Parques urbanos nas cidades contemporâneas. Projecto de requalificação urbana do Parque da Ponte de Braga: proposta de intervenção

Abstract

This work presents two complementary and simultaneous searches aimed at deepening urban park as a concept and, therefore, understand the set of interactions intrinsic to their formation in the contemporary city. In the first part, exempt of subject and specific context, we begin to investigate the relationship between man and land surface, on which he establish, and specifically how, over the centuries, flora, that he annull to set up urban infrastructure and to build his system to survive in society, has come to be preserved or reinstated, in town. Distinguishing the various forms established by contemporary cities to incorporate vegetable species and to make them coexist with the urban valences, we understand the specificity of the urban park, what define it, which answers and meanings it has in the current urban systems. The reflection on this concept and their general intrinsic questions were based on the knowledge of the multitude of forms and ways to respond to the individual and collective need of green spaces and spaces in each city. In the second part, we put the work on a particular case - o Parque da Ponte em Braga - engine and purpose of theoretical speculation, which presents its owns particularities and problems related to the specific urban structure to which it belongs. Before his disfunction as a park in the city of Braga, despite its potential, mostly because of its relative position in the city centre and the unique concentration of geophysical evidences, we considered necessary to propose a urban intervention. In this way, we analyse its components and their validity in the city as well as its fragilities that make it fail as a urban microsystem and compromise its use as a park by citizens. In na intervention proposal, whose primary intention is to return the Parque da Ponte to the structure and the dynamic of the city, realizing it as green space designed to fulfil the current needs of citizens and recover it as the focus of attraction for its natural valences, we summarize the results of our theoretical and practical research.