If successful, Porto Digital might well serve as a model
for revitalizing the rest of Pernambuco state,
which is among the most impoverished in Brazil.

Ami Albernaz

The past and present have long co-existed in the old port area of the capital of Pernambuco state. Waterfront warehouses hearken back to Recife's glory days as a world leader in sugar production during the seventeenth century. Ornate colonial buildings, now serving as apartments, shops and even nightclubs, stand as testament to the wealth brought in by the sugar production. Yet the peeling façades and rusted balconies, along with the poor who beg visitors for spare coins or food, are present reminders of the slump that Recife later suffered. Now, a $13 million plan is aiming to pump new life into the old heart of Recife—via technology.

The plan is called Porto Digital (in English, digital port) and is a joint undertaking of the state government, private companies and the Inter-American Development Bank. Over the next few years, technology companies including heavyweights Microsoft, Nokia and Siemens will move into some of the abandoned buildings, while the incubators serving those companies will fill space in the port warehouses where sugar was once stored. The project's founders stress that it is not merely another Silicon Valley that is being planned. Rather, the aim is to capitalize on the city's resources and culture.

"The goal is to create something with a human form, and to create conditions of usability," said Silvio Meira, one of the creators of the project. For these reasons, the project is starting with the computer science program at the Federal University in Recife, which will be moving into the old city center. One of the best programs of its kind in Brazil, it loses about half of its graduates each year to larger cities with more job opportunities, such as São Paulo, or to companies like Microsoft, which comes to Recife every summer to recruit promising grads.

"We need to create challenges here in Recife so that people will want to stay," said Meira, who is also a professor at the federal university. "Either we create a world-class place, or graduates will keep leaving."

The way in which the project is creating challenges is through a university-based organization called CESAR, or Recife's Center for Advanced Studies and Systems. Meira, who also serves as CESAR's president, refers to the organization as an "enterprise factory." CESAR generates small companies whose purpose is to solve problems frequently encountered by businesses. One CESAR-generated company, called Radix (http://www.radix.com.br), is the search engine for iG, Brazil's best-known free Internet service provider. For Porto Digital, the idea is that companies started by CESAR will open in the port area and attract investment that will enable more businesses to open. The first CESAR company in the port area, called Vanguard, opened in June.

Porto Digital is aiming not only to keep workers in Recife, but to attract workers from outside of the city. A "human capital fund" that is one component of the project would provide competitive salaries to those considering Recife. Meanwhile, the project's founders are hoping that the city's climate, with warm weather year-round and little rain, could also work in its favor.

The benefits of Porto Digital will extend to the poor in the port area, according to State Secretary of Science and Technology Claudio Marinho. A housing project consisting of 300 poor families will be renovated next year and will be the site of an informatics training school which will offer low-cost training to residents. The residents might then work in some of the businesses which will open in the port area.

In the conceiving of Porto Digital, its creators have tried to combine their own elements with those of already-existing technology clusters. "We're taking ideas from what's already been tested and proven," Marinho said. "We're not looking to re-invent the wheel." In the beginning, for example, Porto Digital will receive plenty of government support. Every real invested by the private sector will be matched by a real from the government. Yet the founders acknowledge that eventually, the project will need to be self-sustaining. "In order to be truly successful, the project needs to be able to run on its own," Meira said. "You can help it begin, but then you should be able to leave it alone and watch it grow."

An Example

If successful, Porto Digital might well serve as a model for revitalizing the rest of Pernambuco state, which is among the most impoverished in Brazil. José Carlos Calvacante, president of the state foundation for technology and support (FACEPE), said that state officials are trying to enrich the state and improve living conditions for its residents through science and technology, in a way exemplified by Porto Digital.

In Calvacante's vision for a more digital state, partnerships between universities and the private sector will be a driving force, as in Porto Digital. Calvacante acknowledges that the greatest challenge will be preparing the population for a more technically-oriented society. "We will not succeed if we don't train our population," he said. "We need to create something that comes from the state and from its people. Otherwise, it will fail."

Since all of Pernambuco's 184 municipalities are already linked to an Internet backbone, the challenge now facing Calvacante and leaders of social organizations throughout the state is finding how to use it to best serve the population. Many of the state's residents are illiterate, which will make the work more difficult. Calvacante calls for using the Internet creatively. Instead of focusing on computer skills training, for example, he says a more efficient use of information technology might be to teach the state's artisans and farmers to use the Internet to sell their goods, particularly in towns well known for their arts and crafts, or fruits and vegetables.

Just as in Porto Digital, Calvacante's vision for a more information-based Pernambuco state will be something with a distinctly home-grown feel. "We are trying to use our most unique advantages," he said. "We have traditions of samba, frevo and arts and crafts. I get angry when I hear people say that Pernambuco is so poor. That's overlooking what we do have, and what is special to this region."

Future Meets Past

The installation of fiber optic cables and wires beneath Recife's streets for Porto Digital is already yielding benefits, but of an unexpected sort. Since the wiring began in mid-May, thousands of relics of the city's past have surfaced. For a team of archaeologists and the residents of Recife, the serendipitous findings are filling in gaps in the story of the city's beginnings.

The 15,000 archaeological artifacts being studied by the archaeological team include tobacco pipes, porcelain dishes and perhaps most interestingly, pieces of a fortification wall built by the Dutch who controlled Recife between 1630 and 1654. According to the head of the archaeological team, all of the findings are providing archaeologists with clues about the patterns of settlement and the social classes of Recife's earliest inhabitants.

"By studying the objects we can tell where they came from, and by the quality, what was the social status of the people who had them," said Marcos Albuquerque of the University of Pernambuco, who is leading the excavations. As an example, Albuquerque compared the white tobacco pipes that were used by Dutch settlers with the brown ones favored by the Portuguese. Additionally, the fragments of English porcelain dishes that have been found are signs of a relatively wealthy settlement.

The pieces of the Dutch wall which once surrounded Recife have fueled the imagination of the archaeologists, who believe the wall might have served as a fortress and as an observatory point. The find has also been intriguing in that it has given the archaeologists a glimpse into how Recife looked under a people other than the Portuguese, who reclaimed it from the Dutch in 1654. Starting with the wall, the archaeologists intend to study the successive layers of buried artifacts to learn the chronology of settlement in the city. In the time of the Dutch, Recife was much smaller than it is today, having since filled in some of what was once water. With future findings, the archaeologists hope to create a new map of how Recife was in the seventeenth century.

The excavations have taken place near Rua do Bom Jesus, one of Recife's main touristic points. On that street stands the first synagogue to be built in the Americas, called Kahal Zur Israel. Near the synagogue, the archaeologists found a perfectly preserved mikvah, or Jewish ceremonial bath. In addition, the team has reached tunnels more than 60 feet long, which carried water for the city's population in the nineteenth century.

Some of the findings, including the mikvah and pieces of the Dutch wall, will be visible to the public through glass windows in the ground. Others, including the dish fragments and pipes, will either be donated to an already-existing museum in Recife or will be housed in a new museum which would be built specifically to showcase the findings.

Certainly the greatest irony of the discoveries is that the original purpose of the excavations was to install the cables and wires for the likes of Microsoft and Nokia, which are among the 250 high-tech companies that will be moving into Recife. Now it appears likely that the old heart of Recife will soon be a place where the spectrum of its past, present and future will be on display for all to see.

Ami Albernaz has taught English in Manaus and recently conducted research on the Internet in four Brazilian cities including Recife, which is how she learned of the Porto Digital project. She is pursuing a degree in journalism and Latin American studies from New York University. She can be reached by email at aea221@nyu.edu  

Send your
comments to
Brazzil