The route and the berth as strategy for the requalification of the Rio Lima

Clara Araújo

The following work is an exercise and reflection on intervening and requalification of the Rio Lima Estuary. Incited by the print in situ, in which it’s recognized a reality of discontinuities that are impermeable to the passage, and simultaneously a reality of desertion at several stages, both of land and fluvial structures, pathways or lots, in the Rio Lima’s margins, repercussion of a process of detachment of the individual to his own environment, a need of questioning the method of people’s re-approach to the margins and the process of its requalification was expressed. Based on this position in which a need to characterize and revitalize the occupation of the Rio Lima estuary and by that restoring it’s sense of place is identified, an intervention strategy was formulated. An intervention strategy that, through an empirical method of analysis, investigates, using the analytical tools of various disciplines and in situ analysis, present in all phases of work, the estuary in its transversality and specificity in order to characterize it physically and culturally. This analysis highlights two relevant aspects, which give the motto of intervention. On one hand, that the estuary is composed by landscape units that particularize it, in his condition of an aquatic environment affected by ocean currents, conditions that are favorable to the subsistence of lagoons, salines, insulas, halophyte formations, and by other, common to all the river Lima, such as extensive meadows, vineyards and fluvial beaches. On the other hand, allowed to realize that the river, a common element to all of these landscapes of the margin, is also the element that isolates them. Realization which led to the need to rethink the way to view and interact with the river, resulting in the construction of a new approach of representing the river, and that defined the intervention strategy. This construction of a new way of looking, puts the individual at the center of the territory as way of understanding it. This, applied to the estuary, implies a need to reposition the individual at the center of the estuary. How? Understanding the river, a continuous element in its strict relation with its margins, as a starting point for the for the observation and understanding of the surrounding environment. Seeing the river as a line of permutations through which two areas come together. Based on this principle the fluvial route is to be recovered as the line that stitches de margins landscapes, supported by the use of existing piers along the estuary. The proposal sets on the previous identification of “landscape units” that characterize the estuary exploring hypothesis for thematic routes associated to existing piers, recovered and reinterpreted for new uses. The recovery of this routes as the intervention, uses the previous identification of “landscape units” that characterize the estuary, and then explores hypothesis for thematic routes associated to existing piers, recovered and reinterpreted for new uses.