a separate and specific mission, causing the decrease of the possibilities and mixed use that characterised the city as multifunctional and public.

13 The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library Series) (New York: Random House Publishing Group, 1993). 14 Lewis Mumford, ‘What Is a City?’, in Architectural Record, 1937, pp. 93–96 15 SI quoted in Brian James Schumacher, ‘Potential of the City: The Interventions of The Situationist International and Gordon Matta - Clark’, 2008, p. 10. --The Situationist International (SI) was an international organization of social revolutionaries, the exclusive membership of which was made up of avantgarde artists, intellectuals, and political theorists, active from its formation in 1957 to its dissolution in 1972. 16 Ibid. p.10

According to Jacobs13, the modernist ideology was wrong because it argued that the street is a bad place for humans. It suggested that houses must be off the streets and turned inward to a fenced green area. The cities of the post-War era were described by Mumford14 as lacking any sense of communal focus with their separate residential, commercial and cultural centres and their emphasis on automobile transportation. The Situationist International15 argued that the urbanists’ championing of the automobile merely represented a false notion of happiness, one that destroyed social relationships and, in fact, contributed to the alienation from authentic experience that was demanded by advanced capitalism. Elsewhere, the SI16 claimed that the automobile was ‘the opposite of encounter, it absorbs the energies that could otherwise be devoted to encounters or to any sort of participation.’ In order for authentic life to re-emerge, the automobile needed to be phased out and a renewed attention to the old city established. The planners, despite their best intentions, inevitably perpetuated the conditions that capitalist organisation required. The SI17 felt that ‘Those who believe that the particulars of the problem are permanent want in fact to believe in the permanence of the present society.’

The Cave

“How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?”18 The book ‘The Cave’ by Jose Saramago19 has an intertext with Plato’s ‘The Allegory of the Cave’. In his book the Portuguese writer presents the idea of the Commercial Centre. It has everything and does everything. There you live, buy, study, have fun, work. It is a self-sufficient body, very organised, very well controlled and extremely safe and secure - there are cameras everywhere - and of course, it is quite seductive, as Alexandre Barone20 explains. 17 SI quoted in Brian James Schumacher, ‘Potential of the City: The Interventions of The Situationist International and Gordon Matta - Clark’, 2008, p. 10. 18 ‘Allegory of the Cave’ <http:// allspirit.co.uk/writings/ philosophy/allegory-of-the-cave/> [accessed 15 September 2015]. 19 Jose Saramago, A Caverna, 1st edn (Brasil: Companhia das Letras, 2000). 20 Alexandre Vicenzo Barone, ‘A Asfixia Globalizante Em A Caverna de José Saramago’, Labirintos, 01 (2007) <http:// www.uefs.br/nep/labirintos/ edicoes/01_2007/08_artigo_ alexandre_v_barone.pdf> [accessed 20 September 2015]

The Commercial Centres in real life are the shopping centres, the high class condominiums, the privatised environments. That these place did not reflect the real desires of the people who would have to live within those communities, and whose needs the architecture purported to serve, was not a primary concern. Modernism in this way reflected its own alienation from the people it claimed to serve and even protect. Rather, in the end, these chimaeras would not only be unable to aid the population, they would in fact serve to further the inhabitants’ subjugation to new forms of social control. It is often said that cities are mechanisms for generating social contact. Looking at what has been done to cities in the past quarter century, one may doubt the generality of this principle. The city in its modern transformation sometimes 36

seems more like a mechanism for keeping people apart in conditions of high density. The use of this modernist approach to building cities, based on traffic and capital, produces, among others, two problems that I particularly decided to highlight in this work: the lack of public space and ‘verticalisation’ 21.These two factors are interconnected and reflect on each other. Agoraphobia As a reaction to the phenomenon of Modernism, society began to develop a kind of collective agoraphobia as regards the city and public space. This began as non-use; later this agoraphobia turned into rejection and fear of public space. It was no longer characterised as a diverse place to connect and integrate with people. In fact, the public spaces are increasingly perceived as an unsafe and violent environment. A city closed off into private territories and exclusive strongholds doesn’t allow what, historically, were the principle tenets of civilisation and of humanity: diversity and the possibility of meeting others.

21 Verticalisation means the construction of tall buildings that creates artificial communities and isolates the individual from their environment.

The disappearance of sidewalks, devoured by cars, reflects the way we perceive the citizens in their territory. There is a whole ideological burden, much more than a simple matter of traffic or priority to the automobile – this is the sign that the individual supersedes the collective. The result is of people locked in their cars, in their homes and condominiums, and in the malls. These priorities can be seen very clearly in the organisation

of our cities, where the existence of public spaces is small and its use is very limited, and sometimes elitist. If people are not using public space, where are they? And why did those public spaces become so unsafe? Verticalisation In many cities new buildings are going up at an unprecedented pace. Massive gated communities are being built for the middle class, exacerbating the gulf between rich and poor. Traditional neighbourhoods are being replaced by towering skyscrapers, This trend has spread around the globe and it is damaging the fabric of cities everywhere. As noted by Richard Florida22 in his text about the limits of verticalisation for the Wall Street Journal:

“Giant buildings often function as vertical suburbs, muting the spontaneous encounters that provide cities with so much of their social, intellectual and commercial energy. People live their lives indoors in such places, wearing paths between their offices and the food courts, always seeing the same people.” 22 Richard Florida, ‘For Creative Cities, the Sky Has Its Limit’ (WSJ, 2012) <http://www.wsj.com/news/ articles/SB100008723963904 43477104577551133804551396> [accessed 14 September 2015].

The construction of vertical communities suppresses the chance of encounters that make life unpredictable and social. Meanwhile, the capital acts as if their buildings could satisfy the social being fully:

”The real estate capital constructs buildings as if they could be an end in itself. However, not a space in the city, specially a private space, can be an end in itself, because the decision to build a private building has a social and environmental impact that is funded by all the people circulating the city.”23 Eyes of the street Violence is also increased when spaces are not shared. As Andrade24 conclude, we transform selfishness into sociopathy, because we dissolve one place of coexistence in the name of haste and security that isolates, segregating and paradoxically fostering violence.

23 Erico Andrade and Andréa Storch, ‘Por Um Urbanismo Moral’, Insight Inteligência, 68 (2015), 64–77. 24 Author interview with Erico Andrade, philosopher, 22 August 2015 25 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library Series) (New York: Random House Publishing Group, 1993)

As Jacobs25 explains, visibility is related to safety. The concept of ‘eyes of the street’ describes the combination of visually permeable walls, close to the street and with residents who care about what happens in their neighbourhood, and works to promote a greater sense of security for those who walk or develop other types of activity on the streets. In fact, the isolation promoted by high buildings with very low or no visual permeability does not protect even those within the private areas, or those who are on the streets, because the greatest safety factor still is the movement of people on the streets. Erico Andrade26 explains that with the loss of the street, we also lose an important visual and sentimental tie that links 39

people socially, enabling people know other individuals beyond the borders of their houses. Without empathy, it’s not possible to put yourself in the shoes of others. This makes it impossible to construct a sense of civil tolerance. Empathy is also responsible for emotional memory, the feeling of belonging to a place and to a story that invariably marks the formation of each person. Failure to recognize the importance of proximity between places or people is the first step for a lack of commitment to the city. It is questionable if large and tall buildings are what make a great city. The verticalisation understood as a symbol of the future, of modernity and progress, is wrong. It is used as a strategy to impose a new way of building the modern city. Perhaps it is necessary to understand that the idea of progress contains a trap within itself As Nietzsche27 states:

26 Author interview with Erico Andrade, philosopher, 22 August 2015 27 F. Nietzche, ‘ The Antichrist’ ,1895 , quoted in André Raboni, ‘Recife: Uma Cidade Em Construção’ <http://acertodecontas.blog.br/ artigos/recife-uma-cidade-emconstrucao/> [accessed 2 June 2015].

“what is understood as progress, certainly does not represent an evolution toward something better, stronger or higher. This “progress” is merely a modern idea, that is a false idea ( ... ) the progress of evolution does not necessarily mean elevation, improvement, strengthening.” So far, the urbanism that promotes mono functional islands and the excellence of a private life has not worked efficiently. We are all blocked, unable to get around town. Unable to connect. It is chaos. As a result, the city promotes violence and social inequality.

Now, let me introduce Recife, a high and selfish city made of non-places that are a real example of the problems so far described.

Act 02

A city of non places

Fig 09. Marco Zero, view from the river.

‘Is it close to Rio?’ ‘Where are you from?’ This is certainly one of the most common questions I hear here in London. I’m from Brazil. That’s easy. Everyone has heard about this tropical country. ‘But whereabouts in Brazil?’ is the following question. I’m from Recife. ‘Where?’ Recife, in the North East of Brazil. Silence. After nine months in England, I certainly know that Recife is not well known by the rest of the world, unlike São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro. But actually, Recife is among the five biggest cities in Brazil, as regards population and economy. It’s the largest metropolitan area in the North and North-East of the country, and is in fact one of the oldest capitals in Brazil, the capital of the state of Pernambuco. Let Gilberto Freyre28, an important Brazilian sociologist from Recife, tell you about the city where he was born and developed his studies and career:

28 Gilberto Freyre quoted in Fernanda Peixoto, ‘A Cidade E Seus Duplos: Os Guias de Gilberto Freyre’, Tempo Social, 2005, 159 <http:// www.revistas.usp.br/ts/article/ view/12458/14235> [accessed 14 September 2015].

“A traveller, when he gets to Recife, is not welcomed by a city wide open to his admiration (...) With its almost Moorish modesty, she is hiding behind the palm trees, her slender churches, her narrow houses (...) For no one, however, will the city surrender immediately: its greatest charm is in winning one over gradually. “ Recife went through several transformations, not always easy and simple, but important for its life and for the life of its people.

This is the ‘Marco Zero’ (Ground Zero in English), where Recife’s history started. One of my favourites part of the city, a combination of nature and architecture. Looking to one side you can see its architecture, looking to the other you can see both river and ocean. Fig 10. Marco Zero

Fig 11. Recife: bridges & rivers.

Fig 12. Some facts about Recife

Both places are picture postcards from Recife, located in the heart of the city. Fig 13. (left) Boa Vista bridge Fig 14. (below) Boa Vista bridge and Aurora Street

bridges, water

A little bit of history Recife was founded in the XVI century, when Brazil was a Portuguese colony. Initially, it was baptised with the name Vila de Ribeiro do Mar dos Arrecifes. The word arrecife comes from the Arabic word arrasíf, which means ‘sidewalk’. It is also known as the land of the corals or the ‘Venice of Brazil’, because it is dissected by numerous waterways and connected by many bridges. Therefore, it is natural to assume that the Recifenses, people from Recife, adore water. The city can be said to have emerged from the water like an Iara29. Water is connected in the most intimate way to the city’s history: the river, the sea and the mangroves. The city was settled by fisherman and sailors, and as a result the port was used for exporting the local production and receiving imports from elsewhere. Recife was a port of excellence. Such wealth, mainly because of the cultivation of sugar cane, soon came to become known in all the Old World.

29 Iara is a figure from Brazilian mythology based on ancient Tupi and Guaraní mythology. She is seen as either a water nymph, siren, or mermaid depending upon the context of the story told about her

In 1630, attracted by the sugarcane, the Dutch came to Brazil and established themselves in Recife for 24 years.During the Dutch occupation, the city started to rapidly grow as result of the administration of the count Maurice de Nassau government. He planned and mapped out streets, built bridges, brought architects, engineers and landscape designers from Europe in order to improve the appearance and functionality of the city. Bridges and arches were built, streets were paved, buildings were constructed. From a simple village, Recife became an important cosmopolitan location for trade in the Americas.

When I show this picture to foreign friends here in London, it is very common to hear: ‘is it your hometown? It looks like Venice / Copenhagen’. Well, as I said, we had different influences from different European cultures...and Recife is known as the ‘Venice of Brazil’. Fig 15. Morning at Rua da Aurora

Galo da Madrugada, a famous carnival tradition, held the Guinness World Record for the largest public gathering since 1995. Hundreds of thousands of people in costumes, painted faces, in masks or simply dressed brightly take to the streets. Fig 16. Galo da Madrugada

A great mix of people and culture A number of writers have described Recife as ‘a city made up of many cities’, with neighbourhoods that remind us of Europe, other parts looking like streets teeming with people from the Orient, a mixture of aristocratic residences and shanty towns on hills and wetlands, all amidst the vestiges of its tropical forest greenery. Diversity is a word that describes Recife and its history, with its different influences, its culture, geography, and people. Ah, the people.

Oh povo arretado! 30 We are receptive people, cheerful, creative and hospitable with a cultural diversity influenced by Indigenous people, Africans and Europeans. We are warm and joyful, just like our carnivals. At carnival season, everyone comes together to celebrate the holidays. This is the biggest social and democratic event of the year, where clubs perform together and engross themselves in each other’s culture. Every year more than one and a half million people open the festivities of the Brazilian carnival at Galo da Madrugada. The city’s downsides

30 A Portuguese expression, mostly common in Recife, to express greatness.

Unfortunately, Carnival is one of the few times the people of Recife go to the streets. We interact with each other in the public realm. We embrace the streets. We celebrate the Carnival, we celebrate Recife.

Frevo the ttraditional music and dance of Recifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Carnival. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s colourful and full of energy, just like every other element of the Carnival. These festivities embrace everyone....everyone is welcomed on the streets and immersed in the music and colours. Fig 17. Frevo

Golden sands, palm trees, warm water. Crowds of people, food, music...who doesn’t like a Sunday at the beach? One of our last public space… Fig 18. (left) & Fig 19. (below) Boa Viagem Beach

It’s one of my favourite festivities. I love everything about it, the music, the colours, the dancing. Specifically, I love the fact that we spend the day on the streets. Unexpected encounters happen. We look at each other, seeing different customs, letting the spontaneity take over. It’s a different city. It’s a real place to live. However, it is only one of a few times in the year that I use the public realm of the city. I was brought up with constant fear of the city, and with the concept that Recife is an unsafe place. That a safe place was at home, at work, in malls: encapsulated, private spaces. According to my mother, I needed to be constantly aware. There is, however, one more place that we are very famous for, one of the remaining places that we see the population socialising, despite all the usual social segregation. This place is the beach, a sacred space that the whole of Recife cares about. The beaches are a very popular social space, as a writer31 in The Telegraph describes: ‘…the crowds are gathering on the hallowed stretch that is Boa Viagem for another day of relaxation, gossip and exhibitionism.’ The beach is like a picture postcard of Brazil, with its golden sands, hot temperatures and tropical culture. 31 Dominic Jarman, ‘Just Back: The Coconut-Seller of Recife’, The Telegraph (Telegraph.co.uk, 21 October 2011) <http://www. telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelwriting-competition/8839112/ Just-back-the-coconut-seller-ofRecife.html> [accessed 20 May 2015].

In general, we in Recife have a lack of public space, a denial of it. We live a private life, enclosed. In fact, some say that our five huge shopping centres were built within city limits to respond to a deficiency of public space, of streets and squares that were increasingly abandonment by the government.

â&#x20AC;Ślittle by little Boa Viagem was taken over by cars and buildings. Now at 2pm the sunbathing crowd is interrupted by the shadow of the buildings. Fig. 20 Contradictions

As if Recifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s only problem were this... Fig. 21. Danger!

Our carnival is over, no one can hear any songs. No one is about, playing happily...and in the hearts, ashes remain where once there was fire of the carnival.

Vinicius de Moraes

The end of carnival...so sad. It is the end of a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;dreamâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; of celebrations in the public realm... and then the return to our private and encapsulated lives. The photograph is is of the taking down of the Galo da Madrugada. Fig 22. End of Carnival, end of life?

Enigmatic picture of the reflections of Recife from a shop window. That’s how most of the population see the city now, through the lens of a private space. Fig 23. (left) ‘One day, all this will be filled’, scene from Neighbouring Sounds, Fig 24. (below) Recife’s Reflections from RioMar Shopping

This private life, I would say, is completely contradictory to our culture and personality. Recife has a very rich culture. A unique population. We are different from everything else across Brazil. But, as Isabel Cavalcanti32, from the project ‘My Recife’, says:

‘Recife is a ticking time bomb’ Not only a diverse culture, but a diversity of problems shape Recife’s personality. Social segregation, chaotic traffic, violence, verticalisation and lack of public spaces are recurring problems in the everyday life of the Recifenses. A movie called Neighbouring Sounds33, directed and written by Kleber Mendonça, reflects upon this side of Recife. It is a city where walls imprison the population. The movie reflects a community under stress, its changing environment and the effect of its architecture on the people who live there.

32 Author interview with Isabel Cavalcanti,co-founder of ‘ My Recife’ project, 27 May 2015. 33 Kleber Mendonça Filho, Neighboring Sounds (Brazil, 2012). 34 Ibid.

Mendonça34 metaphorically opens wide the heart of Brazilian society, with all its stuffiness, the relicts of the colonial past in the midst of modernity. Through buildings, cars and electronics are revisited secular national institutions such as patriarchy, the cordial man, the big house and the slave quarters, the racist subtext, patrimonialism. The old ways remain, confirmed and redesigned by the behaviour of each character.

The film begins with black and white photos of a Brazilian rural environment of the early century 20. Over the course of more than two hours of film there are at least 48 scenes in which fancies are featured prominently, often in the foreground. It is one of the elements that are intended to signify claustrophobia, alongside the architectural commentary in the film, derived from images of decaying walls, high sills, narrow corridors, closed doors, abandoned basements, dark streets, an empty pool. And everything seems to be surrounded and thus somewhat guarded.

Fig 25. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Moral seediness, ambivalence, paranoia, and desperation exist right below the surfaceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, scene from Neighbouring Sounds.

In an impressive scene, the little girl who is part of the middle class and lives in a building surrounded by alarms and gates has a nightmare where several faceless figures invade her house and just walk around. It is as if they were taking back the private space and making it public. It frightens her.

Professor Luiz Amorim34 says that the city is responsible for mixing people. An urban cluster that segregates and isolates its inhabitants, as he says, can be anything but city. Recife is becoming a non–city:

“When the city becomes a separator device, I always say: change the name, it’s not a city any more. It is anything else. Put other name, but don’t call it city. The city attributes it to aggregate. You can call it Recife, but not city.” According to Kleber Mendonça’s35 artistic and sociological view of his city in his award winning short film Recife Frio:

34 Luiz Amorim quoted in Eduarda Barbosa, ‘“A Cidade Deve Ser Um Misturador de Gente”’ <https:// www.ufpe.br/agencia/clipping/ index.php?option=com_ [accessed 20 April 2015].

“Recife had already developed a paralysing fear of violence and a taste for the ugly and aggressive urbanism common to Latin American cities. The chaotic cityscape, made worse by out of control real estate speculation led to the dehumanisation of the city. Even though many people pay no attention, sections of Recife were turned into a landscape of straight lines and right angles. Sterile and boring. In this mess, the human element was squashed. And the streets became inhospitable. During our trip to Recife we saw the streets looking increasingly empty. And we asked, where is everybody?

35 Kleber Mendonça Filho, Recife Frio (Brazil, 2009).

Everybody’s at the shopping mall.”

Fig 26. Cold Carnival, real day lifes scene from ‘Recife Frio’

The Holiday was built in the 50â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s with the goal of functioning as a place for families who wanted to come to the beach on the weekends.... however, it ended up being used as a housing centre for families with low income. The place is completely abandoned. A piece of concrete in the middle of the beach that no one dares to pass by....

Fig 27. Concrete Tsunami

Fig 28. A vertical landscape

A vertical landscape The verticalisation of Recife, rather than bringing citizens together, has produced a city that is increasingly segregated and dependent on the car as a means of transport, without people in the street and only privileging a small part of the population. Between the 1930s and 1950s, buildings with more than eight floors, with concrete structures and equipped with lifts, became the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;symbol of progressâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; in large Brazilian cities. The urban legislation of Recife, also approved during the 50s, induced and encouraged the construction of buildings on stilts (freeing up space for cars), and required lateral clearances, which led to the reduction in density, the glamorisation of plastic and improved ventilation between courts and buildings. Thanks to discipline introduced by this legislation, the city acquired an urban quality that today sets it apart from other coastal cities: we see a wall of buildings, connected together, restricting visibility and aeration. From the 1970s onwards, these architectural typologies grew into creatures with 15 and 20 floors, disorderly, scattered and concentrated in high-income neighbourhoods. From the 1990s, buildings got even higher, some passing 100 metres high, with up to 40 floors. But what is the problem with the verticalisation? Well, the problem is not verticalisation itself, but the way it is done in Recife. And, wrongly, it continues. From 2003 to 2008, the centre of Recife was the target of a heated discussion on the legal authorisation of the construc-

tion of two residential towers 134.72 metres high, in the historic district of São José and Santo Antônio, located in the centre of Recife. This was a significant area of natural beauty, a landscape which will become a symbol of the tension between the old and the new, the historic and the modern. After numerous debates, the buildings ‘Pier Duarte Coelho’ and ‘Pier Maurice of Nassau’ were built with 41 floors each, and became popularly known as ‘the twin towers.’ On the city skyline, one notices the lack of dialogue between the two buildings and the rest of the historic urban landscape where they are inserted. In 2008, builders announced the continuation of verticalisation in this area, at the Quay Jose Estelita. The quay is an area of about 101.7 square meters, with a rail yard and a number of sugar warehouses abandoned by the government. The site is part of the history of Recife, one of the postcard-worthy images and one of the few public spaces that remain in Recife. This public area was sold to a group of construction companies in an auction questioned by national prosecutors. At the pier , it is planned to implement a joint project involving commercial towers , residential and also hotels whose development is being called the New Recife Project. The proposal for the remainder of the quay is to continue this search to enter a world that is not the old Recife, but a new Recife. The New Recife Project proposes modernisation with a view to the future and its back to a past that no longer interests the administration. The new city is to be far

The buildings ‘Pier Duarte Coelho’ and ‘Pier Maurice of Nassau’ became popularly known as ‘the twin towers.’ Nearly everywhere in the city you can see them and their contrast with the landscape. It’s an almost constant reminder that something is wrong with the city... Fig 29. A city of straight lines

Fig. 30 Lack of dialogue

removed, in scale and form, from the existing city, marking a break with memory and urban history. So, the ‘new’ in the process is not the new consortium for the project ‘New Recife’. That is an old idea, and is what Brazil has always done: privatisation of public areas and urban policy only focused on real estate. What is new is the resistance. ‘A new generation comes along and decides what they want, starts to discuss what city they want,’ explains Raquel Rolnik36. The city is yours Recife has begun to decide what it wants. Before I left Recife, I saw the citizens ‘waking up’. They began to think about the city they want to live in. Who does the city belong to?

36 Daniela Arrais, ‘Raquel Rolnik Fala Sobre a Importância Do #OcupeEstelita Para O Futuro Das Cidades Brasileiras’, YouTube(YouTube, 2014) <https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=1gw_L7y0QGo> [accessed 15 September 2015]. 37 The movement was a clear allusion to the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protest in New York, also organized by civil society to protest the US government steps in New York City.

The project New Recife and the controversy around it was just the tipping point for the opening of the debate. We are experiencing the result of years of neglect of public space by the government, and now part of the population claims its ownership by law. In contrast, the private sector takes the lead role in investing in this space. The two sides of the argument unfortunately cannot yet come to an agreement. This new activity from the private sector triggered the organisation of the protest ‘Occupy Estelita37’. The movement’s slogan is: ‘The city is yours. Take it.’ The group does not just want to prevent the destruction of the quay and discuss the role of the public space in the city, but also seeks more public participation in decisions about the city. They seek to occupy its public spaces, making them a social, cultural and collective destination. They are fighting

The quay is an area with a rail yard and a number of sugar warehouses abandoned by the government... It represents a part of Recifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s history, when our economy was based on sugarcane. Fig 31. A track of change

for a city where leisure and coexistence are not confined to private spaces or shopping malls. Fighting against an urban development model that promotes an outdated idea of progress and modernisation. In June 2014, the movement that began as a network of contacts who fought against the project New Recife evolved into another dimension. Manifesting a physical presence in response to an injunction, despite all irregularities, the project New Recife won and began the demolition of the shed. This was the trigger. According to Andrade38:

“A physical occupation - with our bodies was the immediate solution to the impasse of invisibility. The bodies occupying public space denounce the collective dimension of the space, and therefore reorient the discussion of the city for the square, which is not only the place where you should place the discussion, but it is also the subject of discussion, because in it, as the poet would say, the people find themselves with the notion of public space. To ensure a city with more living spaces and sustainable buildings, the human body is converted […] because the traffic of bodies somehow collectivise space, in a general sense, making it public.” 38 Erico Andrade, ‘Ocupe Estelita - Novas Formas de Atuacao Politica’, Insight Inteligencia, 2014, 108–14 (p. 109).

Therefore, to occupy the Estelita Quay was to take possession of the city, not in the sense of privately appropriating the public space, but as a demand for an alternative urban

Fig 32. (left) The trigger! Fig 33. (below) The city is yours. Take it!

Fig. 34, 35 & 36 Estelitaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sugar house

The occupation of the Quay lasted for almost a month. Meanwhile, families, friends and people of all ages were living there. A kind of a microcosm of an ideal city was built inside the area...a community of respect, collaboration, arts... Fig 37. #OcupeEstelita

model that requires, first of all, popular participation in decisions about urban design of cities. Occupy Estelita is a demand for ownership of the city’s decisions, striving to balance the scales of democracy, which invariably lean towards the power of capital. It is the demand for a much more transparent and more participatory. The Estelita Quay becomes a political platform which aims to generate thought not only about the space occupied, but the occupation of the city as a whole. Urban planning is no longer an abstraction or a smaller agenda in the political scenario. It is becoming an opportunity to reinvent the city. The movement brought new values: reclamation of the public space, socialisation and artistic and cultural production. These are ‘elements that may have little capital value, but that have a tremendous value for the city,’ Rolnik39 explains. The movement is a success due to one key point: everyone can give ideas, participate and discuss. The Occupy Estelita created a channel that previously did not exist in the city, a form of citizen debate on the ways that the city is trending and how they can change and improve these directions.

39 Daniela Arrais, ‘Raquel Rolnik Fala Sobre a Importância Do #OcupeEstelita Para O Futuro Das Cidades Brasileiras’, YouTube(YouTube, 2014) <https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=1gw_L7y0QGo> [accessed 15 September 2015].

Through the debate about the city, the movement is gradually bringing Recife citizens closer to their city and making them not only discuss but get to know the place where they live. The more people know about their city and participate in the debates about it, the more they want to occupy it.

To be included in your city is to know it better, to be able to take greater advantage of what it has to offer. It is to be able to discover new places and create new relationships with space. An inclusive city is a city with fewer barriers between citizens. The Occupy Estelita movement is not only important to Recife, it is important for Brazil as well. The movement opens up a discussion in Brazil, whereas in previous decades, the urban policy was conducted solely based on the interests of real estate companies. Recife as seen the Occupy Estelita movement is the opposite of Recife in the film Neighbouring Sounds: it is a city that prioritises public space and defends the idea of participatory urban planning. Moreover40:

“We believe that we can still go further in the fight to guarantee our right to the city. Together, we will ensure the construction of a human city, with a development plan that represents people who live there. Together, we will resist!

WE ARE THE CITY!”

40 Kleber Mendonça Filho, Neighboring Sounds (Brazil, 2012).

#OcupeEstelita

41 ‘Movimento#OcupeEstelita’ (Facebook, 2015) <https:// www.facebook.com/ MovimentoOcupeEstelita/ info?tab=page_info> [accessed 23 May 2015].

Fig, 38 Say no to the ‘New Recife Project’.

Act 03

What is the city but the people?

Cities have grown rapidly42, and urban growth will continue to accelerate in the years ahead. Different narratives and design tactics are urgently needed to address new urban conditions. Until the present moment, we have been living in a model of a city that drives us towards urban chaos and social disorganisation. Denying the use of public space continues to intensify the privatisation of life. The rigid planning processes of the 20th century have become so institutionalised that community stakeholders rarely have the chance to voice their own ideas and aspirations about the places they inhabit. It is necessary to rethink the city. We should recover the idea of a multifunctional city, one which is both collective and social. 42 For the first time in history, the majority of the global population has become urban rather than rural. More than half of the people in the world, 3.3 billion of us, live in cities. By 2050, according to the best projections, urbanites will account for as much as 70% of the global population. 43 Russel Ackoof quoted in Moeen Khawaja, ‘Are Smart Cities Really That Smart?’, 2014 <http://www. ribaj.com/intelligence/aresmart-cities-really-that-smart> [accessed 20 June 2015]. 44 Le Corbusier was a Swiss-French architect, designer, painter, urban planner, writer, and one of the pioneers of what is now called modern architecture

Cities are complex: a complex system of systems where each problem interacts with others. And, as the organisational theorist Russel Ackoof43 writes, perhaps there are no clear solutions. Such complexity and heterogeneity is a necessary ingredient for a sustainable model of future cities, to stop them becoming totally sanitised and highly institutionalised auto-determined spaces that have no room for individual self-determination. But still, there isn’t a clear solution. There isn’t an ideal or perfect city. Those who tried to achieve this have failed. Le Corbusier44 and his acolytes made cities seem strikingly legible on paper in their ‘sublime straight lines’ and strict functional division. But cities refuse to behave like simple problems.

Jacobs45 states that the idea of money as a clear solution to a city’s problems is a misguided one: ‘There is a popular myth that if we had more money to spend, we would eliminate the slums, but look what we built with the first billion…low cost housing projects that have become centres of delinquency, vandalism and general discouragement, worse than the slums that they should replace.’ But if money is not the answer, what is? There is one thing that gives the city the full potential to change and become a better place to live: people. It is useless to design a city without understanding the demands of that city’s inhabitants. People should be at the heart of the process, as a city should be built based on their needs. People need to actively participate and make decisions. Nobody knows more about a city than its citizens. Good design is democratic.

45 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library Series) (New York: Random House Publishing Group, 1993). p.47

If, as designers, we set ourselves to ask, listen and observe how people behave and react in cities’ spaces, I believe we can deliver long-lasting cities that citizens can relate to. This idea isn’t new. During the 1960s and 1970s, William Whyte and Jane Jacobs applied social research methodologies to the design of public spaces. Their ideas are still valid today and their methods can certainly be reinvented and improved, so why not rediscover them? Many of those who have designed cities with people at the heart have made some use of ‘design thinking’. This is a human and user-centred approach, which leads to solutions that are progressively refined through an iterative process of giving voice to end users and engaging them in shaping decisions. Those ideas have being applied in an ad hoc and unsupported way.

Improving Jacobs’s and Whyte’s ideas with design methodology might be the key to what planners, architects, governments and communities are missing in their attempts to rethink the city. I once overheard the comment that the citizen talks to the city, the city talks to the citizen and the citizen talks to other citizens through the city. This summarises my vision for an ‘ideal’ city. A city should be a place that encourages meetings and interactions, that embraces heterogeneity and spontaneity. A place that listens to its citizens and changes based on their needs. A place where citizens make decisions and participate in the process. So, for my last chapter, I will propose a framework to create an ‘ideal’ city46. This is a guide that puts people at the heart of the process. A city for people, a city by people.

46 This framework is in its early stages, a reflection of what I read and heard during this research. It needs to be tested and all the components here described need to undergo more in depth research. 47 Placemaking refers to a collaborative process by which we can shape our public realm in order to maximize shared value. The thinking behind Placemaking gained traction in the 1960s, when Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte introduced ground-breaking ideas about designing cities for people, not just cars and shopping centres.

This idea was based on current elements of urban design, integrated with principles of design thinking, which has been currently used to equip governments with innovative approaches to face contemporary challenges. It also includes the proposal of the Placemaking movement47. This framework is divided into two sections: structure and governance.

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Structure

Governance

Cities for people

Cities by people

Liveability

Engagement

Sociability

Excellence

PEOPLE Sustainability

Accessibility

Fig 39. Cities for / by people framework

Context

Devolution

Structure

Cities for people

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Designing a dream city is easy; rebuilding a living one takes imagination.â&#x20AC;&#x2122;48 The structure of the ideal city should be based on people-oriented city planning: the creation of an urban environment that is designed based on the human dimension and considers the best attributes to create a better urban quality. There are direct connections between improvements for people in city space and visions for achieving sociable, liveable, sustainable and accessible cities.

Liveability Key words for encouraging life in the city are: compact and diverse, direct and logical routes, modest space dimensions, and safety. A lively city is a relative concept49, not limited by quantity or size. It is not numbers, crowds and city size that matter, but the sense that city space is inviting and popular. Erecting tall buildings to create very high density and poor public space is not a useful recipe for lively cities, even though contractors and politicians often use the argument of infusing life into the city for constructing tall dense buildings. Density, which represents quantity, must be combined with quality in the form of good city space. The lively city needs a varied and complex city life, where recreational and social activities are mixed with room for necessary pedestrian traffic as well as the opportunity to participate in urban life.

48 Jane Jacobs, ‘Downtown Is for People’, ed. by Nin-Hai Tseng,Fortune, 1958 <http:// fortune.com/2011/09/18/ downtown-is-for-people-fortuneclassic-1958/> [accessed 25 August 2015] 49 Jan Gehl, Cities for People, 1st edition (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2010)

Urban diversity is a positive objective for city design in creating more vibrant places, leveraging economic advantages and promoting social equity and environmental sustainability. A mix of functions supports more ‘vital’ urban spaces that are better used by a range of users, and opens up opportunities for social encounter and interaction. Feeling safe is also crucial if we hope to have people embrace city space. It is a prerequisite for creating inviting, well-functioning cities for people. In general, life and people themselves make the city more inviting and safe.

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Sociability Sociability is about the strengthening of the social function of the city space as a meeting place that works toward the aims of a welcoming, interactive, friendly and cooperative society. There are places to meet and interact, play, explore. Inviting cities must have carefully designed public space to support the processes that reinforce city life. One important prerequisite is that city life is a potentially self-reinforcing process. People are spontaneously inspired and attracted by activity and the presence of other people.

50 Ken Worpole and Katharine Know, The Social Value of Public Spaces (York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation, April 2007) <https:// www.jrf.org.uk/report/socialvalue-public-spaces> [accessed 3 April 2015]. 51 There is growing interest in planning sustainable cities and for good reason. The depletion of fossil fuels, escalating pollution, carbon emissions and the resulting threat to the climate are strong incentives for trying to increase sustainability in cities around the world.

Public spaces are a vital ingredient of successful cities. They help build a sense of community, civic identity and culture. Those spaces form a shared spatial resource from which experiences and value are created in ways that are not possible in our private lives alone50. Rather than supporting the idea of withdrawn gated communities, sociability promotes the idea of a city that is accessible and attractive to all groups in society. The city is seen as serving a democratic function where people encounter social diversity and gain a greater understanding of each other by sharing the same city space. Sustainability The concept of sustainability51 implies thinking about coming generations. The city must be inclusive and there must be room for everyone. It is designed to save resources like water, energy and materials, and minimises its impact on the environment. It considers current and future activities and can evolve and adapt over time. 104

The compact city – with development grouped around public transport, walking and cycling – is the only environmentally sustainable form of city. However, for population densities to increase and for walking and cycling to be widespread, a city must increase the quantity and quality of well – planned public space and its infrastructure.

Accessibility You can judge the accessibility of a place by its connections to its surroundings, both visual and physical. There is a range of transport options, including public transport, walking and bicycling. It is connected to places with jobs, schools, shops, facilities and services.

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Governance

Cities by people

‘Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” ’ 52 Ricardo Montezuma53, an urbanist at the National University of Colombia, explains that the city is an idea to which each citizen contributes and from which each citizen should benefit. So, a city can’t only be built for people, creating a pleasant, sustainable, sociable and safe place to live in. The way we achieve these outcomes is by involving people in the process, using a design thinking methodology geared towards excellence and a decentralisation of power. This is the second sector of the proposed framework: governance, cities by people. It comprises four key elements: engagement, excellence, context and devolutions.

Engagement Engagement adopts a multidisciplinary and collaborative approach to planning and design. This engagement refers to: popular participation in decision making and collaboration among urban planners and other experts. The best designers do not work alone. Collaboration is essential when faced with a complex challenge because innovation is unlikely to occur in isolation. The most interesting solutions lie at the boundaries of disciplines.

(engagement) With other stakeholders 52 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library Series) (New York: Random House Publishing Group, 1993), p. 238 53 Ricardo Montezuma quoted in Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (United Kingdom: Penguin Books, 2013) 54 Jonathan Rez quoted in Steven Poole, ‘The Truth about Smart Cities: ‘In the End, They Will Destroy Democracy’’, The Guardian (The Guardian, 17 December 2014) <http://www. theguardian.com/cities/2014/ dec/17/truth-smart-city-destroydemocracy-urban-thinkersbuzzphrase>

There should be a radical upgrade in the role of planners to promote creative, long term thinking. In this, role planners should act alongside urban practitioners and the other stakeholders. In design thinking, stakeholders are called upon to play a responsible, active and constructive role in shaping decisions. They are no longer considered merely passive receivers at the end of the regulatory, administrative and delivery chain. Engaging and collaboration is about ‘generative learning’ resulting from shared experimentation and comparison of experiences across different sectors. Jonathan Rez54 of the University of New South Wales suggests that ‘a smarter way’ to build cities and to truly understand its citizens, ‘might be for architects and urban planners to have psychologists and ethnographers on the team.’

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(engagement) With the population The way for today’s cities to express diversity is to strengthen popular participation. As Erico Andrade55 explains: “Two things are essential in my opinion: it is necessary to have a discussion on a model of an ideal city. This discussion needs to be democratic, open and unrestricted. There should be room for discussion with people. I think this empowerment of people regarding to the awareness that our cities are actually our cities. The city is ours and we have the right to the city. This is something I consider very extraordinary and very important. I think a big step to big change is the recognition of this power people have.” Cities create problems of living that can only be addressed by collective action. It cannot be left to local authorities; citizens need to take control of their own surroundings. Planners and architects need to understand what current and future users think about the condition of the public spaces and cities, and have them commenting on the proposals.

55 Author interview with Erico Andrade, philosopher, 22 August 2015 56 Renato Saboya, ‘A Importância Da Participação Popular’ (Urbanidades, 2014) <http:// urbanidades.arq.br/2014/01/aimportancia-da-participacaopopular/> [accessed 20 May 2015].

Renato Saboya56, a Brazilian urbanist, explains that listening to people is essential to understand their desires, aspirations, priorities and values. Without this, the solutions adopted for urban planning can remain superficial and disconnected from the real problem or assume values and priorities that in reality do not match the real needs. Excellence To achieve excellence, an increasing number of governments are beginning to use design approaches.

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Designers need to be involved throughout the change processes, providing constant expertise and feedback to identify, test and deliver durable solutions. Design thinking results from a number of essential components that follow a process of empathising, co-creating, experimenting and improving. This will result in a quality, integrated process. It is necessary to put together a long term strategic project, consulting relevant stakeholders and communities at appropriate stages, as mentioned before. ‘Design’ acts in this context as a multiplier throughout the decisional process, as it enables a broader range of questions and potential solutions to be elaborated and developed more quickly. It also helps make abstract assumptions and analyses more concrete and tangible. Design thinking places enhanced attention upon the crucial phase of problem definition. Framing the problem correctly from the start is a pre-condition for the effective unfolding of the phases of development, adoption and implementation. A strategic designer acts as the ‘glue’ that binds together multiple types of expertise, multiple approaches, and multiple forms of value in a team working towards a coherent proposition.57 Context 57 Lorenzo Allio, Design Thinking for Public Service Excellence (Singapore: UNDP Global Centre for Public Service Excellence, 2014).

Context is about respect. It respects the needs and aspirations of the community that lives and works in a city and creates opportunities for people to prosper and for local business to thrive. It celebrates unique character-

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istics – heritage, culture and community – that create a sense of place and identity. It is connected with the past – the heritage of a place – and with the community and its culture. But how can a city hold all these elements? This is a contradiction that every city has been or is currently passing through. It’s not a matter of building or not building a new development, for example. Rather, it is a matter of analysing the context. Yes, the city needs to be economical and rentable, but it also needs to build thinking about more than the capital. It is necessary to have a good planning framework analysis and to decide what economic, environmental and social outcomes need to be achieved, and to prioritise actions to achieve these outcomes. The NY department of city planning, led by Amanda Burden58, did some work regarding this, creating frameworks that respect particular aspects of each area of the city and guiding how the private sector can create new buildings. Balance is the key. Amanda Burden muses: “So what were we going to do? If we couldn’t spread out, we had to go up (…) So here was the answer to our puzzle. If we were to channel and redirect all new development around transit, we could actually handle that population increase, we thought. And so here was the plan, what we really needed to do: We needed to redo our zoning and basically reshape the entire city, targeting where new development could go and prohibiting any development at all in our car-oriented, suburban-style neighbourhoods. Well, this was an unbelievably ambitious idea, ambitious because communities had to approve those plans. So how was I going to

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get this done? By listening (…) so I could get to understand the DNA of each neighbourhood and know what each street felt like. I became an incredibly geeky zoning expert, finding ways that zoning could address communities’ concerns. So little by little, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, block by block, we began to set height limits so that all new development would be predictable and near transit.” Devolution Government partnerships with the private sector and community participation are watchwords and guidelines advocated as a solution to the current dilemmas of cities59. There is a need for a system that creates inspirational local leadership, and this would best be achieved via either mayors or leadership groups elected on the basis of an ability to deliver the city narrative. Perhaps, rather than regulate neighbourhoods entirely from the top down, it would make more sense to allow individual neighbourhoods to craft their own, limited set of rules about building styles, uses and needs that are adopted only with the approval of a very large share of residents. 59 Maria da Glória Gohn, ‘O Futuro Das Cidades’, Nas Redes Da Educação, 2006 <http://www.lite. fe.unicamp.br/revista/gohn.pdf> [accessed 10 July 2015].

The sociologist Saskia Sassen60 suggests a ‘focus on building smaller communities that are more governable. Where the residents feel that this is their community: “I’m a constitutive member of this community.” It works better. It is a more civilised condition.’

60 Saskia Sassen, ‘De Onde Vem a Cidade?’, Fronteira Do Pensamento, 2014 <https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK1M72Ntl0> [accessed 2 September 2015].

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Recife’s 500th Birthday And what about Recife? What is going to happen with the city? Recife has many, many problems to overcome. The wish list for the city is extensive. A liveable, sustainable, healthy and secure city seems to be a utopic dream. It seems that the city is currently going through a very singular moment in its existence. The #OcupeEstelita movement was a singular movement for our generation, as mentioned by Cezar Cavalcanti61. It made the population start to think about the city we want to live in and ‘fight’ for it. The citizens started to embrace the idea of increased participation in the creation of cities. In accordance with this new way of thinking, the mayor of the city, Geraldo Julio, took on the commitment to carry out a long-term plan meant to guide the reinvention of the city, preparing it for everything that can and must be completed by the 500th anniversary of the city’s foundation, in 2037.

61 Author interview with Cezar Cavalcanti, service designer, 19 August 2015. 62 Geraldo Julio quoted in ‘Prefeito Convoca População Para Discutir O Recife 500 Anos’ <http://www2. recife.pe.gov.br/node/31690> [accessed 1 September 2015].

The Recife 500th Birthday Plan cannot anchor itself in the economic, social, environmental and spatial scenarios by itself. It aims to work radically in a participatory way. For Recife, this means a step forward, a pioneer initiative that brings together the public sector and society. According to Gerald Julio62, Mayor of Recife:

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“We want the people from Recife to actively participate in the process. This is not only a plan from the city hall of Recife. This is a plan made for the Recifenses to the Recifenses.’’ The project will be managed by ARIES63. In an interview with the director of the agency, Guilherme Cavalcanti64, Cavalcanti explains that the citizens will be at the heart of the process:

“The participation of society, which will sustain the process, will take place from six listening channels. Technical interviews, opinions polls, public hearings, focus groups, online surveys and social networks.”

63 AIRES - Strategic and Innovation Agency of Recife 64 Guilherme Cavalcanti quoted in ‘Desejo de Cidade: Plano Recife 500 Anos Começa a Ouvir População’ <http:// jconline.ne10.uol.com.br/canal/ cidades/geral/noticia/2015/09/01/ desejo-de-cidade-planorecife-500-anos-comeca-aouvir-populacao-197024.php> [accessed 1 September 2015]. 65 Author interview with Guilherme Cavalcanti, director of AIRES, date of interview.

Cavalcanti65 also highlights that the project doesn’t aim to reinvent the city or completely change it. What the project aims to do is to propose something that is coherent with what the citizens want. He also mentioned that the biggest challenge will be to translate all the research into an effective plan. And about the Estelita? The population is still fighting for it. Every day I read news about one more step towards a new future. Recife will have much more to offer than your beautiful landscape and your famous Carnival.

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Checklist

Check the items for an ideal city.

Citizens should be empowered to work together with those who govern and other city stakeholders to create a city narrative that describes their cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s history, its present context and its visions for the future, via a transparently democratic process that delivers consensus across all sections of the community.

There should be a radical upgrade in the role of planners to promote creative, long term thinking. Planners and architects need to understand what current and future users think about the condition of cities and what their needs are. This can be facilitated with design thinking methodology.

Government partnerships with the private sector and community participation are guidelines advocated as a solution to the current dilemmas of cities. There is a need for a system that creates inspirational local leadership. Focus on building smaller communities that are more governable.

Interventions, on a more human scale, which are based on a wider set of values (liveability, sociability, sustainability and accessibility) are more likely to bring with them a more diverse and public spirited culture, which is in tune with local people and creates more successful places as a result. It is equally important to strengthen the social function of city space as a meeting place that contributes toward the aims of social sustainability and an open and democratic society.

Reflections

Dear, Recife.

I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t to want to see this as a conclusion or an ending. Rather, this manifesto is to be understood as the horizon towards which we must aim if we want to understand the city as an unfinished invention of people, who, like the city, are always under construction. I have argued that we are making the city a far more fearful place. For the last decade all we have been building are private places based on shopping, finance centres and apartments. We have been handing over our collective and personal responsibility for private companies which run many of the places we live in and make the decisions about the city, and drifting towards a more authoritarian and less democratic city. Such a complex organism, which constantly interacts with the conscious and unconscious emotions and desires of its inhabitants, cannot even begin to function like a pure market. The city has lost its role as a place of chance encounters. Cities are among the clearest indicators that design is never simply a technical process. In designing cities, social activists are changing the conditions of their own lives and of their relations with others. Cities are also exemplary sites for innovation, for invention, for derailments and diversities.

66 Anna Minton, Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First-Century City (New York: Viking Penguin, 2009).

Many believe that the era of failing back on the argument that â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;There is No Alternativeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; is over66. It is possible that this heralds a chance for real alternatives which could open the door to a healthier, continental approach to the city, which celebrates public life, public culture and democracy. It would also reinvigorate civic engagement.

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In writing this essay, I started to think in different ways. As Anna Minton67 notes, ‘Who walks around seeking experiences and chance encounters in the city? The best learning happens by surprise and that surprising thing happens in cities.’

I began to look at cities with different eyes, observing their complexity and magic.

I found a new way to apply a design thinking approach, and an area that I’m really passionate about working in; I saw new scope for myself as a designer.

When I began this research, I didn’t know exactly what my question was, nor what kind of answer I was going to find. Now, I find that I am encountering more and different answers and, accordingly, I also have new questions. I wish to conclude with some very optimistic words addressed to my home town, Recife.

67 Anna Minton, Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First-Century City (New York: Viking Penguin, 2009).

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Fig 40. Me& Recife

Dear Recife, Speaking as a citizen, it was in Recife that I felt for the first time what the concept of a ‘home town’ means. I experienced the feeling of belonging. This essay created a deep and reflexive connection with you. Now, more than ever I can allow myself to be very passionate when talking about you. I can see your potential and value. And also, I understand your problems, where they came from and why they exist. I know that is not easy. And from my interviews and conversations with friends, I know that there are many basic problems that still need to be overcome. There are political problems, economical problems, sanitation problems…The politics in Brazil seems to make everything more difficult. Politics does have a power over you, doesn’t it? But it can’t stop you from changing. And it’s not only you. Many cities in the world are suffering, on different scales, from the same problems. But after many years of neglect, the world needs an alternative way of living that is not based on capital, cars or modernist ideas. Unless changes are made, the world is going to struggle to survive over the coming years, when three quarters of the population will become urban. There is optimism about cities in this century. People, not only specialists, from different parts of society are reclaiming their rights. There is a feeling that we are creating something that is true, necessary and global.

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The right to the city is far more than the right of an individual or group to access the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change and reinvent the city after our hearts’ desires. It is, moreover, a collective rather than an individual right, since reinventing the city inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power over the processes of urbanisation. The freedom to make and remake ourselves and our cities is one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights. But you are doing the right thing, giving this right back to the people. The project you started, 500 Years of Recife, is a good example of how you are improving in a positive direction. The project is the result of a long term vision that does not rely on the mayor or politic institutions, but it will be supported by them and it will reflect what Recifenses need and want. Following these steps, you will turn into a mature, inclusive, people-centred city. And it will retain your funny, diverse and joyful personality. You will make many new friends. People are going to get to know you better and feel safe and comfortable to explore every corner of you. Economically speaking, you will thrive. A good city attracts innovation and inventiveness. I hope the guidelines about how to create an ‘ideal’ city that I proposed were able to meet your and Recifenses’ expectations and dreams. I know that there is no perfect city. But there are cities that are fit for purpose for their time, place and people. The point is that each city develops its own special social, eco-

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nomic and political mechanism that is coherent with the point of development at which it sits. So shall you. And remember, not only to build yourself for the people who inhabit you. Human scale is important, but itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s only half of the process. You need to involve them in the process. This way they will create and identify with you, a long lasting relationship. Keep listening to your inhabitants, they know you better than anyone. Fundamentally, as a species, we need things that can power our imaginations and can get our passions going, something that gives us a sense of meaning. And that is not bricks, a building, a highway. It is an idea. It is what drives cities forwards. Problems and ideas seem to be side by side within your space. But keep going, and will turn into a place where people can dream and flourish. You will turn from a non-place, to a place. And Luiz Amorim will call you a city again. And from Recife, the city of bridges, poets and carnivalsâ&#x20AC;Ś. you will also become Recife, the city of people.

Mariana 22 . 09 . 2015

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This research project is very close to my heart as it deals in part with the city of my birth and the country that I call home. It has been a challenging yet rewarding undertaking and I would like to thank several people for their inestimable contribution and their help along the way. Principally, Barry Curtis who supervised the project and provided guidance and support; my interview subjects who generously shared their time with me; the photographers who granted the use of their pictures gratis; and finally my wonderful friends and family who kept me going until the end with hugs, love and tea.

Thank you!

Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments about Recife, cities, design or anything else. You can reach me at mariana.pedrosa@network.rca.ac.uk

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Bibliography

A selected list of research resources

Books, Articles & Journals Augé, Marc, Non-Places, 2nd edn (New York: Verso, 2008) Allio, Lorenzo, Design Thinking for Public Service Excellence (Singapore: UNDP Global Centre for Public Service Excellence, 2014) Calvino, Italo, Invisible Cities, 1st edn (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974) Coverley, Merlin, Psychogeography (Pocket Essential Series) (United Kingdom: Pocket Essentials, 2010) De Castro, Josue, A Cidade de Recife: Ensaio de a Geografia Humana (Recife: Casa do Estudante Brasil, 1954) De Siqueira Cavalcanti Veras, Lúcia Maria, ‘Paisagem Postal: A Imagem E a Palavra Na Compreensão de Um Recife Urbano’, 2014 Freyre, Gilberto, Casa-Grande E Senzala, Global (Brasil, 2006) Gehl, Jan, Cities for People, 1st edn (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2010) Glaeser, Edward, Triumph of the City: How Urban Spaces Make Us Human (London: Pan Books, 2012) Harvey, David, Rebel Cities (New York: Verso, 2012)

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Hélio, Mário, ed., Continente Turismo (Brasil: Continente, 2002) Jacobs, Jane, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library Series) (New York: Random House Publishing Group, 1993) James Schumacher, Brian, ‘Potential of the City: The Interventions of The Situationist International and Gordon Matta - Clark’, 2008 Manzini, Ezio, Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation (United States: MIT Press, 2015) Maria de Siqueira Cavalcanti Veras, Lúcia, ‘Paisagem Postal, a Imagem E a Palavra Na Compreensão de Um Recife Urbano’, 2014 Marshall, Peter, ‘Guy Debord and the Situationists’, in DEMANDING THE IMPOSSIBLE, by Peter Marshall (London: Fontana Press, 1992), pp. 551–53 <http://catless.ncl. ac.uk/Obituary/debord.html> [accessed 28 May 2015] Minton, Anna, Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First-Century City (New York: Viking Penguin, 2009) Montgomery, Charles, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (United Kingdom: Penguin Books, 2013) Mumford, Lewis, ‘What Is a City?’, in Architectural Record, 1937, pp. 93–96

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Rolnik, Raquel, O Que É Cidade, 3rd edn (São Paulo: Editôra Brasiliense, 1988) Saramago, Jose, A Caverna, 1st edn (Brasil: Companhia das Letras, 2000) Tonkiss, Fran, Cities by Design: The Social Life of Urban Form (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013) Worpole, Ken, and Katharine Know, The Social Value of Public Spaces (York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation, April 2007) <https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/social-value-public-spaces> [accessed 3 April 2015] Zukin, Sharon, Naked City (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)

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[accessed 28 May 2015] Saboya, Renato, ‘Segurança Nas Cidades: Oscar Newman E Os Espaços Defensáveis’ (Urbanidades, 2009) <http://urbanidades.arq.br/2009/11/seguranca-nas-cidades-oscar-newman-e-os-espacos-defensaveis/> [accessed 20 May 2015] Senett, Richard, ‘Open and Closed Design’ (The Cities Papers, 2014) <http://citiespapers.ssrc.org/open-and-closeddesign/> [accessed 27 July 2015] Siggaard Andersen, Camilla, ‘Should Smart Cities Be Smart Communities? – Gehl Architects’, Blog (Gehl Architects, 2015) <http://gehlarchitects.com/blog/what-is-a-smart-cityanyway/> [accessed 14 September 2015] Tabet, Michelle, ‘Thoughts | Urban Design Is Service Design’, 2012 <http://thoughts.arup.com/post/details/230/urban-design-is-service-design> [accessed 14 July 2015] ‘Thoughts | Good Design Is Democratic’, by Josef Hargrave, 2015 <http://thoughts.arup.com/post/details/468/good-design-is-democratic> [accessed 3 August 2015] ‘What Is Placemaking? - Project for Public Spaces’, Project for Public Spaces (Project for Public Spaces) <http://www. pps.org/reference/what_is_placemaking/> [accessed 28 May 2015]

Interviews Expert interview with Anna Poyry and Setphanie Schemel, ser-

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vice designer and architecture at ARUP, 02 September 2015 Expert interview with Cezar Cavalcanti, service designer and Co-founder of ORBE, 19 August 2015 Expert interview with ClaĂşdio Marinho, urban planner and Co â&#x20AC;&#x201C; founder of Porto Marinho, 27 May 2015 Expert interview with Erico Andrade, philosopher and member of Direitos Urbanos Group, 22 August 2015 Expert interview with Guilherme Cavalcanti, director of AIRES, 07 September 2015 Expert interview with Isabel Cavalcanti, social media manager and Co-founder of Meu Recife project, 27 May 2015 Expert interview with Michele Tabet, independent strategy director and ARUP associate 25 August 2015

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Appendix

Facts, memoirs, letters & notes for the future.

Appendix

Please, refer to items in the box.

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;(...) far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city ... The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.â&#x20AC;?

Henri Lefebvre

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