Projecto como processo de (re)conhecimento: Estratégia prospectiva de continuidade e articulação nas margens do Ave

Abstract

The current dissertation focuses on the diffuse territory of Vale do Ave, searching for a narrative capable of dissect the complexity of a very particular area, which often deceives interpretation and inhibits the will to intervene. A project that finds in the river the joinning and propelling element of a reflection that rehearses the approach to concrete places, as part of the construction of a process to renew the ways of observing and representing as means to (re)cognition. The prospective strategy developed is based on the need to contribute to a paradigm shift: the persistence of a collective imaginary that struggles to overcome the perception of the watercourse and its banks as a discarded space, which reflects a state of resignation to the vicissitudes of the golden era devoted to industry that powered the intense urban expansion and gradually confined and hid the "residue" of its progress. From the contact with the river space, arises the proposal for its operationalization as an axis of continuity and articulation that promotes the access and the possibility to wander along the riverfront, identifying the multiplicity of materials found as fragments that reveal the ordinary, enunciate dynamics, existing relations, latent or extinct, and stimulate other possible ones. The set of paths discovered constitutes both, the hypothesis of re-approach with the river Ave, as well as, the support to a learning process, which adopts an inquiring attitude, that is mobile, approximates itself, and accesses, simultaneously, to the production of intelligibility about the place and to project opportunities. The intention is to contribute to the permanent need to review and renew the approaching methods to the territory, making them capable of offering meaning and producing adjusted intervention tools, recognizing in the project process a dynamic and open mechanism that speculates to catalyze possibilities, that captures to anticipate transformations and that synthesizes to communicate an intention of collective appropriation.