EU WATER FRAMEWORK DIRECTIVE
LA229 Mediterranean Climate Landscapes, Spring 2007
In Spring 2007, the course focused on the European Water Framework
Directive (WFD), a law adopted by the EU in 2000, and its
implementation in Mediterranean countries. The WFD represents a bold
change in river management, emphasizing catchment-scale analysis,
public participation and envinronmental economic approaches. It
requires EU member states to document substantial progress toward
improving water quality and aquatic ecology in their rivers by specific
deadlines. Its implementation is of great interest to water resource
managers worldwide as it recommends management changes that have been
discussed for a century but have faced institutional and political
barriers, especially in the United States.
At the international workshop held in Bombarral, Portugal between May 25 to June 1, 2007, students from the UC Berkeley and the Universidade Tecnica de Lisboa investigated how the EU’s Water Framework Directive might impact a local community in the agricultural region of the Rio Real Basin, northwest of Lisbon.
Student presentations focused on how the Water Framework Directive may impact regional water issues related to:
- Flood management (.pdf)
- Agriculture (.pdf)
- Arundo donax, an invasive plant (.pdf)
- Urban stormwater (.pdf)
- and Urban waterfront design (.pdf)
A draft of the workshop publication, Living River: the Rio Real's quest for Good Ecological Status presents a comparitive analysis of the WFD's policy initiative and illustrates students' ideas about how Portugal's Rio Real basin can meet the framework's regulated goals.
ARHICTECTURAL INSPIRATION: Wineries of Portugal
Arch 200B Studio, Spring 2006
Each Year, Berkeley's Graduate Architecture 200B Studio, the second component
of a year-long introductory design course, focuses the bulk of its pedagogy
on an architecturally rich international locale. Portugal was chosen as a destination in 2006,
primarily on account of its innovative vernacular building tradition, its
critical role in the Modernist movement, and the
particularly intimate relationship between its built
environment and the landscape.
The students’ final design project was a winery and vineyard to be located on a hilly wooded slope near Healdsburg, California for a Portuguese- American client who wanted to incorporate aspects of Portuguese architecture and its characteristic integration into the landscape.
The class, consisting of twenty-two Berkeley CED graduate students and their two professors, spent spring break in Portugal conducting field work on Portuguese architecture. They focused on the Douro wine region, drawing on the country’s wealth of architectural strategies and material techniques.
Students had organized themselves
into research groups to familiarize themselves with Portugal’s history, geography,
and culture on local, regional, and global scales. They distilled
their analyses into a handy spiral bound travel pamphlet that
could accompany and supplement field research outings.
The Berkeley students were impressed with the remarkably idiosyncratic means Lisbon and Porto have addressed their waterfronts while “climbing the hillside” behind: the dense layering of their vertical urban development serves as a useful counterpoint to the studio’s ultimate resource, the terraced hills of the Douro Valley. The students explored cultural and physical relationships of Portuguese architecture to landscape and site. In this vein, vernacular architecture proved especially poignant and pertinent, but several modern works—in particular the work of Alvaro Siza—impacted the group’s design dynamic with equal import. Photographs and sketches from the students’ notebooks show how they reacted to the landscape and its built forms, leading to their designs for the site in Healdsburg.
NEW LIFE FOR URBAN STREAMS
LA229 Mediterranean Climate Landscapes, Spring 2005
In Spring 2005, the pilot coarse focused on strategies for revitalizing waterways in the rapidly urbanizing region west of Lisbon. Students from UC Berkeley joined with students at University of Lisbon to apply methods pursued in the Bay Area to two urban watersheds near Lisbon, the Laje and the Jamor. The watersheds have been drastically altered by two successive construction booms along the rolling plateaus which sit above deeply-incised river valleys. Within these valleys, the streams remain largely undeveloped and afford opportunities for restoartion adn a recreation corridor from the upland urban areas to the coast.
As teams analyzed opportunities and developed proposals for the stream
corridors, common themes emerged: reconnecting people to the streams by
integrating sustainable (and often traditional) technologies into the
urbanized landscape to restore natural systems and revealing a story of
cultural heritage which grew from the area's unique natural resources.
A report New Life For Urban Streams (.pdf) was published to document the student work and broaden the audience for their ideas.
THE PORTUGUESE MARRANO-ANUSIM
REVIVAL MOVEMENT
Dissertation Research by Naomi Leite
Naomi's research focuses on the Portuguese Jewish heritage and the construction of a modern marrano identity. Her research has required intensive study of the institutions and networks that support the individual and collective construction of the marrano identity through "multi-sited ethnography," a method that seeks to capture the whole of a large-scale phenomenon by cumulatively tracing its emergence in several geographically distinct sites.Her fieldwork report (.pdf) provides more details.
FITTING IN, STANDING OUT, LOOKING UP
ASSIMILATION, ISOLATION AND RELIGION
IN PORTO'S SUB-SAHARAN AFRICAN COMMUNITIES
Dissertation Research by James Beard Porto is home to many Africans, but their lives are lived just beyond the general public´s threshold of recognition. These immigrants have not established ethnic neighborhoods, nor have they come to dominate any recognizable economic niches. While opportunities to socialize in groups of common origin are not prolific, some communities of Africans have coalesced in worship communities—Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim.
This research investigates the relationships between worshippers, their immigrant communities, their spiritual lives, and their shifting identities. Equally important are the connections of such relationships to a broader Portuguese social ethos, and how the variables of religious affiliation, race, and Portuguese national histories and mythologies have affected the immigrant experiences of Catholics, Protestants and Muslims from sub-Saharan Africa. Finally, the research engages with larger issues of immigration, reflecting on the impact of religious practice on processes of assimilation, integration, and isolation in immigrant communities and their host societies.
View his fieldwork report (.pdf) for current details.
THE POLITICAL INCORPORATION AND CITIZENSHIP
OF PORTUGUESE IMMIGRANTS IN NORTH AMERICA
Faculty Research by Professor Irene Bloemraad, Sociology
Using as one of its case studies the Portuguese immigrant communities in the Boston, MA and Toronto, ON metropolitan areas, this research project examined immigrants’ acquisition of citizenship and political incorporation in the United States and Canada. It found, in part, that Portuguese “invisibility” from politics is not just a question of the particular barriers faced by Portuguese immigrants or their attitudes toward politics, but it is also a function of the welcome the host society provides. In this respect, Canada has done a better job at integrating Portuguese immigrants into politics than the United States. The project draws on over 150 in-depth interviews with ordinary immigrants, some of their North American born children, local officials and leaders of community organizations.
The major findings from this project are published in Bloemraad's recent book, Becoming a Citizen (UC Press, 2006). Further results from this research, "Citizenship, Naturalization and Electoral Success: Putting the Portuguese American Experience in Comparitive Context" (.pdf), will also be published in Fashioning Ethnic Culture: Portuguese-American Communities along the Eastern Seaboard, edited by Kimberly DaCosta Holton and Andrea Klimt and in The Portuguese in Canada: Diasporic Challenges and Adjustment, 2nd edition, edited by Carlos Teixeira and Victor M.P. Da Rosa.
THE PORTUGUESE IN AMERICAN WHALING
Faculty Research by Don Warrin, PhD
Whaling, at one time, was the fifth industry in importance in the United States. In the late eighteenth century, it attracted more and more participants from the Portuguese islands of the Azores and Cape Verde. By the mid nineteenth century virtually every American whaling vessel (out of some 200) carried a number of these islanders. Soon they became captains and owners, and by the end of the century a dominant factor in the industry. It was, in sum, the earliest path to America for these islanders. And it set a pattern of migration that was permanently to mark the Portuguese settlements of the United States.A research summary (.pdf) outlines this history.
ORGANIZING FOR VOICE
IMMIGRANT COMMUNITIES IN THE SOUTH BAY
On-going Research by Professor Irene Bloemraad, Sociology
This project examines Portuguese, Vietnamese, Mexican and Indian organizations in the Silicon Valley area of south San Francisco Bay. The project seeks to document and explain differences in the degree to which immigrants and their descendents can organize, including the creation of official nonprofit 501c3 organizations, and the degree to which local officials recognize and view these organizations as legitimate actors in local political decision-making.
THE PORTRAYAL OF IMMIGRANT
COMMUNITIES IN LOCAL MEDIA
On-going Research by Professor Irene Bloemraad, Sociology
This project considers immigrant communities’ civic visibility in the local mainstream media. To what extent are immigrants found in the pages of local newspapers, and how are they portrayed? This project is based on content analysis of newspaper coverage from 1985-2005 of three immigrant groups (Portuguese, Vietnamese, Indian) in four major local broadsheets located in the cities of San Jose, Boston, Toronto, and Vancouver. The project team is considering how frequently these groups appear in local news over time, the amount of newsprint devoted to them, the centrality of the group to the article, and, most importantly, the way the group is presented. We juxtapose these trends with changing demographics of the cities, which all saw significant inflows of immigrants since 1985.