Please tell me again - What were you doing in Portugal?

A question I asked myself repeatedly when I was in Portugal.

The short answer: I am in Portugal to study people’s perception of riverfronts in urban areas.

Through UC Berkeley’s Institute of European Studies/Portuguese Studies Program, I had the wonderful opportunity to go to Portugal to evaluate a waterfront recently rehabilitated by the Portugal-wide urban redevelopment program, called the POLIS program.

Since then, there have been European as well as national efforts to develop indicators to evaluate these river rehabilitation projects. Colleagues of my professor Matt Kondolf, at Instituco Superior Tecnico (IST) in Lisbon, have been involved in these evaluation efforts, focusing on the Polis intervention in three cities: Leiria, Coimbra, and Bragança.

My research focuses on the perception of local stakeholders on the Polis intervention in the City of Coimbra (website). To give myself a broader perspective, I visited Lisbon and Porto, the riverfronts of which are renowned, successful public spaces. The latter are also historic riverfront areas, and I wanted to see a modern/recent riverfront area in light of an older, more established public space.