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chapter 8 Redesigning Brownfields in Porto Alegre Lineu Castello After a period of rapid industrial development and accelerated urbanization in the last half of the twentieth century, by the turn of the twenty-first century Brazilian society was fully aware of the negative consequences of these processes and of the finite nature of the country’s environmental resources. However, even though growth has slowed in comparison to previous decades, cities have continued to grow centrifugally , towards peripheral suburbs—which in Brazil are marked by accentuated levels of poverty. And although social behavior in big cities displays signs of ever-growing consumerism, the transition to full democracy has translated into increasing levels of community participation and preoccupation with the quality of life that cities offer to their citizens. Urban design in Brazil has also started to share many of the same concerns as in other parts of the world; it has experienced significant conceptual changes and has become another effective means of transforming Brazilian life. Consequently, urban action no longer seeks complete products—whole cities, morphological objects designed to function rationally—as extolled by the modernism that culminated in Brasília. Moreover, the general plans which encompassed the whole of a city were infrequently implemented and even became discredited. The a priori vision of the whole was replaced by projects that value an a posteriori vision that concentrates on particular aspects of that whole. That is to say, as in what is becoming known as the “Barcelona paradigm,”1 planning no longer deals with the level of an entire city, but rather with the design of a complex of places that marks human existence in this more complex city. Consequently, the city acquires a polycentric structure with a diversity of simultaneous events that are, likewise, offered in a diversity of places.2 The city of Porto Alegre is a clear reflection of these aspects, two of which will be discussed in this chapter: (a) the appearance of vacant sites and buildings in the cen181 tral city and the corresponding tendency to convert elements of the urban heritage to new uses; and (b) the creation of new spaces dedicated to consumption and to practices associated with it which are potentially capable of generating new places in the urban structure. These two aspects are typical of what is conventionally called postmodern urbanism, reflect concepts recently introduced to the field of urban design, and represent development operations that are becoming common in contemporary Brazilian cities. Sustainability in Urban Brazil Brazilians are still proud that they hosted the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), known as the “Earth Summit” or “Rio92 .” In that year Brazil was also the site of the 1992 Global Forum, a series of simultaneous events that enabled all sectors of society, even the poorest, to express their views about the growing problems in the human-environment relationship. Concern for environmental sustainability—and the international prestige that the subject seemed to bring—was such a fertile concept in the minds of Brazilians that supporting sustainability became almost a national behavior. Sustainability is a concept with admittedly diverse definitions, sometimes focused on the urban and sometimes on the natural aspects of the environment. In this chapter , I primarily address sustainability with regard to the built environment and only indirectly with regard to the natural environment. When I do discuss the natural environment, I focus on ways to keep rural lands free from urbanization. This has an obvious, direct relationship with the concept of sustainability, since the conservation of land in its natural state prevents the soil from being covered by structures, hence contributing to a sustainable urban development. Therein lies a novel way of thinking about the city and its design in Brazil, where there has been unceasing growth outward from the center. Containing the growth of a city, the expansion of major transportation axes, the endless growth of the infrastructure network, and the centrifugal nature of urbanization are all viable strategies for a policy of sustainable urban development. The very concepts of urban planning underwent substantial changes at the end of the twentieth century to reflect heightened concerns with sustainability. A new thinking moved traditional urban design towards alternative visions, which started to be considered and employed in Brazilian urbanism. One such conceptual change derives from the argument that it is always more economical to invest in services in a compact city, rather than to extend expensive infrastructure to the urban periphery . Growth without expansion came to be seen...

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