Session 49 summary
Managing natural habitats: the Seas
Miguel grew up by the sea in a small town in Portugal, Europe’swest coast and surfing was the natural response to the call of the sea which was just across the street. They had this nature that was just out there and they had to ride it somehow. First, it was the impulse but then came this connection and this was not from his perspective but also from his group of friends. It was not about the sport but about the engagement with this new reality with the ocean and the surfboard was the medium to make that connection. But when they started searching for the waves, as waves are very dynamic entities, the formation of a wave is complex. So somehow they had to learn about the impact of the moon, normally today people can use apps to know when to go surfing because the waves are good. But 35 years ago Miguel and his friends had the moon calendar to know if the wave was coming or not. They learned how to detect the changes in the wind and they were always looking for the position of the Azores high to understand the direction of the swell. That allowed them a learning process. People learn a lot from agriculture and from traditional fishing to understand nature, to engage with nature and to sync with nature which was very important as they were growing up and becoming adults and having an understanding of the environment and of nature.
Later Miguel graduated as an architect and then he came to work upriver in a small village. He was responsible for the redesign of the urban public space. The village main square of the village and other communities have a certain importance in community life, because the main square is the place where people gather, they celebrate the good and bad moments and it is where they make gatherings, so it is very important for the civic life. In Cabedelo, there is a surfing community in the public space, the square for the surfing community is not inland and it’s at the ocean. So when local administration was intending to redesign and invest some resources in this, normally they would have built new infrastructures and parking places but for Miguel and the community it was not just about that, he just asked to turn the lights around and illuminate the wave because the core is the wave, the core is in the ocean their land is at the sea. This movement was very important because of the message they wanted to explain because normally the sea is ignored, is a blank area, so this was an important moment for his community. Since he has been involved with that group of people he is trying to explain the importance of waves.
The village where Miguel was working, the main square got flooded as it is very close to the river which is not far from the ocean one can feel the tides as it is 15kms from the seashore. But flooding is not a tragic event for the community. Normally when talking about floods, sometimes and most oftentimes they are seen as tragic events but not there, the people were used to the floods. The people looked happy there, they were all dressed up and probably taking the boat to go board train to keep going on with their lives and also other people were seen wearing boots and doing their daily business. Everyone had their boats back then in those days, when Miguel would go to his grandparents’ house which was nearby, Miguel would be always anxious because in the winter Miguel knew that he would have to take the boat which was part of ordinary life. So, for the community, the flood is okay the community would be farming most of the time and in winters they would become fishermen, life would be going on and it was okay. But of course, this is not okay for the economics or for contemporary industrial production because if there aren’t floods then the people would have more crops in the field and the old system starts to speed. Someof this is an inconvenience and so at some point there were these narratives saying that the river was bad and things caused by them were bad, which is not true.But the result of it is that the river was constrained in-between the walls to control the floods so that people could have a different access to the resources in the fields. This was a very hard thing for the community because the relation was changed, these people had always lived with the river but suddenly the river was put behind a wall, just like putting it in a prison, so one loses that connection with the most important natural element in the life of the community. So on an abandoned branch of the river at the center of the valley Miguel was fortunate to design this Nautico Centre. This is a great OlympicRegatta course in the middle of rice and cornfields and this became a great opportunity to reconnect the community with the DuoroRiver, not just for that village but for all the urban area around the valley. During this project Miguel realized that the main reason for the control of the river was not agriculture but a huge paper industry that is located not far from there which is one of the biggest paper factories in the world. It has a very big machine which demands a lot of resources from the nearby territories and the impact of the machine is not only on the valley but also upriver. One can see the dams which were built in the sixties (1960s), when the first factory was being build, at the same time on the river there was this big construction upriver to control and accumulate water to have the capacity to control the water to feed that big machine and of course when talking about these big industries, they produce a lot and they produce goods for all around the world so there is this problem of shipping. In his city at the river they were designing these jetties which is there to protect the entrance of the river so that big boats could come in for transportation of the paper. On the south of the harbor near the jetty, there is this wave- that is Cabedelo, it is the name of the wave, of the place of Miguel’s surf spot. That’s home, that is where Miguelgrew up and this is a very important wave because it’s one of the most consistent surf spots in the region and it was in this place that the first pro surfing league event in Portugal happened, 10 years later the 11 times world champion was crowned here twice in a row in this wave. So it’s not just important for the local community but also for global surfing community. In 2000 because of industrial increase in demands the government extended the north jetty 400m into the sea. So Miguel and his friends called all the surfing community and created this huge human logo S.O.S to make the statement saying- that it is okay that an infrastructure is being built but it is going to have a very important impact on the waves and also on a big portion of the coastal area and the people are very concerned with the impact it would have and they also realized that they greatly value the wave.They value the balance and the importance of the wave but it is not recognized as the sea is seen as a blank. Apple computers use the waves to sell their products, they have an operating system name after a wave-Mavericks, a famous wave in California. Nazarae (wave) is bigger than Mavericks, this waves holds the record for the biggest wave ever surfed for the last decade so it’s one of the highlights of the Portuguese tourists. Just a few kilometers from the coastline there are these amazing waves and that’s because they ave a very incredible position facing the Azores high. The coastline is facing the Azores high so they get all the power from the center of the ocean and because of the rotation the impact of the swell is from north to south. So the sand which drains from the rivers into the sea is then carried by the waves from north to south and ultimately it will fall into the deep sea. The waves are shaped by the stream of sand, that’s the place which is responsible for formation of the surf. The Azores high is one of the places where one concentrates a lot of energy on the surfers of the planet, it’s a very powerful environmental event. So the scale of this is very strong and this stream of sand that comes from north to south along the coast is huge so when a jetty is built it blocks this flow of sand. Nature finds a new way by going around the jetty and gets in the way of the navigation channel and as a result of that 15 lives were lost of fishermen since the jetty was extended because of random waves and because the stream of sand is not in the right position waves will be created irregularly which would have fatal consequences. The most deadly harbor in that coast is their harbor which is in front of the beach. The other aspect is that normally the surfers surf at a safe distance from the shore which requires equal distribution of the sand but because of the jetty there is soil erosion and the sand gets collected in one area adding more danger.
There was a debate in the city with what to do with the no-man’s land where there are huge amount of sand. The big companies came up with these business models of building new infrastructures like casinos etc. so Miguelgave the idea that if they are building a casino they should build it on a cruise ship stuck in the sea of sand, if they want to make a new swimming pool they should use a boat to do it, or use shipwrecks as a monument because it is the sea and it does not belong to the city. It is an extinct sea and it is important to show that. Miguel also wanted to relate this disaster with another disaster of the AralSeawhich is left with stranded boats on the sand which is one of the biggest ecological disaster globally. The sea lost a lot of water because of wrong agriculture policies and now the percentage of salt is so high that those ecosystems are collapsing and the communities are also collapsing and all the economy is getting destroyed. It was important to show this to the city by reminding them of the Aral Sea disaster that it was happening to that place too. To find solutions to the jetty problem Miguel looked at the Australians who have a bypass system to balance the sand from one side to the other of the jetty. This is what they needed if new infrastructures would be added otherwise the sand will settle in front of the navigation channel and it will be a disaster as the jetty is so big if the sand goes in front of the jetty it won’t go back to the coast, and they need to put the sand in the coastal ecosystem.
It was in this beach place that the first surfboard in the continental Europe was built in 1942. This shows the deep relation of the people and the ocean.
Recently Miguel was invited to the European debate called- A New European Bauhaus, where the President of European Commission was present and the European green bill agenda was being discussed. She proposed this New European Bauhaus to boost the agenda which is the European response to the climate change. When in the debate, on seeing the billMiguel wondered that it was not just about extending the palette to put more colors because the color green is limited one cannot put out the ocean from the equation because it’s too big. People know that there are a lot of issues regarding pollution in the oceans like shipping alone produces more CO2, etc. but there are also some solutions in the oceans. So all things should be put into the equation. But the most important thing is that if they put the sea into the debate they are actually helping this European program to go forward and to engage with the world. The things which concerns Miguel are the words European Green Bill. He already talked about the color problem. But taking the word European into the contest Miguel says that it is not just a European crisis but also a global crisis. One cannot go into a global agenda with a rational solution. With Miguel’s perspective, putting the ocean on the agenda is pushing Europe to relate to the world. When this debate was taking place it was also discussed about the new school- The New European Bauhaus, where this place would be? What shape? etc. Miguel’s answer was pretty obvious that they have to go into the sea. The new school cannot be territorialized, it has to be a knowledge school and not just connecting the European coastal cities. They need this new school for the new community of creatives. Miguel says that just like the first snapshot of earth from the moon which was unplanned but created a new perspective of the world similarly there would be an image which would change the way people look at the crisis.
About the Speaker
Miguel Figueira
Architect / Urban Designer
Co-author of Bauhaus of the Seas Manifesto
The New European Bauhaus Initiative
Figueira da Foz, Portugal
cargocollective.com/miguelfigueira
Miguel Figueira is an architect, graduated from the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto in 1993. He is the author of projects with relevant social and territorial impact, such as the escalators on the degraded slope of the historic centre of Montemor-o-Velho or the nautical centre in the abandoned bed of the Mondego River, distinguished by the International Association of Art Critics. He is a Founding member of the civic movement SOS Cabedelo that defends the recognition of the sea and waves in territorial planning and coastal protection policies, awarded by the Millennium Movement. He is the Author of the book O Mar É a Nossa Terra, co-curator of the homonymous exhibition and co-author of the Bauhaus of the Seas manifesto.
