Arquitetura e Infar-estrutura - Desenhar as fracturas da cidade contemporanea

Abstract

The globalization, the economy, and the technological advances modified the temporal and spatial dimension of the City, changing old and stabilized balances. We pass from the City to a territory ever more delicate and difficult to define, as if suddenly, and without any further notice or harbinger, the city disappears. The contemporary city, delocalized and consumed by the peripheries, is structured by the accessibilities and fast displacement opportunities, assuming itself as multiple, decentralized and fragmentized. A City without limits and a defined center, where the problems and all aspects of its new condition are changing to a broader field passing from one level of exclusively urban and regional concern to the global agenda. The current dynamics of the territory, and the finding of distinct urban forms - between the traditional City and the periphery - justify different methodological approaches, both in creating and extending emerging forms, as in the rehabilitation and restructure of the existing shapes (Furtado, 1999). The Architecture, responsible for the practice of transforming the territory, must reposition itself to observe this new reality of the City, looking for the best answers to the requests of this new territorial proceeding. Bearing in mind the reality of the contemporary City and its development, essentially dictated by mobility and communication infrastructures, this work aims to study and realize the impact that these infrastructures represent and what is the importance of its drawing. The Architecture/ Infrastructure duality reveals itself as a key issue, at a time when the reflection on the City seems increasingly uncertain, existing fewer and fewer explanations and solutions to the contemporary urban drawing/form (Brandão, 2011). This study aims to develop a contemporary approach to the city, in its vagueness and dispersal, as well as to the role of road infrastructures in the evolution of urban forms. It will have as relevant matters, the importance of public space as locus par excellence of the collective life, as well as the potential that "empty" spaces, interpreted as territories not-built, have in this city more and more disperse. To the Architecture - in this new enlarged City - will fit the role of assigning diversity and beauty to urban facts, who framed in this urbanized territory they respond to the needs of society.