At the end By the 1990s, Recife, on Brazil’s northeast coast, was in decline. Its picturesque historic center, made up of 17th century colonial buildings with Dutch, Portuguese and French influences, had fallen into neglect, reflecting a deep economic crisis worsened by deindustrialization. Many young people were fleeing the city to find opportunities in the commercial centers of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, or heading abroad. Something had to change.
In 2000, a group of businessmen, government officials and academics came up with the idea of regenerating the historic center of Recife by building a new technological district. With 33 million reais ($6.8 million) from the privatization of the local electricity company, they created Porto Digital, a non-profit organization whose mission is to make Recife a hub of technology and creative industries. The project – “a bold way to show São Paulo that there was smart life in the northeast,” according to Claudio Marinho, an urban engineer who was one of the brains behind Porto’s digital strategy – was more radical than a simple technological park, although.
Marinho incorporated concepts seen in cities like Paris, such as the “pedestrian feature”, meaning that people should not have to walk more than 15 minutes to reach key locations in the ecosystem such as offices, bars and cultural spaces for working and socializing. Planning emphasizes “fortuitous, serendipitous encounters and serendipity,” he says. “Such situations make knowledge spillover much more likely and, of course, business gets done. »
The world is full of ambitious technology hub projects aimed at reviving and reinvigorating cities that have lost their reason for being. The recipe is often the same: symbolic government support, tax incentives and a lot of public relations. Many – probably most – fail. But nearly a quarter of a century after its launch, Porto Digital has made Recife a true hub for Brazil’s emerging tech and creative economy sectors, with more than 350 residents, from global players to cutting-edge startups . The industry employs more than 17,000 people, many of whom come from the local university, the Federal University of Pernambuco, which offers one of the highest-rated computer science courses in Brazil. Today, the cluster is once again looking to the future, hoping to capitalize on its successes to lead the way in Brazil in new areas of innovation, such as generative artificial intelligence.
“Porto Digital has never stopped growing, but we want to significantly increase the number of people working in the technology sector in Recife in the coming years. We also want our companies to generate most of their revenues outside the northeast, and preferably outside Brazil,” says Silvio Meira, one of the founding fathers and chairman of the board of directors of the technology park and professor emeritus at the Federal University of Pernambuco. .
The central idea of Porto Digital is “triple helix collaboration”, which involves bringing together government, academia and business to drive societal change.
One of the initiative’s founding institutions is the Recife Center for Advanced Studies and Systems, known as Cesar, which conducts research for some of Brazil’s largest companies and has its own educational institution higher education, with courses focused on technology, design and business. The center has also been a breeding ground for some of the main startups born in Recife, having supported more than 220 new companies in recent years.
