O Bairro do Leal. Apontamentos de uma Estratégia de Ação Futura

Abstract

The following work focuses on the investigation, an urban sector of the city of Porto, where the neighborhood Bairro do Leal is inserted. This consolidated city sector is characterized by the contrast between the urban street front, of a bourgeois character, and its hidden interior, marked by the existence of structures of a social character - called ilhas. These degraded and abandoned structures, given their social and economic context, are currently isolated and completely decontextualized and marginalized from the rest of the city. It has been, since the Industrial Revolution, several times the target of intentions, by the Porto City Council, for its rehabilitation and intervention. However, the only action carried out at the site, resulted from the process Serviço de Apoio Ambulatório Local, in 1976, on a plot of land. And since then, the rest of the area, in response to the existing unhealthiness and segregation, has seen several projects to be commissioned, but nevertheless, never materialized. Thus, starting from these not carried out projects, a study of its conditions and its background is conducted, with the purpose to reflect its practicability and feasibility in the present context. Allied to the current problems of making city, as well as the needs related to the realization of collective housing and public spaces in contemporary society. Action, which attempts to outline an intervention strategy for the neighborhood, questioning the feasibility of the four projects carried out for the place, especially that of the SAAL process, by recognizing its past and analyzing its present.