- Traditional centralities x new emerging centralities – what impacts to the city?    369 kb by    Magalhaes, Fernanda & Serdoura, Francisco | fmbrasil@centroin.com.br    Short Outline Often cities promote the emergence of new centralities to attract more dynamic and innovative sectors of the economy. Attention has to be given to what happens to traditional centres as we will demonstrate by looking at Rio and Lisbon. Abstract Traditional centralities x new emerging centralities – what impacts to the city? In many cities new centralities have emerged, either expontaneously or as result of planned actions. This brings often a combination of new uses and activities for parts of the city that non existed before, inprints a new image and generates an innovative cultural and technological environment which adobtly are very good for those areas. But what happens to existing traditional centres? and what are the effects on the city as a whole? In oder to try to give an answer to these questions we will look at two cities in two different continents – Rio, in Brazil and Lisbon, in Portugal. If required to explore further the subject the city o São Paulo might be added. The Lisbon CBD has grown with a dynamism that often has been higher than other parts of the city. The traditional centre of Baixa has expanded towards north, particularly after de 70’s, as a need to find locations in the city that could offer better access and mobility. During the 80’s and 90’s this pattern has been consolidated to reach areas beyond the ringroad towards the upper north periphery of the city, in a discontinous structure that has developed without any planning. With the EXPO 98 a new centrality at the eastern part of the city is intentionally created, supported by a strong investment in metropolitan landuses and infrastructure, focused mainly on the service sector, particularly cultural and commercial. As a consequence a new spatial and functional pattern emerged, with significant impact on the traditional CBD. A patterns that is particularly characterized by great spatial-morphological permeability and discontinuity in relation to the city as a whole, and to Baixa in particular. Rio has two main CBDs. The traditional city centre still retains the major business and cultural activity of the city, and has been subject since early 80’s of a strong policy known as “corredor cultural” focused in strenghining its centrality qualities. The second CBD is Barra da Tijuca - at the eastern part of the city, is still of local nature, but is enlarging its importance, in special given major infrastructure and supra-local scale uses installed, such as linha amarela and the 2008 olimpic games site. The effects of that has been poorly discussed. Some conclusions could be antecipated from the analysis of the cases – to a larger or lesser extent in both cities the impacts of the process of emerging new centres has not been fully antecipated with little control and management mechanisms developed to deal with the phenomena. The result is that although they might represent a success story if looked from the point of view of the area in question, on the other hand they paradoxically represent a real threat to traditional centres. This seems to show that a long term more holistic vision of the city is required supported by: (a) strong political leadership and participation; (b) sustained multi-dimensional long term actions at city level; (c) private-public engagment with strong market involvment. Keywords new centrality Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2005: Making Spaces for the Creative Economy   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper