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R. Timothy SIEBER
Dept. Anthropology,
University of Massachusetts, and CITIDEP-USA.
100 Morrissey Boulevard, Boston MA 02125 USA. E-mail: tim.sieber@umb.edu
ABSTRACT
Lisbon and Boston have both been showpieces of recent waterfront redevelopment and revitalization - Boston as a premier example for 1980's developments and thinking in planning and design, and Lisbon, for the 1990's. Remarkably similar in size, both considered "historic" cities with rich pasts as centers of maritime power, the two cities have settled on many of the same waterfront redevelopment strategies to revitalize their historic central areas. Despite their similarities, the two cities have experienced waterfront planning and development in different ways, reflecting significantly different national traditions and legal contexts that shape participation in planning decisions by the state, the private sector, and the citizenry. This presentation will discuss and contrast these differing waterfront redevelopment histories, with an eye toward outlining the different cultural, political, and legal contexts for public participation, especially by citizen groups in environmental impact assessment.
Lisbon and Boston have both been world showpieces of recent waterfront redevelopment and revitalization - Boston as a premier example for 1980's developments and thinking in planning and design, and Lisbon, for the 1990's. The cities are remarkably similar in size: Boston has 574,000 and Lisbon, 680,000 in population; the American city has a metropolitan area of 2.4 million and the Portuguese, 2.1 million. Both are "historic" port cities with rich pasts as centers of maritime power. Lisbon's mercantile "Golden Age" was the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, and Boston's, the 18th and early 19th. These glory days of maritime power have long been over for both cities, however, and in the late 20th century each city has experienced a similar transformative post-industrial economic shift, involving the decline of port trade and manufacturing in favor of growth in their service-based economies. In each city, recent land use planning and urban redevelopment has attempted to create a new urban infrastructure to support this emerging economy. In this process both cities have settled on many of the same waterfront redevelopment strategies as ways of revitalizing their downtowns and historic central areas, which are located in or adjacent to their waterfronts. Key themes in both Boston and Lisbon have been conversion of formerly industrial/commercial land to office and upscale residential development, an increasing emphasis on recreational, leisure, and touristic uses of waterfront areas, and a new valorization of history and heritage as key tourism attractions (Sieber, 1993, 1999). Despite these similarities in planning strategy and outcome, and in broad socioeconomic planning parameters, the two cities have experienced waterfront planning and development in significantly different ways that reflect differing national traditions, political traditions, and legal contexts that have shaped participation in planning decisions by the state, the private sector, and the citizenry.
Here I would like briefly to discuss some key waterfront development projects in each of the two cities, with an eye toward indicating the different sorts of public participation that have taken place in environmental impact reviews. I will suggest some different features that public participation takes in both cities, and try to explain how differing political, cultural, and legal contexts produce these. Differing conceptions and practices in how civil society manifests itself in Portugal and the United States are especially significant here. Commonalities between the countries are also important to note, since the environmental impact assessment (EIA) process has many similarities - including some of the same limitations - whether it occurs in Europe or North America In proceeding, first I will briefly introduce the broad outlines of recent waterfront redevelopment in the two cities, and then examine public participation in EIA in some key recent redevelopment projects, after which I will follow with an attempt to set the differences in their national contexts, and conclude with some recommendations regarding the future of public participation.
My observations and analysis here should be taken as preliminary. They are based on long-term urban anthropological fieldwork on the Boston waterfront between 1984 and 1990, and in Lisbon for a total of ten months in between 1995 and 1998. The analysis will reflect my overall orientation as an social anthropologist interested in broadly holistic analyses of these two cities and their recent urban development, and the use that I have made of fundamentally qualitative forms of participant-observation, interview, and archival research in each city. EIA in both countries shows complex manifestations, and is still dramatically evolving; so, generalizations made about EIA here, I realize, are offered on the basis of a very limited number of urban waterfront-related cases, and as such are not meant to be extended to the full range of EIA practice in either country.
Boston. Boston's waterfront redevelopment has been occurring at a steady rate since the mid 1960's. Major actors in Boston are the quasi-independent authorities - the Massachusetts Port Authority (MassPort), and the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA), operating in concert with the City of Boston and other affected harbor municipalities, and the Massachusetts Coastal Zone Management agency. The city's 73 kilometers of waterfront have been extensively rezoned, especially away from industrial uses toward more mixed use development, including commercial, recreational, and residential. Most key parcels in the downtown area of Charlestown, the North End, the Financial District, and most recently South Boston are either redeveloped, or under active planning. The more "frontier" neighborhoods of East Boston and Dorchester are not far behind in this process. New developments typically mix offices, luxury housing, upscale retail services, hotels (principally for business, but also for leisure travelers), and recreational and leisure facilities (marinas, museums, restaurants). Regulations require new developments to preserve scenic views of the water through providing perimeter pedestrian walkways, plazas, and other viewing platforms, and these public areas are increasingly common on the waterfront.
Major development poles to this point have been the (1) Downtown "Waterfront" area that encompasses the Columbus Waterfront Park, New England Aquarium, Harbor Towers, and Rowes Wharf, which area will soon be augmented by the new adjacent parkland freed up by the "Big Dig's" razing of the elevated Central Artery highway; (2) the Charlestown Navy Yard; and (3) most recently the newly emerging "Seaport District, " extending eastward from Fan Pier, and including the new Federal District Courthouse, the World Trade Center, and the planned new Boston Convention Center. These developments, and supportive projects in Boston and surrounding harbor municipalities such as Quincy and Chelsea, add up to a conservative estimate of 40 billion US dollars of public and private investment in the last two decades.
The key theme in all these developments is transformation of waterfront space and ambience to make it more amenable to the corporate, business, and professional activities linked to the city's growing service economy, including conversion of space for residential, leisure, and commercial use by upscale, affluent workers, residents, and visitors, especially tourists and suburban commuters. Such redevelopment accelerates further the decline of industrial economic sectors in the port and city, and of the working-class neighborhoods and people who are dependent on them.
A major environmental clean-up of the harbor has taken place in the late 1980's and early 1990's through the building of the metropolitan water district's first secondary sewage treatment plant at a cost of 6 billion US dollars . This was a foundational element in transformation of the harbor into a more aesthetically pleasing and recreational resource for the new post-industrial Boston. It is the controversial siting decision for that plant that I will examine shortly as a case study of US citizen participation.
Lisbon. Lisbon's dramatic recent waterfront development efforts date from the mid-90's, with planning and coordination assumed mainly by two quasi-public authorities, the Administration of the Port of Lisbon (APL), with long-standing jurisdiction over the port, and Parque Expo, the public-private entity responsible for producing Lisbon's 1998 world's fair, both organizations ideally working in consultation with the Lisbon city government, the Camara Municipal de Lisboa (CML). At the end of the decade, redevelopment has already taken place or is well underway along the city's entire 15-kilometer margin of the Tagus.
The most significant reinvestment and planning effort has been in the city's eastern zone at and around the site of the city's recent world's fair, Expo'98 (now "Parque das Nações"), and its associated new urban development (ExpoUrbe) that surrounds the fair site and is still under construction. Expo'98 which closed in October 1998 was essentially a massive waterfront development project designed to "requalify," as the Portuguese say, this derelict industrial zone along the city's eastern riverfront, on the border of Lisbon and Loures to the northeast. The fair site itself, 70 hectares in extent with another 250+ hectares in ExpoUrbe, is fast being transformed into a new, state-of-the-art business and cultural center for the city. The fair buildings and facilities were designed to serve future uses as a permanent aquarium, world trade center, museum of science and technology, government ministry offices, and premier performance halls for Lisbon, and many of the structures have already been converted to their new uses.
Beyond the immediate fair grounds themselves, significant real estate development is occurring in the adjacent "ExpoUrbe" mini-city. Proceeds from real estate development here were the main source of capital funds for producing the Expo itself. ExpoUrbe will eventually include significant new office construction designed for medium-sized companies, with a new projected employment of 18,000 service jobs; luxury housing for 25,000 people, thousands of whom already live there; several new hotels; new rail, and auto transportation links, including quick, direct access to the airport; a new state of the art site-wide system for digital communications; and, new commercial facilities, including the Vasco da Gama Shopping Center, and recreational spaces, including parks and marinas. The new 84-hectare Tagus and Trancão Park will be the Lisbon's largest and major waterfront park, equipped for equestrian sports, tennis, golf and football, and the city's overall number of marina moorings will be more than doubled through the development of a private marina to the south of the Olivais Dock. In all, five kilometers of waterfront will be redeveloped between the fair and the ExpoUrbe sites. All long the shoreline, scenic walkways offer pedestrians open views of the Tagus.
The new transit links to the area, including a new, second bridge across the Tagus river to Montijo, the Vasco da Gama Bridge, several new road and highway connections, including high-speed access from the nearby airport, new water transit links to the south bank, a new multi-modal train station, the Gare do Oriente, as well as a new underground ("Metro") line, also are working to create what planners have called a "new centrality" for the city, a major pole in its future development.
In the remaining areas of the Lisbon waterfront, as well, APL's POZOR plan, Plano de Ordenamento da Zona Ribeirinha, divides the Tagus riverfront into six zones from the city's western limit at Algés-Belem to Poço do Bispo-Matinha near the Expo site in the east. While a continuation of commercial shipping, water transit, and naval uses are still strongly provided for in the plans, many of the city's traditional waterfront commercial and industrial facilities, including much of its shipping and cargo-handling, have already been relocated to newer facilities outside the city limits in municipalities across the estuary. This has left the principal focus of POZOR waterfront planning also on promotion of new mixed use developments, including upscale housing, office development, hotels and other tourist facilities, and leisure and recreational installations - especially walkways, marinas, and restaurants, cafes, and clubs. Lisbon's exciting new, expanding area for nightlife, in fact, is centered on the recently converted waterfront "docas" area in the Alcântara and adjacent Santos districts.
Developments in the "Docas" are reminiscent of similar waterfront zones for lively nightlife in Boston, such as Quincy's Marina Bay and Boston's Faneuil Hall Marketplace. The similarities in the design and programmatic "look" of the Lisbon and Boston waterfronts, of course, are no accident. Not only have both cities undergone similar processes of post-industrial economic transformation, the rise of the corporate and financial sectors, and significant globalization of their economies, which have led to a new influx of middle and upper class professionals, managers, and investors, many of them foreigners whose lifestyle needs are increasingly catered to by new developments. In addition to such common social and economic factors, the design similarities in the two cities stem from the fact that a common grammar of planning and design principles, often applied by the same set of international design firms, have been used in both cities, as well as in other redeveloping post-industrial cities throughout the world.
Under federal court order in the mid 1980's, Boston was mandated to construct a secondary wastewater treatment plant in order to reduce illegal levels of pollution in Boston Harbor. The clean-up was a step that was essential to recasting the harbor as a recreational resource, and an essential amenity for new post-industrial residential and commercial development along the waterfront. A harbor-side location was needed for the central treatment plant, that was designed to process sewage effluent from 43 towns and cities in the wider Boston metropolitan area. Several alternative potentially available sites were identified in the coastal towns of Winthrop and Quincy, to the north and south of Boston, respectively. Under the policies of the National Environmental Protection Act of 1969 (NEPA), and the Massachusetts Environmental Protection Act (MEPA), the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) established a 24-member Citizens' Advisory Committee (CAC ) to coordinate public input into the decision on siting the plant. C.E. Maguire, a public relations firm specializing in arranging public participation, was hired to manage the entire process for the CAC. (Much of the preceding and following information on this EIS process draws on US Environmental Protection Agency, 1984 as a source.)
At the outset, the CAC held two public hearings, and extensive committee meetings, in order to define the scope of the environmental impact review process. Once the 900-page preliminary environmental impact statement was produced, and made available to the public, the CAC sponsored several months of hearings to receive public input. In all, a total of 60 public meetings and workshops were held in Boston and the potential siting towns of Winthrop and Quincy in order to receive public testimony and to hear debate over the merits of the possible sitings of the plant. Written input, of course, was also accepted throughout the process. After hearing a great deal of public testimony on the issue, the CAC appointed a special group of thirty-five people to meet in workshops to plan a program of mitigation and compensation measures for each possible siting option.
The mix of organizations represented on the CAC was very wide, including representatives of trade, business and corporate groups with an interest in harbor cleanup (representing fishermen, shipping, commerce, manufacturing, and utilities); neighborhood residents' associations; an organization of recreational consumers (a boating club); environmental organizations; planning advocacy organizations; and a few people who worked as non-elected officials in government agencies in the potentially affected towns. Only one of the 24 members was an elected official, and only four of the 24 representatives were from environmental organizations. Every member of the committee was a leader or representative of some larger group or constituency involved in harbor affairs. No one was an ordinary rank-and-file "citizen," though many such people registered opinions in public hearings organized by the CAC.
Aside from the hearings, special attention was given to maintaining communications and accessibility to the public. For over a year, a monthly newsletter was mailed to a list of 740 organizations and individuals detailing the progress of the study and the schedule of public participation events associated with it. As EIS reports accumulated, all were made available to open, public inspection in libraries in Boston, Quincy, Winthrop, and Newton, and hundreds of copies were distributed by the CAC to harbor-related organizations In addition, for anyone who wanted to familiarize themselves directly with the sites, guided field trips were offered on demand.
Because such a broad segment of the public were involved, among the variables studied were the impacts of possible eventual plant siting on the community "character" and on the property values of each community in the potentially affected towns. The EIA was broadly "multidisciplinary" in the sense that Social Impact Assessment (SIA) (Van Willigen, 1993), and not simply technical physical environmental evaluation, was a key part of the study methodology. SIA, in fact, is usually a key part of EIA in North America, and focuses on gauging social effects on local residents and other users of potential development sites. The Boston Harbor CAC, in fact, found that most public participants cared far more about social and human environmental impacts on the "quality of neighborhood life" than they did about metropolitan or regional economic impacts specifically. The technical, institutional, and legal issues that interested most planning and environmental bureaucrats were also of lesser concern to the public. For example, key issues for the public were (1) the projected effects of changes in air quality, noise, odor, traffic safety on quality of neighborhood life, (2) parkland preservation and public access, and (3) potential declines in property values that the long-term construction process might cause in the chosen town.
A major focus, and perhaps the most lasting effect of the EIS, was its detailed development of mitigation plans for each siting option, to compensate and mitigate for each town the projected negative effects of a plant siting there. The mitigation plans included detailed clarifications of which political structures would be used to monitor the implementation of mitigations over the five to ten year construction process. Each plan gave principal authority in this monitoring process to representatives of the community itself. In the end, after the entire EIA was complete, and the work of the CAC finished, the politically appointed board of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA), with the power of making the final decision, chose to locate the plant in the town of Winthrop to the north of Boston.
Mitigation measures for Winthrop included in the decision were extensive and included: (1) large cash grants to the town to abate property taxes for residents; (2) subsidies to support property owners if their property values dropped during the period of construction; (3) an agreement to barge all construction workers, materials and supplies by a water route, to avoid increasing truck and auto traffic through the narrow streets of the community, where safety and environmental quality could be reduced as a result; (4) a number of more specific measures to reduce noise, odor and visual pollution during construction and afterward, during future operation of the plant; and, (5) an agreement to relocate the large regional prison existing in the community, the Suffolk County House of Detention, to another location, away from the town. This involved the state's promise to build an entirely new prison elsewhere, which many community members mistakenly believed would never happen.
Was this a successful EIA process? Procedurally, it would seem so; however, for the residents of Winthrop, the EIA was not viewed as a fair and legitimate assessment of the alternatives, and in fact the town pursued an unsuccessful law suit to overturn the decision (Belich, 1985). Moreover, during the EIA process, despite all the careful procedures to assure full public input, residents in both of the potential siting towns of Winthrop and Quincy were not content to trust the process, and took a variety of actions outside the EIA to attempt to influence the siting decision. The public, in other words, was not content to trust a purely administrative handling of the matter, and in this sense their own public participation was much more broadly targeted than simply toward the EIA process.
During the EIA review, for example, groups in both Winthrop and Quincy were politically active in a broad sense, and especially so as the siting decision drew close. Residents submitted petitions of protest to the Massachusetts state legislature, one for example with 2000 signatures; different grass roots community groups engaged in letter-writing campaigns to officials to attempt to influence the decision; many public demonstrations were held, including picketing outside government offices, and during CAC open hearings. Street traffic stoppages were also used as a form of protest in Winthrop. All groups made appeals to the mass media of communications to cover their concerns. Finally, all major elected political officials in the involved towns, and state-wide in Massachusetts, including the Governor, were involved in intense lobbying activity. Given that the CAC for the EIS was not the real decision-making body involved, it seemed obvious to all the involved parties that the matter was more a political decision than an administrative one, whatever the rationality and the niceties of the EIA process, and the parties acted accordingly.
In fact, the Winthrop decision that was made conformed to the political outcome that had been widely expected throughout the entire EIA process, despite the careful examination of alternative sites. This was because the town (actually the adjacent Deer Island) was already the site of the existing primary sewage treatment plant. At the very least, the EIA process did give a measure of dignity to local leaders by allowing multiple venues for protest, and even more importantly, it allowed the town strongly to influence a very favorable set of mitigation measures that compensated it for the siting decision, and that made the impacts on the town less harmful in the long run.
Two briefly recounted examples can show how different the environmental impact assessment process can be in Portugal; here it appears to be a more truncated procedure that allows little opportunity for broad public consultation. As we will see, the range of citizens' groups participating is much narrower, and there is almost complete reliance on purely administrative, written means of receiving and evaluating input. Public meetings where citizens can hear the testimony of others, dialogue directly with planners, and engage in debates over the issues, are rare (Ribeiro and Rodrigues, 1997). The study methodology used in EIA is also narrower, and generally does not include attention to Social Impact Assessment. Less effort, as well, is expended on developing detailed mitigation programs before final decisions are made, in large part because the voices of local site-based groups are not strongly included in the process.
The two sample projects are both mega-projects associated with the redevelopment of the Tagus River waterfront in Lisbon. Since the massive rebuilding of the city under the Marques de Pombal's direction after the infamous 1755 earthquake, these recent projects are among the largest and most costly public works projects in the city's history.
Expo '98. Despite being without question the most massive public works project in the nation's history, this massive 1990's redevelopment was not subjected to normal EIA review, and accordingly provided for no real public consultation in its planning. In October 1995 Parque Expo sought and received an exemption from the normal environmental review process from the two ministries of Environment and Natural Resources and of Public Works, Transport, and Communications (Garcia, 1995). This was despite the fact that the site included 330 hectares of redevelopment, and included construction of significant infrastructure such as a 500-mooring marina and alterations to a major sanitary landfill in Beirolas. Parque Expo's stated reasons for the exemption were that (1) a full-scale review process was not be possible given the Expo's extremely rushed timetable to prepare for opening of the world's fair in May 1998, and the assertion that (2) programs of urban redevelopment (requalificação) are not covered by the law, but only original construction undertakings (Garcia, 1995).
Moreover, Parque Expo announced it had already contracted with a private consulting company, HPK, to complete a full environmental impact assessment of the Expo project, including projected impacts, and that this private, unreleased report had concluded that the "the overall balance of impact on the environment, in all the major projects, is clearly positive" (Garcia, 1995). In the press conference announcing the decision, the Portuguese Director-General of the Environment, Ascenso Pieres, also stated that the HPK studies were the "equivalent" of a regular environmental impact study. "The only difference now is that we will not have public consultation," he is quoted as explaining (Garcia, 1995).
When examining the summary of the study, 47 pages of text and maps, dated September 1995, and entitled Avaliação do Saldo Ambiental dos Projectos com Incidências no Ambiente (Evaluation of the Balance of Environmental Quality Impacts) (Parque Expo, 1995), however, it is easy to see that the scope of the study is extremely narrow. It examines almost totally only physical environmental features and impacts of the Expo development, including effects of the construction phase on air, water, landscape, soil, noise, and biota, and discusses issues affecting the Tagus shoreline, such as erosion and drainage. For the site itself, the discussion centers on drainage, water supply, solid waste disposal, recycling, decontamination of soils, with some limited discussion of impacts of auto traffic by visitors, of artificial lighting on local bird life, and electrical energy consumption (Parque Expo, 1995).
What is most glaringly missing, however, is the coverage of any projected social impacts on the surrounding urban fabric, including effects on traffic, housing, transportation, and environmental quality in surrounding local neighborhoods, or even on the ExpoUrbe neighborhood itself, during construction, during the five-month realization of the Expo itself, or afterward. The report treats the development as an island unconnected to anything else around it. It is difficult to imagine that there are actually tens of thousands of people resident in the area, or that they could be deeply impacted for several years by disruption, noise, traffic, dust from project construction; from demographic changes, including influxes of new social groups; from sharp rises in property values and rent levels; from major alterations in transit patterns; and from changes in the extent and quality of neighborhood retail services. Furthermore, no mention was made of the economic or social impact of the project, good and bad, including such matters as: (1) effects both positive and negative on employment of local residents, (2) displacement of a variety of local marine industrial and commercial facilities (Público 1998), or (3) displacement and rehousing of many hundreds of local residents, both inside and adjacent to the intervention zone, to make room for the Expo facilities and nearby transit access ways. Many other dislocations of businesses and families were necessitated by the extensive construction around the site, as part of the improvement of access routes to the Intervention Zone. None of these matters were studied or addressed as "impacts" of the Expo development.
All these lacunae validate the broader critique of Expo planning by Vítor Matias Ferreira and others at Lisbon's distinguished Center for Territorial Studies (Centro de EstudosTerritoriais) that the Expo site has been created as an island in the city, planned with little reference to the outside community, and not well woven into the broader urban fabric (Ferreira, 1999 and Ferreira, Lucas, and Gato, 1999). Operating largely independently from outside public or political controls, Parque Expo also refused to coordinate its planning for the site with Lisbon city planning officials or to link its work with already existing municipal master plans for the city's eastern zone that encompasses the Expo area (Fernandes and Pedro, 1998; Monteiro, 1998; Vaz, 1999).
As for the availability of public information about Parque Expo's environmental impact assessment, three years later in July 1998 during the realization of the Expo itself, the company's report still remained a secret document that had never been released to the public (I myself was able to receive a copy of the summary document only after considerable effort.) At that time, prestigious Portuguese institutions such as the Center for Territorial Studies at Lisbon's ISCTE, and its Director, Professor Vítor Matias Ferreira, who were operating an "Observatory" of the Expo development from 1989 until 1998 as part of its "Expo'98: Observar Enquanto Se Realiza" project (see Castro and Lucas, 1999 for a summary) were still being refused a copy of the document (Fernandes and Pedro 1998). Parque Expo's climate of secrecy did not only involve documents: in several well-publicized incidents, Ministry of the Environment inspectors were refused entry into the Expo site during the construction phase, in order to check on reported toxic waste spills (Publico, 1995), and Lisbon newspapers during this time had to resort to helicopter flyovers to photograph the premises, since their journalists were also denied entry.
When my research associate Angela Cacciarru and I finally went through the Olivais, Moscavide, and Prior Velho freguesias (local administrative districts) surrounding the Expo site during June and July 1998 to inquire about Expo'98 environmental impacts and whether any public consultation had occurred, we confirmed that Parque Expo's pattern was not to consult with local communities about planning even if they were immediately adjacent to the Expo intervention zone. Local communities had been very negatively impacted by redevelopment of the Expo site: long-term noise, dust, transportation disruptions, unwanted alterations in public transportation services, and sometimes damage to local property, sometimes extending over years, were the common complaints.
Interestingly, we also discovered that even though there was no formal program of mitigation to prevent, ameliorate, or compensate such harms, local officials knew they could file complaints and seek restitution from Parque Expo after the fact. All the freguesias reported that they had made such complaints, and that Parque Expo staff had been open to hearing them and reasonable in making accommodations and sometimes restitution to the affected communities, such as when the company paid for repainting the private automobiles of many local residents in Moscavide whose cars had been damaged by Expo painting. In other words, even if there was no plan that treated such mitigations as a matter of rights for surrounding communities, such accommodations seemed to be handled fairly well on an informal basis.
POZOR. In brief, the Administration of the Port of Lisbon's (APL's) POZOR plan also displayed a similar lack of organized public participation in its formulation. Formal EIA procedures were neglected. The POZOR, Plan for Rezoning of the Lisbon Riverfront (Plano de Ordenamento da Zona Ribeirinha de Lisboa), eventually divided the Lisbon's Tagus Estuary waterfront into six zones spanning the 15 kilometers from Belém to Poço do Bispo, for purposes of redevelopment planning. During summer 1994 the APL, acting as an independent authority, used its own bureau of technical experts to create a provisional plan without any open public input, except for an earlier architectural design competition, and then released the plan without defining any clear process for inviting public comment, or even, for that matter, careful input from Lisbon city planning authorities in the Camara Municipal de Lisboa (CML). The APL did not even offer much written documentation of their provisional plan. Instead, they mounted a one-month exhibit at the APL headquarters in Alcântara during a summer vacation period when many people were away from the city, with architectural and planning models, and solicited opinions from visitors, as well as a self-selected panel of distinguished architects. Soon afterward in September 1994, APL moved to finalize the plans and then called for construction bids.
This rush to implementation, the entire lack of public consultation, and absence of coordination with the CML, however, became controversial and aroused many segments of the public. Intense debates and criticisms over the plan erupted in the media, where it was featured in television, newspaper, and magazine coverage, much of it stimulated by journalist, magazine editor, and political critic Miguel Sousa Tavares (see Tavares, 1995). Criticisms especially centered on the paucity of public recreational facilities planned for the waterfront, in comparison with APL's planned extensive real estate speculation in large-scale residential, office, and commercial development, on the high density of the anticipated development, and on the blockage of river views to inland locations.
Public protests went beyond media debates to include a court suit (ultimately unsuccessful) challenging APL's jurisdiction over such waterfront planning, a flurry of debate and discussion in the national parliament, and the creation of a new public organization opposing the plan, called the Movement for the Defense of Lisbon (Ferreira, 1997: 188-195). APL in its own turn was forced to respond by sponsoring four "technical sessions," to garner more public input into the plan; the largest session was that for architects and urban planners, but others were held for environmental organizations, boating clubs, and real estate developers (Ferreira, 1997: 189). A new revised plan emerged (Administração de Porto de Lisboa, 1995), that responded to many of the public criticisms that were voiced. While there is some disagreement over whether the revised plan, the earlier version, or no real plan at all is actually being followed today, it is clear that this intense critical public response to the initial plan went far to shape the directions of contemporary APL waterfront planning.
It is important to note that throughout this entire process of planning proposals, debates, and public involvement, the rules for formal EIA were never followed. The "public" was never formally invited to participate in any meaningful manner. Key elite segments of the public, however, made their voices heard through other channels of political participation - through grassroots political organizing; media scrutiny, criticism and debate; protests and appeals to elected representatives in the Assembly of the Republic, the national parliament; and, finally, through seeking redress in the courts. Public input occurred, even though improvised and ad ho in terms of the procedures followed.
The laws governing public participation in environmental impact review are remarkably similar in both nations, despite these remarkable differences in how public participation is used, or not used, in waterfront redevelopment planning. EIA in each case, of course, aims at connecting representatives of civil society with the state, and with capital, in order offer public consultation on decision-making in planning decisions. The character and conceptions of civil society in the two countries differ significantly and appear to account for much of the observed difference in practice and outcome that these limited cases illustrate.
Factors Limiting Public Participation in Portugal. In the USA, as noted in the representative Boston case, a much wider range of citizen's associations than in Portugal furnish representatives and enter into the public participation process. In Portugal, as Manuel (Manuel, 1998) and many others have noted, the consensus is that civil society is relatively new and still developing from a state of almost complete repression under the dictatorship of Salazar's Estado Novo, which fell only 25 years ago. The range of civic groups available to participate in EIA does in fact seem narrower than in the USA.
As João Joanaz de Melo has remarked of Portugal, citizens can influence environmental planning through "representative organs" of civil society, and he lists "unions, philanthropic organizations, other professional associations, local base associations, environmental defense organizations, and student associations" as examples (Joanaz de Melo, 1993: 141). Interestingly, this list does not include much attention to geographically-based local groups, such as neighborhood or residents' associations or local merchants' associations, two constituencies whose everyday quality of life, property values, and overall economic fortunes are probably the most dramatically affected by planning decisions, especially mega-projects in the population-dense urban settings where waterfront redevelopment typically occurs. Such local-level grassroots organizations do not seem have much presence in Portugal.
An especially strong sector in Portugal, of course, is constituted by "environmental defense organizations." Such NGOs are strongly positioned to intersect with environmental review processes, since they are specifically provided for in law in Lei No. 10/87 of 4 April, which guarantees consultation rights of such civil organizations in environmental planning (Ribeiro and Rodrigues, 1997: 112), and also provides for their representation on the executive board of IPAMP, the Instituto de Promoção Ambiental (Institute for Promotion of the Environment) that organizes public consultation for the environmental ministry. It is necessary for such organizations to officialize their status by registering and being approved by the state, and 140 such organizations were on record in 1995 (Ribeiro and Rodrigues 1997). They also receive funding from IPAMB for their projects and are guaranteed other special privileges by law.
In the US, there is no such special privileging of environmental defense organizations. Especially in the urban context, their importance appears to be dwarfed by other types of organizations that represent public interests in planning matters. As noted, in citizen participation in US urban settings, neighborhood-based associations -- civic associations made up principally of residents and/or of local small businesspeople -- are probably the most vocal citizen components to public participation processes. On the CAC for the Boston Harbor Wastewater Treatment Plant Siting Process, for example, only four of the 24 members represented environmental defense organizations, but seven represented local residents', consumers' or merchants' associations. Where environmental organizations are included in EIA reviews in North America, they also tend to be local groups, rather than national organizations. Their predominantly local nature, and their great availability, are underscored by Hazel Henderson's recent estimate that "over a million such groups" exist in the USA and Canada combined (Henderson, 1996:31).
While Portuguese environmental organizations in such as GEOTA, QUERCUS, and LPN serve crucial roles as the conscience of the nation in environmental matters, and continue tohave a distinguished, even heroic record of holding the state accountable for shortcomings in environmental protection, there are pitfalls in the state's singling out of environmental defense organizations for such roles. In Portugal as in the USA, the orientation of such environmental organizations toward the issues tends to be more technical and scientific, their purview clearly more national or regional in scope, and their membership, mostly well-educated professionals. The special status given to such groups in Portugal has probably done little to promote the emergence of more grass-roots, local, popular citizen's organizations, such as residents' associations, that might engage with planning decisions. EIA is still the province mostly of officials and experts. The glaring absence of social impact assessment (SIA) as part of the EIA review process in Portugal is obviously closely linked to the exclusion of local residents' associations in public consultation. These latter for reasons of custom, law, and history have little visibility or power in state decisions that affect their neighborhoods or towns, and the state has not designed an EIA process to assess potential planning effects on them. Local residents' associations do exist in many locations, especially where communities are facing crises, in middle income areas, working class neighborhoods, and especially in bairros da lata, or shantytowns.
EIA in the USA: Highlighting Limitations of the EIA Process. Even though EIA laws in the USA may appear to work more effectively on a technical level, and draw widely on citizen participation, the entire EIA process, as well as most established vehicles for citizen participation in the country, have still come under extensive criticism, especially by anthropologists and other social science observers, for the limited nature of the participation they actually engender. Criticisms center on the fact that "citizen participation" engages only a very narrow slice of the public -- a highly educated, generally professional, and usually technocratic elite. In Josiah Heyman's words, there exists only, "real involvement by a narrow segment of educated, upper middle class `citizens' " (Heyman, 1998: 57). Carol MacLennan also notes that the USA has a very weak public sphere, that broad participatory democracy does not exist, and that it is actually thwarted by a "dominance of scientific and technical experts [that] creates dependent citizens who lack the capability of entering public debate over political decisions" (MacLennan, 1995: 60).
Further criticisms of the NEPA provisions for public participation in EIA, in particular, are that the law was cautious in not expanding the judicial standing of the public to litigate in environmental matters (Fairfax, 1978), and did not provide for any new public rights beyond those that had already been recognized in the two still foundational laws guaranteeing public participation in government administration, the Administrative Procedures Act of 1946, and the 1966 Freedom of Information Act (MacLennan, 1988). Fairfax points out that in EIA reviews, NEPA in fact appears to limit public participation to "examining documents," which she and others see as a "misallocation of the environmental movement's resources" and a "disaster for the movement" (Fairfax, 1978: 743). This is because NEPA deflected energy from more broad-based environmental activism and public dialogue with government over decision-making, replacing it with attention to reviewing and filing technical documents (Fairfax, 1978). Litigation accordingly now tends to be less about decision-making itself and more about procedural violations in the EIA process.
Given that the EIA review normally comes late in the administrative decision-making process, as well, when the fundamental decision options and planning parameters have already been determined by technical experts, the limitations of the EIA process are clear. This is the reason for the widespread perception that the process is often an empty ritual for decisions whose technical and usually political solutions are already in place. The supposed benefit of public consultation in increasing the public legitimacy and acceptability of planning decisions (Gorney and Sanger, 1987) is obviously undermined through such perceptions of the EIA process. In both Portugal and the USA, of course, ultimate siting and other planning decisions are in fact made by bodies other than the environmental protection agencies who organize the EIA process. In Portugal, IPAMP, under the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources (MARN), is two steps removed from the Ministry of Planning and Territory Administration (MPAT) which has final approval of most projects, and in the USA, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defers ultimate planning decisions to local political authorities as well.
EIA: Only an Element of the Broader Politics of Public Participation in Planning. It is well to remember that members of the citizens' advisory committees in EIA reviews, where they exist, and even the environmental bureaucrats, are never the decision-makers themselves. Major planning decisions are essentially political, made by executive or legislative bodies, or by their representatives, or more commonly, by politically appointed independent authorities subject to very limited public influence - such as Boston's BRA, MassPort, and MWRA or Lisbon's Parque Expo or APL. EIA review and its public consultation, in the end, are fundamentally advisory processes.
The exclusion from decision-making of ordinary citizens in the special case of waterfront planning seems especially ironic given the fact that the working class are arguably the segment of society most seriously impacted by such redevelopment, in the USA, in Portugal, and in all similar countries. This is because world-wide this type of redevelopment signals urban transition from industrial to post-industrial economies. When waterfronts become "revitalized," they become gentrified and made more amenable to bourgeois leisure, business, and residence. The jobs and often the housing of working-class people are usually displaced as a result (Sieber, 1993 and Sieber, 1999).
The scale of most waterfront development projects also provides a barrier to public response to administrative action by planning agencies. Laws for EIA both the USA and in Portugal guarantee citizens a role in review of large-scale master plans, as well as of specific projects. Middle-range strategic plans, however - such as the choice of Expo's "intervention zone" in Lisbon, and the decision to site the world's fair there, or the recent designation of the new "Seaport District" - now Boston's "hot" waterfront investment zone - are often made at the highest political and administrative levels outside of much public scrutiny.
These facts about the realities of power are well-known by those who are being displaced, who understand the essentially political nature of these decisions, and who do the best they can to exert influence over such matters through overtly political channels, rather than through EIA, from which they are usually excluded anyway. This can be seen clearly in Boston at present, in the response of working-class residents of the rapidly developing and gentrifying "Seaport District" of South Boston. Large-scale political mobilization behind the community's local elected political leaders, and appeals to the media, rather than input into EIA reviews alone, are key channels through which the community has been seeking control over redevelopments. This strategy appears to be an accurate calculation on the public's part, given usual their lack of representation in EIA, the advisory limitations of the process, and the typically massive mobilization of state and economic power behind waterfront redevelopment mega-projects, like Lisbon's Expo and Boston's harbor cleanup.
In the same manner, key figures in Lisbon fought POZOR battles in the forum of the public media, appealed to political authorities and officials, and sponsored some of their own public forums to discuss the issues. Lisbon residents surrounding the Expo site found other ways, as well, using normal political channels, to seek redress after the fact of suffering some harms from redevelopment. In their case, it may be that the presence of a benevolent, paternalistic state ideally committed to responding to people's needs and activated through clientalist claims placed through local political leaders yields as much redress for ordinary citizens as a more rights-based formal mitigation program might do. The public still have avenues for participation, in other words, but they are through the broad political process as it is locally defined.
The task in both countries, and in both cities, of course, is to find ways of strengthening the input of the public into the EIA process, while at the same time fostering these broader "supplementary" forms of democratic participation that will always be necessary to expression of popular will. EIA is only effective, as Peter Shelley has noted, when full information is as accurately and openly provided as possible, to as broad a swath of the public as possible (Shelley, 1995). In Portugal, without much tradition of CAC's or use of the open "town meeting" to debate environmental impacts, it could be that computer-based technologies will offer a more accessible informational and dialogical format to ordinary citizens than the usual print-intensive and bureaucratic types of communication that are traditional in exchange of environmental information and evaluations. For example, the CITIDEP Intelligent MultiMedia Systems project, directed by Pedro Ferraz de Abreu, may offer a useful prototype, making available to ordinary citizens access to multiple and sometimes diverse opinions of experts and other citizens, and also more easily understandable non-technical summaries of EIA reports (Ferraz de Abreu and Chito, 1997). Multimedia communications may be more inclusive, provided that improved public access to computer technology is made a priority.
Despite Portugal's relative lack of grassroots citizen activism, there are significant strengths to the political system that are lacking in the USA, and that often require in North America the more vigorous, though not always successful, citizen initiative that we can see. Those special strengths in Portugal include (1) still vital political parties with significant popular bases, (2) a strong state commitment improving the social welfare of the citizenry, (3) a high level of state support for environmental organizations, and (4) preservation of a still engaged public sphere. These conditions, plus the small scale of the country that allows easier physical accessibility of actors to one another, will hopefully set the stage for some innovative improvements in Portuguese EIA practices in the years to come.
In the USA, EIA can and should certainly be technically improved, especially toward inclusion of broader ranges of the public to offer input into significant planning and development issues. The process, however, will probably continue to look suspicious to the public in many cases so long as the public sphere continues to be devalued and diminished in the current rush toward privatization of the society, and overall levels of citizen participation in formal politics and public administration more generally continue to decline. The public's expectations of the state are much lower in the USA than in Portugal, and levels of distrust and cynicism toward government at high levels across the political spectrum. Improvements in EIA, while important, will do little by themselves to reverse these current political trends.
In Portugal as in the USA, EIA will never be a panacea, as the mixed experiences in waterfront development clearly show. Even where the process "works" and follows all the ideal rules, it still does not always have a high level legitimacy for the public, and often for good reasons. The broader political issues that planning and development raise cannot and should not have a purely technically managed resolution, such as EIA ideally promises. The broadest forms of democratic participation - political mobilizations of all types, grass roots movements, fights to extend citizen participation to new arenas of decision-making, media campaigns, lobbying of legislative and executive government, and litigation - will always be necessary to promote forms of social and economic development that are truly beneficial to the publics they are intended to serve.
The Lisbon research reported here was supported by a Senior Fulbright Fellowship from the US Fulbright-Hays Program, the Luso-American Cultural Commission, and the Universidade Aberta, and an Invited Scientist fellowship from the PRAXIS XXI program of Portugal's Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, both during 1998, as well as by CITIDEP-Portugal. I am deeply grateful to all these Portuguese sources for their support. Research on Boston waterfront development was supported by grants from the University of Massachusetts/Boston. I especially thank my research collaborator in the 1998 Lisbon research, Angela Cacciarru, and I also appreciate the intellectual support offered me in Portugal by Vítor Matias Ferreira, Alexandra Castro, and Joana Lucas at the Centro de Estudos Territoriais at Lisbon's ISCTE. I also thank Pedro Ferraz de Abreu, and other CITIDEP colleagues, for their valuable help and encouragement throughout the project.
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