Recife, Veneza Brasileira: repensando a mobilidade urbana a partir de seus rios

Abstract

Many cities are rich in rivers, canals and estuaries that make up and beautify their urban landscapes. Traditionally used as transport routes and recreational areas, they have gone through periods of degradation with intense domestic and industrial pollution. Throughout the last decades, such spaces have been designed as alternatives to the dystopian context of contemporary cities, challenging the hegemonic model of individual private mobility and bringing social, cultural and environmental benefits. Recife, regarded as the Brazilian Venice for its number of rivers, has begun to invest, as of 2012, in a project that aims to clean up the waters of its rivers and transform them into corridors for public transport. The project Rios da Gente emerges as a potential mobility that can democratise and pluralise the options of its transport modes. This article aims to analyse this project as a potential mobility, following the concept of motility presented by Kaufmann (2002) and based on the potential mobility's model developed by Kellerman (2012). These model and basic concepts show themselves useful to think about both micro and macro levels, for example, of the planning and sustainable management of urban mobility. Based on the concepts that constitute a potential mobility and its appropriation, we focus on aspects of individuals/users but mainly societal considerations of these elements.