Urban Thinkers Campus, Recife

Challenge

Urban Thinkers Campus is a UN-Habitat format: open meetings where cities, universities and civil society discuss how to put the New Urban Agenda into practice. In 2017 the INCITI research institute at the Federal University of Pernambuco ran a campus in Recife on water and resilience. Recife is a city of rivers, canals and mangroves, and it faces flooding and water pollution. The organisers wanted practical, low-cost ideas that residents and city services could use.

What was done

Mihail Veklenko worked with Prof. Circe Monteiro and the INCITI team on organising the campus. Within it, he organised and moderated his own session, “Permaculture and Organic Enzymes: how to help take care of the waters of my city” — an international round table held on 30 November 2017 at Casarão das Artes in Recife.

Urban Factory brought the speakers together and built the programme. The panel included an environmental NGO working on Recife’s mangrove park, Isabelle Santos (permaculture unit of the Secretariat of Infrastructure and Housing of Recife) with the idea of a programme of household and community composting sites for organic waste, a water-management researcher from INCITI, a governance think tank and a social-projects foundation. Topics ranged from household composting and the value of urban mangroves to water-sensitive urban design and simple biological methods for treating wastewater.

Mihail moderated the debate and gave one of the presentations. After the session Urban Factory wrote the report for the campus: issues discussed, proposals for a local action plan, ideas for monitoring and for involving schools and universities.

Result

• An international session held within the UN-Habitat Urban Thinkers Campus in Recife.
• Practical proposals for an action plan in line with the New Urban Agenda, including a working group of session participants.
• A report in Portuguese, English and Russian.
• Part of a long-term collaboration with INCITI / UFPE (since 2016).