Reconversão da habitação burguesa portuense. Casos de alojamento local

Abstract

The Porto city continues gradually losing population, with the abandonment and the fleed of its inhabitants to the peripheral areas, the city has aged like its built heritage in the central and old areas. Due to the exponential growth of flights operated by low-cost airlins between major European cities, such as London, Paris, Barcelona and Amsterdam, Porto tourism is increasing. Over the last couple of years it has grown the offer of local accommodation, like hostels, guesthouses, apartments, townhouses and bed&breakfasts, adapted to the typology of bourgeois housing of Porto that spread not only in the historical center but throughout the expansion areas of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Given the current degradation of the townhouses and the consequent urgency of their recovery and reconversations of the buildings have emerged in a attempt to tranform the degraded Porto built heritage and respond to the large increase of tourism in the town. From the medieval village to the XXI century city, the society evolved and with it new ways of living have emerged, contaminating the bourgeois house, forcing it to adapt and transform. Being so, it materialized the interest in studying the adaptability of the city's bourgeois house to local accommodation in order to reuse it and reinstate it in the city. Will it be feasible the reconversation of the bourgeois house of Porto to a local accommodation? What transformations will take occur in their morphology or their internal organization? What contribution does it have on the revitalization of the city? Is it intrusive to the identity of the bourgeois house? For such questions, it will be analized the formal, functional and constrution transformations of the different selected cases intending to discuss the problems involved in the rehabilitation and conversion of the bourgeois house in Porto.