A memória industrial na regeneração urbana de um eixo prioritário. O exemplo da Companhia Portuguesa do Cobre, no Porto

Abstract

This investigation focuses on urban key subjects regarding the city outskirts and post-industrial spaces, endorsing a civic position of consciousness about the recent history of the city of Porto and the preservation of industrial memory. This circumstance frames the strategy development of a priority axis of urban regeneration that leads to the practical case of an old copper factory in Contumil and provides important guidelines on handling inter-municipal articulation areas. Studying this specific brownfield - where the former Companhia Portuguesa do Cobre is placed - triggered the challenge of rehabilitating the priority axis, concurrent to the railroad tracks, as a strip of continuity between industrial structures, located in a diffused territory struck by major infrastructures. Interpreted in time and space, the continuum main strategy defines several critical points of action, identified along the axis. Combined with the conceptual notions developed, this thesis aims to operationalize the case study at various scales and to propel an ideology of valorization of the collective memory as an identity and a regenerative impulse of urban dynamics. The intervention proposal for the former Companhia Portuguesa do Cobre site pursues its role as part of a potential qualification cluster and sets up an experimental laboratory, which implements the discussed principles and shows a demonstrative result of the lessons and references absorbed in the patrimonial, programmatic and urbanistic fields.