The Barredo Urban Renewal Study in Oporto, Portugal: Távora’s Approach to Urban Heritage in the Late 1960s (2024)

LEARNING FROM THE HISTORIC CITY: ARCHITECTURAL HERITAGE REHABILITATION AND GIS, THE URS-VISEU NOVO (PORTUGAL) LEGACY

All cities share a similar challenge: "How to rehabilitate the historic centre without denigrating its identity and at the same time encourage private investment in built cultural heritage in order to avoid its degradation?" The historic centres are the oldest and most central areas of the cities, defining their identity, but have fallen into economic, social and residential decay, in part by the abandonment and aging of their most outstanding buildings. The presented paper intends to study the projects promoted by the Portuguese Municipality of Viseu, namely through the Urban Rehabilitation Society Viseu Novo, in short URS Viseu Novo. This revitalization strategy of the Historic Centre of Viseu aims to identify the buildings' most relevant problems, the rehabilitation's proposed objectives and the feasible solutions to renovate them promoting youth housing, cultural events and others. A contextualization analysis of the URS's work in the historic area of Viseu is presented through the inventory of its interventions using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). GIS spatial analyses, syntheses and conclusions can be used for the presentation of rehabilitation solutions duly framed in the goals and environment intended for these noble areas. As a result of this work, and starting from this principle, another research is being developed and serves as theme for the Integrated Master in Architecture Dissertations, highlighting the relevance and pertinence of this theme.

Urban and Architectural Reconfiguration In The Opening To Modernity - The Construction Of The City Of Oporto (Portugal) Between The Influence Of Beaux-Arts And The Modern Movement

The nineteenth-century’s urban life, based on economic and political liberalism, required a profound re-functionalization of the city that transformed the structure and architecture of the urban space. At the turning of 1900, these changes radicalized, when associated with the radical changes in the political order, until the period between the wars, with the successive changes in the political reality from monarchy to republic, from democracy to dictatorship. The case of Oporto (Portugal) permits to evaluate these urban transformations for that period, in which the municipal politic changes from constitutional monarchy to democratic republic and to dictatorship, setting the urban and architectural public projects to the new ideas and cultural purposes, adjusting images and the architectural vocabulary. The introduction of new building systems and the use of the new materials were driven by the public works, national or municipal, or by the building construction of citizen or profes...

Which urban plan for an urban heritage? An overview of recent portuguese practice on integrated conservation

This paper presents an overview of how integrated conservation of urban scale heritage is managed in the urban rehabilitation practice in Portugal and its relation with local urban planning. The central argument is that the safeguard of urban scale heritage is mainly a question of urban management and urban planning, which necessarily implies a framework that results from conciliation among the culture and the land use administrations. For that purpose, we consider that special attention to a cultural debate concerning the urban heritage concept itself plays a key role, once it can lead to a focus on urban rehabilitation practice, commonly spread and diffuse in its objectives. We also believe that integrated conservation practice doesn?t belong exclusively to one of the several land use plans of our top-down planning framework and therefore requires a cross-management strategy ? top-down and bottom-up ? and urban management skills to take advantage of each of those land use plans.

Portraying Urban Change in Alfama (Lisbon): How Local Socio-Spatial Practices Shape Heritage

Urban Planning

Alfama, a neighborhood whose history dates to Lisbon’s origins, held simultaneously the power and burden of representing the “old Lisbon.” It is recognized as a territory that was never a part of the efforts to modernize the city but also through its inherent values. The latter derives exactly from the nostalgic images it projects and through which the city’s history is kept alive. As part of a city’s ecosystem and embroiling global phenomena, the neighborhood faces inevitable changes, affecting both the closely intertwined urban fabric and socio-cultural aspects to shape a landscape of tangible and intangible heritage. Based on a multidisciplinary and humanistic approach, the article portrays the urban change in the neighborhood through a spatial and ethnographic lens, along different scales and angles, contributing with a critical dimension to understanding urban development processes. We examine how Alfama has been dealing with political intentions steered by economic prosperity ...

Urban renovation of portuguese historical centres

2012

Cities are ecosystems that consume a lot of energy and substance, as well as generate much waste and pollution. Concerns about waste and misuse of natural resources have led people and governments to think better about urban growth. Nowadays half of world population lives in cities, and it is expected a considerable increase over the next years in developing countries. Already in some European Union countries, which currently go through times of crisis, it is misunderstood the necessity of cities expansion. Portugal is ...

Beneath the surface of the heritage enterprise. Governmentality and cultural representation of rural architecture in Portugal ARTICLE in ETHNOLOGIA EUROPAEA · SEPTEMBER 2011

Reshaping Heritage - the restoration of Northern Portuguese monuments in the 1920s and 1930s (abstract)

19th Annual Cambridge Heritage Research Symposium - Heritage and authoritarianism - Programme, 2018

Transformations of Historic Urban Tissue in Lisbon

2016

Over the centuries, cities developed a variety of processes connected with transformations of urban tissue. Building in historical centres increased its density, up to the stage which resulted in visible reduction of the quality of life. Such changes compelled the escape of the inhabitants to the constantly expanding suburbs. These days, we can observe certain efforts that bring life back to the central areas of the cities. To follow the needs and expectations of the contemporary society, it became necessary to raise the standard of both: the buildings and the space between them. Re-establishing multi-functionality, entering new buildings or infills, and organizing new public and green spaces within the dense city structure are some actions that can be observed. Some of the most interesting and complex are connected with creating voids in the extremely dense areas of the historically formed nucleus of the city. Several examples of this type of intervention will be presented in this ...

The Built Environment of Lisbon Region: Cultural identity and New Uses

This paper aims to contribute to the debate of the built environment revitalization, and to the requalification of old places to new uses, by proposing a methodological approach that is sustained on the value of Cultural Identity, the Typological Process methodology and by questioning the meaning of New Uses. This approach is sustained on a fresh look over the territory that aims to read and to value the cultural aspects of its construction throughout history, with respect to the landscape values and those of the natural resources, by guarantying continuity to its construction, by means of the reinterpretation of the vernacular architecture, and eventually, through the continuation of the Typological Process, contributing to a new critical attitude that, in a proactive manner, and in the emergency of new cultural syntheses leads to a real collective participation in the construction and on the revitalization of the built environment. Finally, by following a brief review of the Portuguese planning process it is introduced a Portuguese planning proposal that bears on the notion of Cultural Identity and questions the New Uses.

BUILDING TRANSFORMATIONS IN OLD JOAO PESSOA (BRAZIL): Spatial form impacts on uses and levels of built heritage conservation

Proceedings of the 12th International Space Syntax Symposium, 2019

This paper analysis relations between spatial configuration, uses and built heritage in João Pessoa old city centre (Brazil) as part of a recently finished master thesis. Urban transformations that João Pessoa city, dated 1585, has suffered along its centuries have brought a number of consequences for its initial settlement. Its gradual loss in economic relevance to other urban areas was followed by the arousal of some urban trends, recurrently seen in old centre areas of many large Brazilian cities, such as: degradation and loss of original building styles, vacant or underused premises, loss of residential use, feeling of insecurity. Such trends are emphasized by a rapid linearly oriented expansion of Brazilian cities; João Pessoa, first settled by the river, later directed itself speedily towards the sea. Assuming that spatial configuration impacts on movement in the city and affects modes of city occupation and economic dynamics (Hillier, 1996), this research presents the old city centre morphologic responses, comparing its spatial structure, uses, building maintenance and architectural style conservation. Relations between these attributes were investigated, diagnosing incompatibilities that generated some urban pathologies. For this, ground and upper floors uses and conservation state of circa 1800 properties were surveyed, and related to syntactic integration measures (continuity lines and of angular segment analysis), through comparative maps and graphs. Main observations in João Pessoa old city centre were (i) how morphologic transformations followed processes of use and function alterations; (ii) how roads movement hierarchy reflects on current occupation; (iii) consequences of form/function relations in built heritage conservation. Amongst other findings, there was an alignment between the level of topological importance of the Old centre in João Pessoa, variation in its economic importance and the transformation of uses in the area, culminating in the insertion of functions incompatible with built heritage conservation. The concentration of certain uses according to road hierarchy was also observed in the area, as the presence of few residential groups and larger number vacant premises on more segregated routes, and growing loss of original building styles with increasing potential movement, corroborating trends found in other studies in Brazilian cities (such as Trigueiro & Medeiros, 2003; Carvalho & Trigueiro, 2007;). Overall, three distinct sectors of spatial configuration and uses dynamics were identified, which showed distinct relations with built heritage conservation. The study thus contributed-in light of space syntax-to understand urban dynamics pertaining old centres in larger Brazilian cities, and the damaging effects of rapid loss of centrality in a mainly real-estate oriented planning.